https://twitter.com/angeliets/status/1626387806208815105
Do you play as yourself (your avatar is you) when you play video games, or do you treat your avatar as an original character (you view the events of the game through their lens instead of your own)?
This tweet popped into my timeline today but oh boy! This question! It's been rotating in my head for absolute ages. Lemme see if I can put a coherent post about it.
So like a major aspect as to why this is a question at all is because in these kind of video games, you're roleplaying. This is exactly the same concept as in a tabletop roleplay, and if you ask anyone who does tabletop roleplay, you'll get an answer along the line that, the character is a distinct character, sure, but they're also themselves, in a way. When they're playing they're both their character and themselves.
Alright to be honest, I've never actually done a full campaign tabletop roleplaying, so that's just an anecdote I got, but I can see this from another angle: writing fiction. When I write a character in a fiction, I'm obviously not writing about myself, but within all these characters, there's a part of me within them, even if I didn't mean to write it that way. You can see this how other writers write too, it's how it feels like every writer has their own style. Heck, for many writers, you might notice the protagonists of their stories might all resemble each other. As far as I know, most of these similarities we do unconsciously. It's just human nature to project our own knowledge to what we create.
(Oh here's another related topic: how much reading a story is communication, despite its one-way nature, but that's an essay for another time)
So back to the question of playing a video game protagonist. By necessity of the medium, playing a video game puts a lot of the agency away from the player and to the GM (or the game developer, in this case). The protagonist, in a way, is the gamedev's character. But also through the act of playing, of making decisions that pertain to them, the character is also yours. Whether you want it or not, you've taken ownership of them too.
(Which is also why when the player character is annoying, it's especially grating!)
So is the main character in a game supposed to be you or their own distinct character? And why is it one way for some and another way for others?
(And to be clear, I'm discussing all kinds of player character, but this topic (and I think what the tweet's writer was aiming for) is especially interesting for customizable characters and silent protagonists, the ones that are meant for you to fill in, either with yourself or with a character you think up yourself)
I think there are two things at work here: your willingness to self-project, and the affordance that the game developer leaves you with to self-project.
Early in the game, your willingness to self-project is probably in flux. As you get a feel of who you're playing, you might be more or less willing to put yourself in the main character's shoes. In this phase you're also feeling the affordances, the "spaces", that the game developer left out for your to fill.
In a game where the main character has a clear personality and strong characterization, like the typical JRPGs, there might not be enough space for you to fill in yourself. You probably get the sense very early on that you shouldn't self-project (beyond the "wow that's just like me fr" feeling you might be getting in any media). In a game with custom or silent protagonists, this space might be bigger.
But no matter how big it gets, no matter how customizable your character is, it can't possibly be big enough to account for every kind of person there is. If the protagonist's personality is expressed through dialogue choices, you can't make every possible choices that everyone on earth can think of; even with infinite time, you can only think up as many choices as you personally could think of. If the protagonist's personality is expressed through actions, you can't take into account every possible verb, only what you can do in the game.
It's important that early on, while the player is figuring out how they should approach the game, the game makes clear what kind of game it is. This is true both for what I'm discussing here, but also things like game mechanics, the possible verbs in the game. Players should be able to form an opinion, consciously or unconsciously, their degree of self-projection towards the main character.
If the character has plenty of blank spaces for you to fill in, but the player can't fill those in because they're just not that type of person, they can then create a character of their own to fill in those spaces! They'll be less willing to self-project, but they can project someone else in that space! But in the event that they can't think of a character to project into that space (even after playing for a while and understanding the narrative), or is uncomfortable with it for whatever reason, congrats! The player has discovered that the game is not for them! At least they don't have to suffer through hours of gameplay trying to fit something in that hole and failing.
This is also why stuffs like getting thrown into a character creation screen before starting the game (or, indeed, knowing anything about how the game plays), or even just being asked to choose a name before even knowing who you're naming, is especially annoying! We don't know how much we should self-project. Or, if we're not the type to self-project, what kind of character we should be forming in our head!
There are ways to mitigate this, and a favourite of mine is especially simple: have a default name! Having a default name signals to the player that "yes, this character is meant to have spaces you can fill in with yourself/your own character, but we also have a solid enough idea of who they are to give them a name ourselves, so maybe don't self-project too hard".
When you don't give enough signal of how much space you're giving for self-projection, your player might end up with a whiplash! They think of the character as A when the character is actually B! That's really annoying! This is harder to manage than say, just writing your character consistently, because you also have to take into account that self-projection space. If there apparently isn't a space in there, but your player has already filled it with something (and if that something is a piece of themselves, especially!), and that something doesn't line up with that's supposed to already be there, that's annoying! The player will have to reorient themselves again. That feels like bad writing! That is bad writing!
I'd drop some examples here but I'm tired so I'll continue this another time. Long story short, I think games should make it clear early what kind of person the main character is, so the player can quickly get a feeling whether or not they can self-project!
