Character Generation

Player characters do not come from nowhere. They have to be created. If players themselves do the creation, they will identify more with their characters right from the beginning. However, if they don’t know what they are doing, then this could easily backfire as they make arbitrary decisions that they shortly come to regret.

Although it’s not part of the virtual world per se, character generation is the first thing players have to do when they start to play a virtual world. It’s therefore very important, as the impression it leaves will shape how players view the virtual world proper when they enter it.

In MUD1, players were asked for their character’s name and gender, and that was all. Nowadays, characters will typically need to have their class, race, skills, and appearance set before they can set foot in the virtual world—a far more complicated exercise. Let’s take a look at what’s involved.

Appearance

The first two questions that need to be answered for any virtual world are still character name and gender, but increasingly character appearance is becoming important.

In graphical virtual worlds, obviously it’s paramount (although even there it’s not mandatory—Lineage succeeds despite having thousands of characters that all look the same). In textual worlds, a character description is usually optional and can be added or changed at any time; a non-default description can often be thought of as a badge of non-newbiehood. Even some graphical virtual worlds allow players to create textual vignettes for their characters, to enhance role-playing.

Almost always, a character’s appearance is intangible: The virtual world itself makes no reference to it, so gameplay effects are non-existent. Although gender and racial ¹ characteristics will affect the image, other attributes won’t: You can be short and skinny yet still have more strength than someone twice your size. Unrealistic though this may be, players like to customize the look of their characters more than they like realism; at this stage, identification with a new character is more critical than its future effect on immersion.

An idea yet to be taken up by any major commercial virtual world ² is that of hyperlinks. It’s a simple matter to associate a hyperlink with any object in a virtual world, characters included, such that activating it opens a browser window to the character’s home page. This gives players even more of an opportunity to flesh out their characters, and can include other useful information, such as objects the character has for sale or is looking to buy. It’s convenient, and it’s extra content that costs the live team nothing to create. However, it’s also 100% immersion-breaking and very open to abuse. Some players will create links to inappropriate web sites, and other players will complain about it; the live team’s workload will increase accordingly. Linking to pages hosted on the developer’s own servers and limiting content to that auto-generated from predefined forms would help enormously, but would lead to increased bandwidth requirements (that is, expense).

Graphical virtual worlds use a paper doll approach to character image design. A basic, randomly featured model of the character is presented, which the player can tweak within certain parameters (the client is going to have to animate this, so changes can’t be too esoteric). Some adjustments concern the underlying wire frame (for example, height), some concern the palette (for example, skin tone), and some concern texture maps (for example, facial features). There are so many variables involved (some of which are interdependent) that most characters will look distinct from one another, except when someone is deliberately trying to create a doppelganger of someone else. Players generally like their characters to be unique ³.

When players create their character’s appearance, it’s the first opportunity they have to engage with their character. It therefore represents a powerful iconic representation of their identity goals. Unfortunately, these goals can change: You might start off as a dark, brooding, menacing figure, but in the course of interacting with the virtual world and its players discover a lighter side to yourself. However, the first impression you’re giving when you meet someone new is “I am a dark, brooding, menacing person.” Changes to apparel can have some impact on this, and there may be hairstylists, beauty therapists, and magic/plastic surgeons able to take it further. Your decision to change has to be conscious, though, which can present a barrier to identity exploration. Short of making characters change physical appearance based on their emotional behavior (which, were it implemented, would lead to a world full of characters looking like their own Dorian Gray portraits ⁴), this is something that graphical virtual worlds simply have to live with.

Appearance is a two-way cipher. It encodes what you want other people to think of you, but it also encodes what you want to think about yourself. When a non-newbie male player creates a female character, that character encapsulates idealized values that the player is aiming both to project and to experience—only very experienced role-players can keep the two separate. The same applies to all other aspects of character appearance—race, hair, eyes, skin tone, height, and so on. These are lexical tokens that combine to create impressionistic symbols meaningful in an emergent, cultural language of identity. Although rooted in the tangible (and, in the case of gender, in reality), it’s the abstractions that players make, and the common vocabulary they adopt for communicating these through appearance, that are important.

This semiotic view of appearance comes with two caveats. Firstly, not all players will invest time creating characters—they’ll take the random image with which they were first presented (unless perhaps it’s outstandingly hideous). The players most likely to do this are

• Newbies who are super-keen to enter the virtual world for the first time.

• Potential newbies checking out the virtual world before committing themselves.

• Players creating secondary characters for some specific purpose.

• Oldbies who are already as one with their online selves.

The other semiotic caveat is that some players use a more concrete real-world symbolism of direct identification. As noted in Chapter 3, Tolkien’s Gandalf character is one favorite role model, but there are plenty more from other works of fiction. Thus, in a Fantasy virtual world you may find a female character with dark, wavy hair, dressed in tight-fitting, purple clothes and calling herself “Deanna ⁵.” However, although this phenomenon is widespread across virtual worlds, each individual world usually has only a small number of people determined to role-play against the world fiction to this degree.

Character Generation Methods

It seems a simple task: Set the initial values for a fixed number of genders, races, classes, attributes, and skills. What is the best way to do it, though, so that it provides enough dilemmas to make players think about what they’re creating, yet can be completed quickly for those who just want to play?

There are many different ways to do it, a surprising number of which can be offered simultaneously. Let’s go through the main ones.

Random

The easiest method to create a character is at random. The server ¹ rolls digital dice to determine all values.

This is fast, and it may produce interesting character ideas that the player had not considered, but some characters will be measurably better than others (depending on how the dice fell). A modified version uses a balancing scheme, whereby each attribute, skill, or whatever is allocated a points rating. Random values can then be adjusted upwards and downwards so that the sum total of points is the same for all new characters but their distribution won’t be. This modified system has the advantage that it can be done on the client, with the server merely sanity-checking the results.

Pick Points

Starting from the modified random position, pick points allow players to tinker with the results. This saves players from re-rolling continuously until they get the result they want. They can reduce some values to gain pick points (equivalent to their rating) and spend them on raising other values. Sometimes, not all the pick points initially available will have been spent by the randomizing process, leaving a pool for players to draw from. This is better, because players don’t feel as if they have to harm their character before they improve it; however, it does mean that a “randomly flesh out” option should be available for players who don’t want to waste time messing around.

The cost of attributes and skills will normally increase (and sometimes decrease) disproportionately beyond a mid-range, to stop players from minimaxing. For example, if a character’s default tracking ability is 40, then it may cost one point to rise to 50, another point to rise to 60, but then two points to rise to 70 and a further three to rise to 80.

One of the ways by which classes and races can be made more distinct is to provide different base (and, sometimes, ceiling) values for skills and attributes. A stereotypical elf, for example, may begin with higher defaults for dexterity and archery than a stereotypical dwarf; the dwarf may have higher strength and axe-wielding abilities to compensate. In these cases, pick point costs may be relative to the defaults rather than to some absolute scale: If the elf’s default archery skill is 60 then it would only cost one point to raise it to 70 instead of the two it would cost the dwarf with default 40.

The total number of pick points available to a character may in some systems be increased by taking a flaw (or quirk). The idea here is that the character has some flaw that the player is willing to accept in return for more pick points. For example, if a player is designing a “desert warrior” character, then it might be worthwhile accepting a flaw of “fear of heights” (on the grounds that the character will never encounter any). Were a giant eagle to pick up the character and drop it at the top of a minaret, however, the flaw would kick in; at the very least, the character could expect a catastrophic loss of attribute points while the situation prevailed.

In addition to flaws, some systems have one-off improvements that can be bought for pick points (for example, “language aptitude”). In this case, the improvements are known as advantages and the flaws disadvantages ¹. Because most advantages fit (or can be fitted) into a skills/feats/attributes scheme, though, they are popular.

Kits

Character kits are predefined pick point spends optimized by the designers for particular playing styles. For many newbies, going through extensive skills lists without having a clue as to what’s useful and what’s not is very daunting. It’s easier to look down a (shorter?) list of character kits and make just one major decision, and then maybe fine-tune the result.

Character kits have a special significance for classless virtual worlds, because they allow players to create a character that is a “sorcerer,” “ranger,” “merchant,” or whatever, but don’t lock them into it. You can start off as a mendicant priest and end up as chief of the assassins’ guild; the character kit you start with points you in a direction of your choosing, but you don’t have to follow it.

A nice feature of character kits is that they can be saved and loaded. Because all the action in character creation happens at the client, this means players can customize their own character kits and give them to their friends, post them on web sites and so on. This makes for a more involved community, although the temptation always exists to create a crock kit and label it “arch-wizard” to trick newbies.

Questionnaires

Questionnaires offer a different approach to character creation. Players answer a series of (usually) multiple-choice questions, from which a piece of software constructs a customized character. Questions may or may not be focused—that is, later questions may or may not depend on your answers to earlier questions. This can be done independently or tied into a kit system; it’s easy to see how a player-written web-based tool could construct characters from forms even if the developers decided against doing it officially.

There are basically two ways that questionnaires can be used: Ask players about the character they’re creating; ask players about themselves. Examples:

• Your character prefers to deal with enemies

  • Face to face.

  • At a distance.

  • Behind their backs.

  • By giving them what they want.

• You view your fellow players as

  • Potential victims.

  • Part of the world.

  • The reason you play.

  • Competition.

The first approach constructs a profile of the character that the player wants to play, then attempts to spend pick points in a way that best reflects this. In the example given: The first answer might suggest a confrontational role such as fighter or lawyer; the second answer might suggest archer or magic-user; the third answer might suggest thief or politician; the fourth answer might suggest crafter or merchant ¹.

The second approach tries to create a character that is right for the player; this may be radically different from what the player would have chosen otherwise. In the (somewhat unsubtle) example given, the answers basically point at player types—killer, explorer, socializer, achiever. Although players can enjoy the surprise results that this technique can deliver (if only to scoff at them) and can have fun wrestling with off-the-wall questions (“If you were a color, what would it be?”), nevertheless it’s a form of psychometric testing; many players find the idea of this uncomfortable ².

Tabula Rasa

This method creates characters by constructing a backstory for them. Starting as a callow youth with no skills, no quirks, and no unusual attributes (that is, an empty slate, or tabula rasa ¹), the player chooses a profession from a list. This adds some skills and perhaps changes a few attributes. The player is then presented with a second list that omits many of the original choices but offers new ones instead (depending on what the character decided). The process iterates, with new opportunities and specializations presenting themselves. When it stops, not only can a character be created, but a short history, too.

For example:

“Zayre spent much of her formative years helping her carpenter father. The call to adventure was too strong, however, and so she joined a merchant train as a traveling cooper. Soon, she turned her talents to fletching, and became adept with the bow. Her reputation grew as she defended the caravan from bandits and raiders, until eventually she left to join the army as an archery instructor. Finding the discipline too stifling, she volunteered to become a scout, patrolling the barbarian wilderness with only her horse, her bow, and her thoughts for company.”

I first encountered this idea in the single-player role-playing game Darklands ², where it was very effective. It doesn’t seem to have made much of an inroad into virtual worlds, though, perhaps because it implies that characters age. This is a shame, as it remains my personal favorite.

Essay

High-powered role-playing virtual worlds turn character creation into an art. Players of games such as EverQuest and Anarchy Online who regard themselves as “role-players” would do well to consider whether they could have written an essay on their character and its background before ever playing, to be submitted for approval to the world’s staff members. That’s what’s required of some MUSHers.

Role-playing virtual worlds work consensually. People who do not buy into the fiction or who are disruptive of it have no place. This makes all players simultaneously guardians and perpetuators of the fiction. To gain admittance, newbies must therefore demonstrate that they both honor the fiction and have an aptitude for role-playing. An essay forces a player to create a fully rounded character, in the process satisfying both these goals. As mentioned in Chapter 1, “Introduction to Virtual Worlds,” some virtual worlds will conduct interviews, too.

This kind of freeform character creation only works for small-scale, intimate virtual worlds with very dedicated players. Given that most players regard essay writing as a form of torture that should be outlawed by international convention, this is perhaps not surprising. Nevertheless, in its place it can bring character creation to the highest planes. It’s not by chance that some of the best role-playing MUSHes have waiting lists ¹.

Physical Differences

Elves are taller than dwarfs, but not at tall as humans. Dwarfs are stronger than elves, but elves are more dexterous. Elves and dwarfs can see in the dark, but humans can’t. There are physical differences between character races, which are reflected in their default attribute settings.

Okay, so what about character gender?

Ah. In virtual worlds, the differences are usually purely cosmetic. Male and female characters look different, but apart from that gender X is every bit as good as gender Y and vice versa. There are three main reasons for this:

• If characters of one gender were more able than characters of another gender, it would greatly annoy real-life representatives of that gender because it would seem to be saying things about them.

• On the whole, ability differences between genders really are negligible. In day-to-day situations (as opposed to extreme ones), tasks are usually gender-independent.

• Virtual world designers are a liberal lot who don’t want real-life prejudices either seeping into their virtual world or being reinforced by it.

It may surprise many students of gender studies to learn that the third of these is perhaps the strongest. It certainly applied to MUD1 ¹, which made no tangible distinction between character genders except in three instances that I’ll discuss shortly. Such gender-blindness is all very noble, of course, and it promotes attitudes that can only be good if carried out to the real world. Unfortunately, there are some real-life physical differences between men and women that really can’t be dismissed in virtual worlds.

In real life, genetic females can have babies, but genetic males can’t. Few real-life women can grow a beard, most real-life men can. Any virtual world that suggested that either of these statements were untrue would have a hard time maintaining immersion.

What about differences in height? That’s a little fuzzier. The average adult male is taller than the average adult female, but some women are taller than some men. I’m taller than my wife, but her brother is shorter than his wife (who is also taller than me). Nevertheless, I’m noticeably taller than most of the women I know. In a virtual world, would I have to be the same height so as not to disadvantage female characters?

Well, perhaps not, because in a virtual world height can easily be regarded as cosmetic. Humans won’t bang their heads in dwarf houses, and dwarfs can reach things from the top shelf of a bookcase. Graphical worlds might have a more practical problem in that super-tall races simply won’t fit in small places, but if they do it’s a problem of their own making ². Nevertheless, in general female characters can be made to look smaller than male ones while having collision-detection boxes the same size.

However, what about strength? Men have significantly greater upper body strength than women. I may be shorter than my sister-in-law, but I can easily beat her at arm-wrestling. Should male characters have a higher base strength than female characters? If so, should female characters be compensated with a higher dexterity and/or stamina? This is precisely what MUD1 did: Initial attributes for characters were set using a random-number generator, then female characters had 10 subtracted from their strength and 5 added to each of their dexterity and stamina. It was possible to get strong female characters, but strong males were more likely.

In reality, though, the differences between male and female dexterity and stamina are marginal compared to the male advantage in strength (dexterity may be more related to size than gender). I was balancing genders in MUD1, but not in a realistic fashion. How far should virtual worlds reflect reality as it is, as opposed to reality as people wish it were?

There were two other ways that MUD1 made a distinction between male and female characters. One of these was to have a matched pair of puzzles that you had to be a certain gender to complete, namely kissing a sleeping beauty (for males) and kissing a frog prince (for females). I was never happy with these, though, because they were unfair on gay players: Both the sleeping beauty and the frog prince were heterosexual, and didn’t take kindly to advances from members of their own sex ³. I did not migrate either of these puzzles to MUD2.

The other tangible way that MUD1 used gender was that it had magic to flip it: Male characters could become female, and female characters could become male. This was non-consensual—other characters could cast the necessary spell on you whether or not you wanted them to. It wasn’t something that people did very often: It had a high chance of failure, the penalty for which was the caster’s falling asleep; besides, most people didn’t actually care if it happened to them ⁴. Having their character’s gender changed commonly angered only two groups of players:

• Newbies and recently ex-newbies, who hadn’t yet grasped the fact that virtual worlds can have a different culture to the real one.

• Players deliberately playing characters of the opposite gender who viewed it as an interruption of their experiment.

It’s possible to have tangible but neutral differences between genders that (in theory at least) hurt neither. For example, plate armor breastplates could reasonably be restricted so only characters of the gender they were made for could use them. This might lead to economic imbalances, though: If supply and demand differed by much, one gender could end up paying more for their breastplates than another. Should a designer strive to eliminate such unfairness, or accept it as an inevitable consequence of increasing the virtual world’s depth?

To conclude: There are significant physical differences between men and women in the real world. For the short-term periods that characters exist in virtual worlds, these can be embraced fully, embraced cosmetically, or conveniently ignored. Unless they’re making a deliberate point about gender, most virtual worlds will stop short of adding tangible gender differences between characters. There are too many real-world consequences otherwise.

Yet character gender isn’t really all that different to character race. Why is it fine to suggest that one race might be stronger or smarter or more pain-resistant than another, but it isn’t fine to say the same thing about gender? These may be made-up “races,” but it’s easy to see how such casual references to “racial differences” can perpetuate false notions of racial differences in the real world. Chapter 8 considers this issue in greater detail.

Long-Term Characters

Should player characters age? There are some characters in text MUDs that have been played for so long that, were they alive in the real world, they’d be entitled to vote.

For virtual worlds with moderately low persistence, it’s perhaps not an issue. If the world periodically resets, it never ages; it’s not inconsistent to suppose that the characters entering such a timeless world shouldn’t change either.

For greatly persistent worlds, it’s not this easy. EverQuest’s night/day cycle is 90 real minutes in length. That means 3 years of real time is nearly 50 years of virtual time. As the virtual world never formally resets, shouldn’t 3-year-old characters be in late middle age by now? Everyone must sup regularly from a fountain of youth.

Aging, like gender differences, is one of those inconvenient facts of real life that designers often omit from virtual worlds. They don’t even address it cosmetically: Beautiful characters are forever beautiful.

The reason for this, of course, is that aging implies decay and, ultimately, death. The decay part might be acceptable to players if it’s balanced by something else—for example, dexterity might drop but intelligence might rise. What they are unlikely to accept without a great deal of persuasion is that they themselves are responsible for supplying the main gain that comes with aging: experience. Their character will be better when it is older because of what it experienced when it was younger—that is, how they played it.

Character death is not something that sits easy with players, even when it’s “natural” through aging. Would people buy a music CD if it was guaranteed to stop playing after five years? Why would a player want to start in a virtual world knowing that their character would be taken from them when at the height of its powers? What about the players of elf-types, whose characters are practically immortal? Would female characters get an extra two or three years, as they do in the real world? It’s almost inevitable that in such a climate, some fiction would have to be created to assuage the concerns of long-term players. Characters don’t age because, er, there’s something in the air.

Okay, so they don’t age. Time still passes, though. Characters get married all the time in virtual worlds—it’s a common ceremony (and one I’ve performed many times myself). Do they get to have virtual children?

Virtual children pose so many problems for virtual world designers that most will avoid the topic at all costs. Unfortunately for me, as author of this book I can’t do that. Here, therefore, are the main issues:

• Children have to be conceived. We all know how this happens in the real world, but….

• Women bear children and men don’t. Is this unfair on male characters, unfair on female characters, or unfair on both?

• It takes nine months from conception for a human baby to be born. Even at accelerated time, this is plenty long enough for the player to have second thoughts. Are virtual abortions allowed?

• After a few months, pregnant women look different to non-pregnant women. Do their character models change?

• The final few weeks of pregnancy can be quite disabling. Should pregnant characters still be able to hack dragons with the best of them, or would suggesting this be irresponsible?

• Labor and the birth: These are going to be faked up to happen when the player is logged off, right?

• Naturally all babies are born in perfect condition without any complications. So, who looks after them, and how?

• Are children shown in the virtual world? If so, they grow, they change shape—all that needs to be modeled.

• How are children’s looks and attributes computed? Are “designer babies” possible? What about something basic, such as choosing a child’s sex?

• Parents don’t age, but their children do?

• Can you sell your children into slavery? Every real-world parent has thought about it….

• Have you any idea how expensive it is to bring up kids?!

• Are children educated automatically? Do parents have any say in the matter? What if they disagree?

• Can children die before they reach adulthood? Can they be killed?

• Who gets custody of the children when the parents split?

• Can parents abandon their children? In worlds with permanent death, what happens to orphans?

• Who gets to play a child once it reaches adulthood?

• What tangible reasons are there for having children anyway?

There are serious moral, practical, and implementational issues concerning virtual children. They can all be addressed, but never to the satisfaction of everyone. In most virtual worlds, the cost of implementing virtual children so outweighs the benefits that it makes sense to put the idea in the “forget about it” pile. The main exceptions are

• Virtual worlds with a strong, realistic theme (particularly ones in an historical context). Children may be necessary for gameplay reasons, and the prevailing morals of the modeled reality can be used to answer some of the more awkward questions.

• Virtual worlds actually about children—for example, educational ones.

• Virtual worlds with permanent death, where children are used in an inheritance fiction to replace dead characters ¹.

And that, thank goodness, is quite enough of that.