14 DAY TRIAL // I feel like video games care less and less about me, the man who plays them, and too much about themselves, the characters that the development team crafts and then expects me to inhabit, to guide, to keep safe and lead towards success.
It is easy and safe for the developer to decide what they want the player to be, give that vision a name and then a destiny, and then create an entire narrative and experience around that product of their imagination.
The alternative is to give the player options and then simply allow him to mix and match those in order to come up with his own presence and then make sure that the entire game structure can react to any combination that gamers can come up with.
It’s not hard to see why even wide open titles like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, which deliver a lot of variety, make it impossible for the in-game Andrei Dumitrescu to be even remotely similar to the real me, both in terms of appearance and character.
The amount of work needed would be phenomenal while the marginal utility for the player base would be limited.
Still I long for the days when I was able to fire up Icewind Dale II (which, incidentally, I recently picked up from Good Old Games along with the original title in the series) and create a whole party of six characters from scratch.
The game, which was launched in 2002 by developer Black Isle and publisher Interplay, gave me the space to express different aspects of myself using the six slots and the potential classes and race match-ups.
Oddly, the fact that I was able to split myself up into six facets made it easier for me to express myself, in conversation and battle, closer to how I would do in the real world.
Since 2002 computing power available for gaming has grown significantly and I long for the next game, role-playing or team-based, that gives me the opportunity to make myself by deciding my main traits and building whole characters around them.