Player Avatars and Player Characters

The ideas that follow have been kicking around in my head for over a month now. I’ve struggled with finding the right way to explain them, and have come to realize that if I don’t just get out there and write them, they’ll languish forever in the labyrinthine corridors of my mind. With that in mind, I admit that my ideas here may not be entirely clear, but with any luck, I’ll also be able to expand and clarify them with time.

Over the past seven or eight months, I’ve spent a lot of time creating new characters for new campaigns and inviting new characters to my own campaign. Around a year ago, our long-running 3rd Edition campaign (which lasted for ten years, dove into Epic rules headlong, and then into third-party divinity rules until our characters were more powerful than any of the gods we had once worshipped) came to an end, and we’re now on our third campaign in the former’s timeslot (more or less). What’s struck me in all of this is that every one of us has approached the character creation process in entirely different ways, and these differences have also manifested themselves in the way we approach the role-playing of those characters. In thinking about these differences, I’ve begun to wonder about what I’m calling player avatars and player characters. I want to lay these ideas out there, in part to help develop them personally and perhaps get some commentary on them (because I have a feeling I’m being too binary here).

(In what follows, I will use “PC” to refer both to player avatars and player characters if only to maintain standard parlance. At some point, I hope to find a better term than “player character” for the type of PC that I use it to describe.)

A player avatar is what I think of as a PC designed primarily to act as an individual player’s manifestation within a world, or an avenue through which the player can explore a world. A player avatar does what the player thinks is best or what the player finds most interesting in a given situation. Distinct characterization may be present within a player avatar—but often, characterization and background will be built up as an amalgam of the actions which the avatar’s player found best or most interesting throughout the game. An avatar whose player is fond of gaining level is likely to seek out battle or opportunities for it frequently. A player who finds a particular aspect of a game master’s setting might create an avatar who is an expert in that subject (or perhaps intensely curious about it) so that they can, through the game, learn more about what interests them in the game master’s setting. A player avatar’s in-character rationales are often straight-forward. Sometimes, they may not be overtly present at all, and others, they may be infused with a heavy level of metagame knowledge and assumptions. As an example, consider the protagonist of a Grand Theft Auto title, if the plot missions were set aside (as they often are in favor of the chaotic fun the “sandbox” of these games provides). Though the Grand Theft Auto games have a central plot, the player can elect to completely ignore it in favor of running around causing mayhem, repainting cars, gambling, or dealing drugs (individual “side-games” may vary between the various titles in the series). Other examples abound in the field of video games. Often, in video games, “avatar” protagonists are often silent, so as to allow the player to “become” them (think of Link from the Legend of Zelda series or Samus Aran in the Metroid Series—primarily in the Prime games, which are first-person).

A player character can often grow out of what began as a player avatar. The player of a character (in the narrow sense of this post) may often try to divorce her own thoughts from her character’s, and is probably on some level fond of the complaint, “But it’s what my character would do!” A character may have a written background and a family tree, or the player may invent these things whole-cloth as the events of the game call for them, but a player with a PC who is very deep into “character” territory may often find that these ideas will come to them very naturally, as they get to “know” the character. In a sense, the player is taking on the role of a character that already exists within the game master’s setting. A well-developed avatar can easily be a character (and indeed, the best characters are probably infused with a healthy dose of “avatarness,” to keep the player interested in more than just her character). Player characters tend not to rely on metagame knowledge to decide their actions, and their decisions may interweave a number of facets of the character, such as their fears and desires, which may not always concur with the fears and desires of the player. An example parallel to the Grand Theft Auto one above would be the protagonist of Assassin’s Creed II, Ezio Auditore. The game itself has a very similar structure to the Grand Theft Auto series, filled to the brim as it is with completely optional side quests and a largely open environment for the player to explore. The key difference, though, is that “Ezio did not kill civilians,” as the game reminds you each time you kill an innocent bystander. Kill enough civilians, and you “desynch,” which is equivalent to dying in battle for the game. This sets a limit on what the player can do in the game based on details of Ezio’s own personality and morality. Another, far more developed example would be Commander Shepard of Bioware’s Mass Effect role-playing games. Though the player is free to choose how Shepard responds to a given situation, those choices are limited, and ultimately, each of them is an “in-character” way that Shepard would respond, whether it is a “Paragon” choice or a “Renegade” choice.

Obviously, nearly all PCs are going to be a blend of “avatar” and “character.” Even the listed examples have some aspects that lean to the other side of the “spectrum” (said in quotes because I’m not entirely sure there actually is a continuity here). Link, for instance, can’t murder civilians, period (though in several of the games, he can spend a lot of his time harassing chickens if the player so chooses). Personally, I tend to find a “character” more rewarding than an “avatar,” to the point that I sometimes can’t wrap my head around the way someone playing an “avatar” is playing the game, but that doesn’t mean that either one way is the better way to play. Do you lean toward one side or the other when you create a character? Do you think there are important subtleties I’m glossing over here? Am I philosophizing about nothing?

I don’t know the answers to those last few questions, which is part of why I wanted to get this out there. Let me know what you think in the comments.