Representing as Self and Other

Toby Gard, the creator of Lara Croft, suggested a distinction between two different types of playable character in video games: the avatar and the actor. The avatar, in his model, is a character that the player 'inhabits', projecting either their own personality or an invented personality onto the character. Silent protagonists, such as Gordon Freeman or Link, fall into this category. The actor, meanwhile, is a character with personality pre-created by the game's writer, a character of whom the player takes control. Examples include Gard's own Lara Croft, or Solid Snake. Gard also suggested that avatars should be tied to a first-person view, while actors should be tied to a third-person view, though I think the relationship between camera view and type of playable character can be overstated: Link is an avatar with a third-person view, while J.C. Denton is an actor with a first-person view, and both of them work just fine.

I'm also not convinced that the distinction is as binary as Gard first suggested. Is Mass Effect's Commander Shepard an avatar or an actor? The answer is that she's a bit of both. (Or he is, if you're playing it wrong.) The character is customisable, and the choices presented in the game are, as I've argued before, not 'true' choices that the player is expected to decide on, but questions about how the player interprets the character. Shepard has neither the flexibility of an avatar, nor the rigidity of an actor, but lies somewhere in between.

But what I want to delve into today is the parallel between Gard's concept of avatar and actor, and the psychological concept of 'self' and 'other'. Some playable characters are proxies for the player's 'self', acting as the vessel for the player to be transported into the game world. Other playable characters are, well, 'other'. The player relates to the character, but doesn't necessarily identify with them.

Take Mario and Sonic. After 30 years, we still don't really know who Mario is. He is a (white male) human with whatever personality the player invests him with. He is the 'self'. Sonic, on the other hand, has a personality (unfortunately). But even before he had a personality, in his heyday, he was still a blue hedgehog. Assuming that nobody playing the game is actually a blue hedgehog, he is the 'other'.

This all has a knock-on effect for diverse representation in games. We are comfortable with playing white dudes as the 'self', and we are comfortable with playing all manner of outlandish creatures as the 'other'. The joke has often been made that the industry is content to let you play as a dragon, but balks at letting you play as a woman. When we introduce a character who is a woman, a person of colour, gay, trans, gamedom gets confused. Is this supposed to be a 'self' or an 'other'? It shouldn't be that way: after all, we're content to cast white guys as the 'other' as well as the 'self' - we're content to play as white guys who have their own personalities rather than being a surrogate for ourselves. That's a function of white male defaultism.

Anita Sarkeesian made a video about why the Scythian from Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP is a positive female character. And Sarkeesian's right: the Scythian is a positive female character. But she's a positive female character in a very specific way. It may be an oversimplification, but I would say the two goals of feminism are to normalise women (which is to say, get away from thinking of male as the 'default' and female as the 'exception'), and to humanise women (which is to say, getting people to treat women as actual human beings). These goals are very closely aligned (to the point where I have had trouble explaining the distinction), but I think they are served in games quite differently. Normalising women is better served by allowing a female character to be the 'self' - as the Scythian is. Humanising women is better served by portraying a woman as an 'other' - after all, how do you demonstrate the humanity of someone who has no personality beyond what the player brings with them?

Neither of these things is 'better' or 'worse' (although casting a woman as 'other' does need to take care not to undermine the normalising effect of casting a woman as 'self' in other games). Both are necessary. But I can't help but wonder if it's possible to achieve both at once. On one hand, Mass Effect seems to manage it. On the other hand, ludonarrative dissonance is often caused by a playable character switching unpredictably between 'self' and 'other', as in Grand Theft Auto, where the cutscenes and missions present the character as an 'other', but the between-mission gameplay presents the character as a 'self'.

I've focused a bit on women here, but the same can be said for other non-'default' groups. We need positive examples we can identify with ('self') to normalise them, and positive examples we can relate to ('other') to humanise them.

There is a caveat that, as a white guy, I might be talking nonsense. But I do think that discussions of more diverse representation in games do necessarily need to talk about what particular kind of representation we're talking about, and what that means.