Who we play as - Videogames, the protagonist and the player

[Edit] The old video is pretty awful, and although I had fun with it I don't really want it to represent my work, the link still works, but the video is unlisted and has now been replaced with a new one that's a lot more serious and now includes relevant gameplay. I think the improvement between the two is pretty tangible, but it's still not perfect and I'd love feedback. The new video is embedded below. [End Edit]

I made a YouTube video, this is the script I was originally going of, I changed things a bit in the resultant video - see the video here or in the embedded video below and give me some feedback if you can, I'd like to know if the style of comedy I'm going for is interesting to anyone. Just don't complain about the Cicadas. I know about the cicadas.

I recently started for the second time to play Fallout 3. The first time I tried to play as a male avatar, one that looked like me. Within an hour I gave up on that first play through. On my second attempt however I made a female avatar and have probably sunk around 20 hours into the game with this character thus far, despite not being particularly partial to open world games. At first I wasn’t sure why I seemed to be instantly more invested with a female avatar, the Jennifer Hale is a better voice actor argument doesn’t work for a silent protagonist, but I think at least part of the reason lies in Dreamfall: The Longest Journey. In Dreamfall you play as Zoe, and Zoe was the first playable character I truly felt invested in within a video game, in some ways I think that investment carried over into other female protagonists.

Prior to Dreamfall: The Longest Journey I had only played two other games to completion; Metal Gear Solid on a PS1 I’d found thrown out on the kerb and, prior to that the classic flash game N (by completion I mean I finished the three tiers of levels the game had at the time, I tried to play it a while back and found that the three tiers had expanded to nine and the new tiers were a great deal harder. I haven’t finished those tiers, maybe I will one day). N’s protagonist is almost entirely irrelevant, think Super Meat Boy without the character motivation and a bizarre need to ingest Gold due to the speed of (his? her?) metabolism. While I love N as one of the formative experiences I’ve had when it comes to video games the protagonist was little more to me than part of a game, I wasn’t playing as that character as much as merely controlling them. MGS, while much more fleshed out had detailed in regards to the protagonist always felt rather camp, cheesy and focused on humour to an extent that Snake himself felt more like a joke than an actual role to play or conduit for the character. From his endless exposition and unending questions he served more of an informative role than one that allowed immersion in a world the way Zoe in Dreamfall did. I like MGS more than Dreamfall, indeed it’s probably the game that really made me love video games as a medium, but the immersion Dreamfall offered went far beyond that which MGS offered, despite the world of Dreamfall: The Longest Journey actually being stranger than what Hideo Kojima came up with in MGS.

From both N and MGS, as well as an awareness of franchises like the Mario games and the Legend of Zelda series, I was left with an impression that male protagonists were the default, that (in the case of N and Mario) the protagonist was little more than a visual representation of your position in a level and that (in the case of MGS and LoZ) the protagonist wasn’t meant to be taken seriously even if the game around them dealt with serious themes. Dreamfall turned these notions on their head, Zoe was a likeable and human protagonist and her story, although entirely bizarre, felt more grounded for her presence rather than less in the sense that I associated male leads with comedic or ultimately irrelevant interactions with other characters. Suddenly, because a protagonist that happened to be female was taken seriously, was the driving force behind all of the game’s events and had what felt like real relationships with the games inhabitants (that also existed outside of the timeframe of the game) I came to a strange conclusion and one that I only really realise looking back on the game. The conclusion I came to comes in two distinct but partially linked ideas, at least back then; the first being that female protagonists were taken more seriously (obviously this was proven very wrong very quickly by a media culture that is more likely to objectify a woman than respect her) and the other, one I still hold, is that playing a role that is distinctly more immersive, involving and enjoyable than trying to play myself.

Perhaps the experience of playing oneself is different for me than it might be for you of course, I’m not the happiest of people and don’t particularly like myself, if I were to describe myself as an Undertale character (and if you know what character I’m talking about you probably know exactly what I’m getting at) it would be Alphys. So games, books and movies have always offered an escape into someone else’s problems, an escape into their world, their desires and their failures; in some ways a safe way to explore my own. Others that hold similarly low opinions of themselves have come to the exact opposite conclusion of course; that exploring a foreign world from their own perspective, playing as themselves as it were, offers a positive reinforcement, that if this fictional world can accept them, then the real one can too. I don’t want to pass judgement on that perspective because I personally don’t understand it, but for me I’ve always accepted games as usually involving some sort of power fantasy, one that worships the player above all else (there are of course hundreds of exceptions to this, so many so that I wouldn’t label this power fantasy a rule at all) and that games will usually praise you regardless of your actions, so any acceptance from a game is typically as hollow as a passing compliment from a friend; they were probably going to do it anyway, regardless of the effort you did or didn’t put in.

So I think the reason I ultimately found it easier to connect with a female avatar in Fallout 3 has more to do with the very fact that she is further removed from my own experiences and perspectives than her gender. I find it easier to separate a protagonist in a game from myself if they are less like me. Ultimately I don’t want to invest myself into a protagonist with experiences like mine; I’ve had them and they’re not ones I necessarily want to have again. If I’m playing Mass Effect as male-Shep I externalise my reasons for my good actions as an irrational fear of doing wrong in another’s eyes. I’m not some paragon who loves everyone so much as a person terribly afraid of people’s opinions of me. When I play as fem-Shep I play as an indomitable force of will, a powerful, independent and fundamentally good person; I get to play as the person I want to be because I can separate myself from the protagonist, to not play as the person I worry I am. 

So why do you play as whoever you play as in games? Do you play as yourself, as someone else, a better version of you, a worse version of someone else or just the most disgusting creation you can come up with within the limitations of the character creation? Do you put yourself into your character or try to play as a role and character entirely separate from you? A male friend of mine who also preferred to play as a woman given the choice once justified his position with the line “If I’m going to spend a lot of time in a game looking at someone’s arse I’d rather not play as a man” which strikes me as just as valid a reason as my own, so I’d like to know yours, whatever your preference and whatever your reason. You know the drill, drop it in the comments below, I’ll be sure to read them and might address any particularly good ones in the next video, have a good one in the meantime.