Character Development - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 134

In general, male players don't actually identify with their avatars as much as female
players do. Men are more willing to take the default avatar provided by the game
and happily run with it. Women tend to see an avatar as an extension of their own
personalities and an opportunity for self-expression. One of the best things you
can do to make your game more attractive to female players is to permit them to
customize the avatar—to choose his or her clothes, accessories, and weapons (if
any). Role-playing games, especially online ones, offer some of the most powerful
customization features.
When possible, it's nice to give the player a choice of male or female avatars, but
this is seldom practical in games with complex storylines. Writing material that
works with either sex can be difficult, and doing so requires creating more content,
which costs more money.
Designing Your Avatar Character
As you design the avatar for your game, think about how you want the player to
relate to him. Do you want an entirely nonspecific avatar, really no more than a
control mechanism for the player; a partially-specified avatar, which the player sees
and knows a little about, but who doesn't have an inner life; or a fully specified
avatar, separate from the player, an individual with a personality of his own? The
more detail you supply, the more independent your avatar will be. Consider psy-
chological and social detail as well as visual detail. How much will he talk? The
more a person talks, the more we know about him; the more we know, the more he
becomes differentiated from us. Gordon Freeman never talks; Mario and Lara Croft
don't talk much; April Ryan talks a lot. Gordon is the player; Mario and Lara are
representatives of the player; April is a person in her own right.
Also think about how the player will control your avatar: directly or indirectly?
Your decision will have a profound impact on the player's identification with the
avatar. With indirect control, the avatar is distinctly someone else , with a mind of
his own; with direct control, the avatar is to some degree a puppet. Your job is to
find the right balance for each particular game, to create an avatar whose character-
istics serve your goals for the player-avatar relationship.
Design an interesting and likeable avatar using the techniques introduced in this
chapter. The player will see the avatar all the time; it must be a character the player
can identify with and must possess qualities he is likely to appreciate, such as brav-
ery, intelligence, decency, and a sense of humor.
Worst of all would be to create an avatar with qualities that players actively dislike.
Squall Leonhart, the protagonist of Final Fantasy VIII , seemed at first to be self-
absorbed and obnoxious, and those players who weren't willing to put up with his
attitude stopped playing the game. This is one reason designers make games with
only semispecific characters. Link, from the Zelda series, is a semispecific character
(though perhaps a little more detailed than Mario). We don't know enough about
Link to form much of an opinion of his character, either positive or negative.