Choosy gamers choose... everything? Nothing?

Let’s talk about customization in games. 

I don’t only mean visual customization—choosing your avatar’s clothes, gender, weight—and I don’t only mean choosing which skills you use in gameplay.  I’m talking about side quests, I’m talking about dialogue choices and multiple endings, skill trees and paint schemes, I’m talking asymmetry that stretches all the way to one-of-a-kind experiences. 

It seems like we’re going there, doesn’t it?  Skyrim delivers an entire lifetime of goals, victories, and dragons.  Players spend more time choosing their avatar than it takes to complete other games.  A wee bit hyperbolic, but my point stands—when you can choose where your nose goes, we’ve started delivering a staggering amount of customization to our gameplay. 

How did we get here?  More importantly, is all of this customization the same?  My gut tells me it is, but my brain tells me it isn’t.  My thyroid’s got something to say about it, too, and my knees just won’t stand for all these leg hairs I’m about to split. 

What happened? 

Getting back to the matter at hand, what is driving all of this choice?  Why is having a say in what your avatar wears as she does an optional quest enabled by the badass decisions she’s made something which gamers crave? 

It’s about choice, right?  Games are a series of interesting choices.  Perhaps gamers want ever-increasing levels of customization because they came to games out of a desire to make choices.  They can’t make choices about the pace of a movie or how a book ends.  Maybe the only way to appease gamers is to give them more choices. 

Choices, broadly, are what I think about when I’m designing gameplay.  How many elements can we mix together to create power dynamics that are volatile and satisfying?  How do we trim back and streamline those elements to make many different styles of play all viable and fulfilling?  It’s also not surprising that I play games with a high degree of mechanical customization—every day, people are coming up with new openings to a game of Starcraft, all of them based on defeating the countless other openings that are winning games.  League of Legends is similar—each of the 110+ champions has four skills, which can be leveled up in hundreds of orders, and 6 item slots that can be filled with items made by combining other items, which are made by combining still other items. 

Cripes. 

Yeah, cripes.  I said it. 

I love that stuff.  When all of those systems are balanced perfectly… oh man.  I dedicate hours and days to them. 

But I’m talking about all of the customization games provide, so let’s bounce back to art.  Costumes, skins, hats.  All of the aesthetic choices you can make in a game—how are these different from mechanical customization? 

They fulfill entirely different purposes, obviously.  Customizing skills and army compositions are about what happens in a game.  They change the narrative of the conflict, they create unexpected interactions, they create the fun of the game. 

I’m not saying aesthetic choices aren’t fun, or aren’t great.  Admittedly, I’m not someone who spends a ton of time on these choices, but I get it—people want to look cool.  They want to be unique, and a digital representation of the self accomplishes that just as much as fashion does.  Looking at what clothes I wear, it may be obvious why I don’t do much in the way of aesthetic customization in games, but the cool stuff doesn’t always come in fat sizes, so get off me, man. 

What happened? 

Getting back to the sweater at hand, aesthetic choices are about self-expression.  Saying that you max out Caustic Spittle first and then switch between Bio-Arcane Barrage and Void Ooze because it says so much about who you really are is a stretch.  Plus, it’s all wrong—Bio-Arcane Barrage is where it’s at, homes. 

Mechanical customization says how you like to play a game, sure—but it says more about how you prefer winning to losing.  Changing your avatar’s look isn’t about how you play the game—it’s about wishing your spikey turtle-man creature looked like a ninja turtle-man.  Because that Rammus skin is awesome (thanks, Jacob!).  It’s about self-expression, which is pretty cool.  It fills a hole that game mechanics can’t.  I dig it, even if I haven’t made any microtransactions on my own. 

Microtransactions are an enormous matter on their own, but I’m going to pull them in here as further evidence that customization is increasingly important to gamers.  Players want badly enough to look different that they’re willing to pay for their appearance.  They want to stand out from the crowd, and they’ll pay to do it. 

However, these new looks frequently violate the aesthetic consistency of the game.  Want your sword-wielding badass chick to look like a bunny?  Done.  Want your other-worldly monster that spits goo to look like a Chinese dragon, even though this world doesn’t have China?  Done. 

And then there’s Steam Workshop.  I haven’t even looked at it, but it’s making a lot of money for Valve and the independent artists and designers creating content.  Like… literal millions of dollars.  It’s a boon for Valve (essentially free money) and independent artists (they can make a living without risking time and money on a project without an established audience).  It’s not going to go away.  However, it’s impossible to have any sort of aesthetic consistency in this system—you can’t wrangle dozens of indie artists to create artwork that matches your style and tone.  Someone at Valve talked about how Team Fortress 2 used to have a 60’s retro look.  The designers chose that look for a few reasons, I’m sure (one of which is allowing them to design things like heal guns and rocket jumps), but it’s been muddied.  That dilutes the impact of the style and makes some of the games’ elements make a little less sense.  In fairness, Valve muddied it themselves with hats and some of the weapons that became available after launch, but that retro look is now only consistent in the environment design. 

I don’t know how to solve that issue—curating all of the new items for style may be prohibitively expensive (outside of being a deterrent to artists trying to express themselves), and artists won’t match their work to your game’s look if you only ask them to.  At least a few will miss the subtleties, and even more will ignore them.  They have a financial incentive to create art that stands out, plus they’re artists.  They love standing out anyway.  Aesthetic consistency is impossible in this framework, and it’s already suffering when a company’s own artists are making the artwork (remember the badass bunny warrior?). 

Internal consistency is important to me.  It’s one of the most interesting things about the alternate worlds we explore through media—how do all of the pieces fit together?  How can someplace so different, with such different rules, have the same problems, the same tragedies, the same human emotions running under it all?  How remarkably different would the world be if only a couple of things changed? 

The look of a place undeniably impacts the possibilities of that culture—we have a hard time believing a nature-loving society that puts importance on community would design buildings that look like banks in a cave.  Bars?  Excessive stonework?  Not without vines growing up them, not without moss and tiny waterfalls. 

It just doesn’t feel right. 

Which sort of leads me to the growing customization of narrative in games.  For years now, we’ve been able to go on side quests to explore the wider aspects of the worlds we play in.  This adds depth to the societies in the game.  It gives us more game to play.  It extends our understanding of the whole. 

But narratively, it doesn’t make much sense.  If we have a quest, and it’s urgent (a feature of virtually all plots), then how does it make sense that we’re going to go looking for a bigger gun blade, an extra shape-shifting soldier or ninja-thief for our team, a rare Esper? 

What happened? 

Japan. 

Getting back to the materia at hand, games are offering much more than mere side quests for narrative customization.  We’ve got branching story paths, multiple endings, morality systems that change who our protagonist is.  How is internal consistency possible when our hero can be a villain?  How can the story mean the same thing when the ground situation can change so much from playthrough to playthrough? 

It can’t.  It’s not even supposed to—that’s what all of the choice is there for, isn’t it?  But what does this do to the overall impact of a game on the culture?  On our collective experience of the game?  We’re no longer playing the same games as each other.  We’re running around in worlds that don’t quite make sense, choosing to lead the lives we want, regardless of whether that gives us a polished and unified experience. 

Which raises the big A question—are games even interested in being art?  Artistic expression is all about refining a collection of ideas and circumstances into the purest, cleanest, most distilled essence possible.  Adding hats, DLC quests, extra characters—all of these are great for players who want more content.  But are all of these choices depriving us of something more meaningful?  Given the glorified status of games like BioShock Infinite and The Last of Us, I tend to think we’re looking for something more.  But maybe that’s just the art school in me talking.