1-Up Dress-Up

As we've discussed here before, electronic games have a fascinating relationship to “player characters,” with a number of evolutionary paths developing ever since players were first asked to identity as the captain of a spaceship, the spaceship itself, or a nondescript adventurer about to descend into a colossal cave. The only thing that defined characters was their role within the game and the means through which the player interacted to fulfill that role. Anything beyond that was, to borrow a phrase, an exercise for the player’s imagination. It's easy to assume that most people approached these stories as shapes to move around a screen or math problems to systematically solved, but there's also no reason not to think players might have filled out these scenarios with elaborate backstories of their own or (in the case of Star Trek) connecting them to an established setting, characters, and storyline. Either way, creators had little to work with, given their limitations both technical (simplistic graphics and tiny amounts of memory) and situational (an arcade player has to be won over quickly or they'll move on to something else). Character design was one trick available, but it's pretty hard to create something both distinctive and easy to render - there's a reason some of the first-named electronic game protagonists are still instantly recognizable across the entire world. But, classic iconography aside, these pixelated protags presented a quandy we're still wrestling with today, even if we take the inherent tensions for granted: characters inherent to the game, the same for every player, yet controlled by those players in ways unique to them.

At this point, of course, it's all part of gaming, as are characters created completely from whole cloth (well, "quilted from the scraps the game provides" might be a more accurate way to put it) with a wide range in between - not to mention the necessity of having a visually-distinct character in on-line gaming. Established game protagonists, with a set look, demeanor, and (usually) voice are household names in the same way fictional characters from more-established media are. For a media format that prides, even defines itself, on the infinite possibilities of player agency, electronic games sure love having us all play the same people... and players are perfectly okay with that.

The evolution from "silent" to "snarky" protagonist is one that fascinates me, no doubt in part because I was around for so much of it. Adventure games aside (given their own parallel evolution), game protagonists only expressed themselves outside the player's control in cutscenes... and even then, it wasn't uncommon for the character to be totally silent in those as well. Which makes sense, creators had very little in the way of resources to spare for things that didn't directly affect gameplay. With technological developments, though, and the massive jump in storage space offered by the CD-ROM format in particular, opportunities began to appear for protagonists to act and speak all on their own, in response to the player's actions, game situations, or wherever designers thought it would make sense or (as was primarily the case) was simply funny. Thus is ushered in what I'll call the "Duke Nukem" era of games. 

In the original 2D Duke Nukem games, he was a standard platform protagonist - essentially a beefier Commander Keen, only speaking in cutscenes and silent during gameplay... which is to be expected of games sold as floppies (or, for those on the cutting edge of technology, downloaded from Apogee 's BBS) and designed to run on 286-based PCs. The Duke of Duke Nukem 3D (1996), however, was anything but silent, offering a running commentary of one-liners and comments and providing a model for nearly every First-Person Shooter protagonist to follow. Duke was an ideal character for this, visually an homage to the meat-headed protagonists of macho 80s movies and comics, but his dialogue was genre-savvy and self-aware, in the style of (and frequently lifting from) Ash of the Evil Dead films. In doing so the creators perform a neat trick, answering the inherent question of "is Duke Nukem talking to himself, in-universe or to us, the players outside the game" with a growled "oh, yeah!" The inherent meta-goofiness of the game and its universe helped immensely, too - the creators are constantly winking at the player, presenting an environment based on trashy stereotypes, but turned up to the level of literal cartoons, a perfect fit for those one-liners. Existing in this world, players can only approach Duke a certain way, so it doesn't matter that they don't get any say in his characterization. We control an aspect of Duke, but not inhabiting his identity the way we might in a tabletop roleplaying game or even a more free-form electronic game. In a way, we're simply directors of his performance, positioning him physically  and laying out a series of actions in real time - an approach still followed today every time we play a game where the protagonist is presented to us fully formed.

So are the players hamstrung, giving up a significant amount of agency in what should be a truly interactive medium? To which I'd answer... kinda sorta? Even in games with zero choice in dialogue or narrative sequencing, we make the character our own through gameplay. As every fight choreographer knows, the way a character moves and responds to the world around them (not to mention the threats it may contain) establishes that character in ways verbal exposition could not. So our version of the character is defined by how we, personally, play that game, both through the choices we make in how to play it and our effectiveness in the play that follows those choices. This, along with many other strange blurrings of the character/player divide, is highlighted in the original Metal Gear Solid (1998) - after Psycho Mantis reads Solid Snake's memories (i.e., a record of your performance in the game to that point), he describes Snake as a person based on how you've played him: "you're a careless man," "you're a methodical man," and so on. As established a character as Snake is, the game knows is still comes down to how you direct him. 

But there's another area where we, as players, get some say in how our established game protagonists are characterized, and that's what inspired this post in the first place: our sartorial choices. To explain how we got there, we're going to hop over to another of my favorite series, one that I first experienced only a few weeks after my first Metal Gear Solid playthrough: Grand Theft Auto. (That was a hell of a year, what can I say?) The "3D Universe" introduced in Grand Theft Auto III (2001) essentially speed-runs the "established protagonist" evolution over the course of only a few games. In GTA III, you play as the platonic ideal of a "silent protagonist:" unnamed (although later games will refer to him as "Claude"), with a single expression, not a single word of dialogue, and no meaningful choices of his own - only what other characters tell him to do and what you, the player, choose to do with him. (One exception, interestingly enough, is in the final seconds of the game before the credits roll, he seems to make an independent, if scripted, decision for himself... off-camera, naturally.) But the follow-up, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (2002) was something very different. Your character had a name and a personality and a backstory: Tommy Vercetti, a mobster newly released from prison and sent to Florida by his bosses to expand their "business" interests. Tommy was as talkative as Claude was silent, the advances in technology allowing for thousands of pre-recorded lines of dialogue for the game to insert in appropriate places. Unlike Duke Nukem, though, Tommy Vercetti was entirely his own character in his own (still-exaggerated) world, and anything he said was in-universe, never winking through the fourth wall. This builds on the idea of player as director, with Tommy very much his own (or rather, the game creators') man - you put him into situations, but he himself lived them.

Needless to say, this was all incredibly cool, but in the long run, a further diminishment of the player's ability to make a character their own, But GTA: Vice City introduced another element to the series, one that, pre-recorded speech, would help define it to this day: clothes. This isn't unique to GTA, of course, and RPGs in particular have been allowing player-determined outfits for decades (usually with individual items providing bonuses and leading to.... unique results), but it's interesting that this bit of customization appeared alongside the feature that defined the protagonist so specifically. And while these outfits are introduced gradually across the game, they (generally) remain available to use at the player's discretion. How one uses this tool says a lot about how they approach the game and the character they're playing. Some people won't care and will just stay with whatever outfit they've been most recently provided. Others might go with the silliest options available, highlighting the artifice of their gaming experience. Me, I take the clothing options pretty seriously - I want my Tommy (or my CJ, or my Vic, or my Nico, or...) to visually represent how I see them as characters. Wardrobe designers, after all, feel as strongly about the characterization inherent in their art as the aforementioned fight choreographers. If I'm feeling particularly invested, I may change the outfit to fit whatever faction I'm engaging with or mission I'm undertaking. (This was a major part of how I approached Bully as well.) For the most part, my GTA protagonists do follow a certain "look," no doubt influenced by my own experiences with crime media, especially Quentin Tarentino. I see them as professional criminals who take their work seriously, and so they get suits, ideally without ties, and some kind of colorful and/or patterned shirt. CJ from GTA: San Andreas (2004) was one exception - he was a man at war, more than the others, and I wanted to represent with Grove Street green, so always took him back to military fatigues and camo. With the way the gameplay loop involves taking and protecting territory, it feels particularly appropriate.

It wasn't until our current mutual playthrough of Grant Theft Auto IV (2008) and I got Nico into a few different suit options that I realized my preferences essentially matched the look of the Yakuza/Like a Dragon games. That series, on the other hand, offers no customizable clothing options, at least anything visible - there are all kinds of garments you can equip for all kinds of bonuses, but they're never visible onscreen. (This is probably for the best, much as I would love to see Ichiban in the pirate hat you can get...) Oddly, this isn't something I've missed in the series, maybe because of the more linear structure of the games or maybe because, unlike GTA, you do get some dialogue options that let you put your own small stamp on these very distinctive characters beyond the way you handle them in combat.

If you play narrative electronic games, I expect you're already thinking of your own examples. If you are, I'd like to think this lengthy ramble has been worth something. I've been thinking a lot recently about this small, yet significant, aspect of player investment and will be paying more attention to how it's used in all the games I have yet to play. It's always a good feeling to find something unique about a medium you enjoy, particularly when it's subtle, and I look forward to all the ones I still have yet to find.

- B

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