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Avataritis — On the Abundance of Customizable Game Characters
Martyn Zachary writes "The Slowdown has posted a new critique, 'Avataritis,' that attempts to portray the utilization of character customization as a pandemic, emotional response on behalf of publishers and developers to finding the easiest, most efficient solution to the very unique dilemma presented by the enlarging, widening player base of video games. 'No mechanisms are in place stopping developers from writing and designing heterogeneous yet fully structured, narrative-based computer games with carefully constructed and immutable, unchangeable characters.' The article discusses the emergence and role of gender criticism and research in relation to the recent proliferation of the customizable avatar. The story also dissects the very act of character creation, subsequently aiming to clarify several semantic distortions related to the terminology utilized in character creation, and in turn breaking apart the concepts of relatability and understandability, wholly differentiating the two. The overarching analysis is finally related to examples from the gaming marketplace, where many continue to corroborate apparent falsehoods and misunderstandings in relation to the utilization of the avatar. Ultimately, the writer hopes to dissuade readers, developers and players from believing that written narratives are going away as customization and emergent content are entering video games with full force."
Good Grid! Somebody has WAAAAAY too much time on their hands.
Same fellow that write EULAs?
It's a bad article due to linguistic elephantiasis. Too much words, too little content.
Or like Monthy Python says: "Get on with it!".
"The story also dissects the very act of character creation, subsequently aiming to clarify several semantic distortions related to the terminology utilized in character creation, and in turn breaking apart the concepts of relatability and understandability, wholly differentiating the two"
Who wrote this? The Architect?
that made more sense.
1. You make a character look like you, so you can feel like 'YOU' are part of the story.
2. You make a character like you wish you were, to make 'YOU' feel like some sort of hero (or anti-hero)
3. You make a character unlike yourself and not like you wish you were to give yourself a different perspective and to act out a roll.
If the characters look (color, shape, accent, etc) has no direct bearing on the story then it's just window dressing.
And all that time I thought people were going for a funny picture, silly me!
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
One reason I purchased CO was to see what people make with the Avatar customization. It breaks what we think is standard for MMOS. You think if you find armor, your avatar should change, but they don't do it this way. They let you pick what your avatar looks like and you stick with it. It makes sense anyway considering most games have an OP Armor set that everyone wears and looks the same end game. I give them points for thinking outside the box.
God spoke to me.
...and after reading that summary -- a good chunk of it anyway, the coherent, least pretentious parts -- I'll be happy never to see anything about the site or him posted here again. This is the stuff which gives geeks and nerds a bad name, even among geeks and nerds. Christ Almighty, makes me want to go outside and toss around a football while tivo'ing American Idol.
Can someone please translate the summary into English?
Reading his writing (but ignoring his conclusion), I got wondering why we don't have some sort of standardization for avatars. All three major consoles now have some sort of system avatar, customizable to various degrees. These don't always make it into the games you play on them, but even when they do they tend to be very basic avatars, whereas many games have a huge number of options (and combinations thereof.) Considering how many games are giving us customizable avatars, and the rate with which they are coming to represent us online and in-game, it would seem the next logical step to create a method whereby someone can import a custom set into a game, and then tweak it from that base template, ensuring a mostly heterogeneous style over all the games they play.
This doesn't mean that developers would be limited by options, nor that they can't do micro-customization. For instance, a game that offers your character a Fu Man Chu would mark such a beard style as part of the "Small Beard" class/group. If a game does not offer that style, it chooses the default "Small Beard" style. Along with this standard, which would incorporate as many customizations as possible (and likely keep updating its database), there could be a set of open-source models based on the standards, which developers could then import into their game, customizing as desired. This would increase the potential of having a similar character from game to game.
There are some sequels that read on older games, and thus would likely incorporate customization, but I'm surprised this doesn't seem to be on even on a developer/publisher level--standardizing such a thing would seem, at least to me, to save a lot of time developing, as well as be supportive of return business.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/10/14/
Hopefully, once they get a couple releases under their belts, they'll have more costume options. Right now there's a lot of option areas, but not a lot of options in each. And a somewhat unhealthy percentage are beast/animal options. Were I a furry with delusions of heroism, I'd be in heaven. But...
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
No, this is not a very unique dilemma. It's only a little bit unique. I've seen many dilemmas which were much more unique than this one.
In fact, on a scale of 1 to 1, where 1 is only a little bit unique, and 1 is completely unique, I would say this particular dilemma rates only a 1.
I got the feeling this guy is in marketing. There was something being said, but it was lost in all the frills.
The english language is not a wedding gown, it doesn't get better the more lace you add. It is instead a thong. Less is more.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I'm a comp lit major so I'm wordy and like to argue about other people's words mean and even my own. I'm concerned about racial/gender stereotyping like all comp lit majors.
Despite this, I'm not sure allowing character customization is a good idea. First, there is the familiar tradeoff of depth vs breadth, so customization leads to shallower stories. Second, customization is a cop-out in the war against stereotyping. It feels like I can't call a game racist if I can choose my race, but this isn't very satisfying for me---I wish there were more games like Resident Evil 5.
"Some people you don't care about are saying that character customization is used to keep from having to write story, we don't HAVE to have customization. Some gender studies people are looking at video games. Relate-ability and understandability are two different words! Game markets sell you the LIE. Stories can't and won't be replaced with customizable avatars and content."
Even from an academic paper standpoint this is a bad abstract/introduction. An abstract should say what the objective of the paper is, why that objective is important, to whom the objective is important, when the research does and does not apply and what the findings are... this paper = fail
from a human stand point.. The re-defining of words to mean something that no one else understands is the stupidity of academia. The more I read about this the more I believe this guy time cube
Customizable characters are essentially a form of skins. I wholeheartedly agree with this thought on the subject from jwz.org:
As far as I'm concerned, any time spent customizing a character and not playing the game is wasted.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
No mechanisms are in place stopping developers from writing and designing heterogeneous yet fully structured, narrative-based computer games with carefully constructed and immutable, unchangeable characters
The mechanism in place is called a "cash register." Stories with immutable characters are worth $7 to $20 whether it's a movie in the theater or a book at the store.
For me to cough up $50, the story must adapt to me. Starting with the characters.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Thanks for your summary.
Frankly I think the contention of this article is much ado about bugger all. Really, if you don't like to customise characters, fine, use one of the presets.
Does having a few in-game dialogs with substitutions for "he/she" and "human/orc/elf" etc really result in a less coherent narrative? Maybe, in some contexts, but I just don't see it being a big enough deal to wax verbose about. Mass Effect had customisable characters. Did it hurt the storytelling? I'd say no. If you want to create a different looking character, you can. If you don't, you don't have to. Whining because game developers are offering you *options* smells like ingratitude, and I think that perhaps this guy doesn't have a legitimate gripe, he just likes reading his own written word.
The argument seems especially flimsy, given the number of excellent story-driven games with compelling narratives that have been coming out lately. Some have character customisation, others do not. Whatever. It's really not all that important.
Way to cry "wolf", TFA.
The character is not a "skin", not part of the user interface. A character is part of the content. The user interface, the skin, is in the controls, the dialogs, the framing of the game. Skins don't need to be customizable by the user interface, either. I've used the programs JWZ is talking about. Creating a new skin is like creating a complete new UI from scratch. Nobody bothers with it... they still have to suffer from the restrictions and limitations built into the UI to support skins.
All video games are skinned applications, they all have a unique UI. I don't know a single video game that uses the native OS UI, and I don't recall a single video game where I haven't some time or another wanted to apply Makali's audio-cock technology to the author.
I was reminded of Richard Feynman's story about how he couldn't make head nor tail of what his literature and philosophy professors were writing about, so he wrote about what he wanted to, dressed it up with some of the jargon, and got A and B+ on his papers anyway. There's no content there, it's all about making the psychobabble sound right.
The short version of the argument is that allowing a lot of character customization
a) Can't fully achieve the goal of having the player "become" the character, as the gameplay and narrative of the game provide their own limits;
b) Doesn't really solve the problem of the interaction of race and video games; and
c) Limits the games, because it prevents them from using meaningful character details as driving the narrative, gutting it.
This misses the point to a great deal;
For (a) All creation has limits but that doesn't make it valueless or not an act of creation; even if the limits are that born within a game system.
For (b) it's true but character customization was never really aimed at solving the interaction fully.
For (c) not all details of a character limit the story of a game (would it really matter if Gordon Freeman was black?) and if a game is anything other than a railroad it needs to branch at some point anyway, so the branching of a game in response to character creation (see Dragon Age's multiple origin stories) is not a meaningful limit of narrative.
In longer form, his argument is full of holes in general; he starts off by begging the question, complete with passive-agressive "I'm going to get modded down for this, but" bullshit:
So he assumes the practice he's complaining about is the only thing stopping him from getting the games he wants (it isn't, but I can see the assumption as useful for purposes of argument) and then assumes the practice he disagrees with is valueless (it isn't). He even admits that in terms of narrative etc he's dismissing the value with nothing more than the word "seems":
As he asserts this without evidence, I'll dismiss it with little more (At very least, games in the line of Fallout or (from what I know about it) Dragon Age are clear examples in opposition to this).
He goes on for a while about minorities and gaming, nothing that minorities are underrepresented in gaming, and that the common approach of reading % of characters as a measure of this is a bit of tokenism and misses the point – that the experience of growing up white and growing up, say, Latino are different and this affects a lot of things in subtle ways, and just changing a character's skin isn't going to reflect these ways. And that making this irrelevant works against both the white and Latino's experience. This is true as far as it goes, but it really doesn't have much to do with character creation:
a) I've always thought the % studies as a quick and dirty measure of how much of the creators are working to take those experiences into account. If the numbers are heavily lopsided, then it's a sign the probably aren't; if the numbers are more even there's at least a chance they are.
b) More importantly, the ability of a trait to help someone connect with a character isn't necessarily connected with the importance in the game world. To paraphrase from a shadowrun sourcebook, “Who cares about the color of someone's skin when the guy over there is a rock with hands as big as your head?” This is even true for characters set initially in our on world (c.f. Gordon Freeman). So the race of the character could end up being meaningful for the player and not meaningful for the game world.
c) Even where it is relevant, it can be bra
Some of us play games pretty much for the art and visuals. The avatar is a huge part of these; standardizing it for anything but the most banal games would be counter-productive and jarring.
Although the applications are somewhat limited, I really had fun with the concept in some EA Sports games (Tiger Woods in my case) where you could upload a picture of yourself and skin the character. It was pretty easy and looked mostly like me. It was a heck of lot easier than spending 3 hours trying to tune an avatar with sliders. I suppose there's too much opportunity for mischief however for this to make it into MMORPGs.
Translation: He must be new here.
I enjoy character customization. It's actually a selling point to me, and I've bought games I otherwise would have passed over because they've had a really robust character creation feature.
Dissect it all you want. I enjoy it. That's good enough for me.