Of course, it’s great when GTA and WoW do it because you know that any investment you make in your character customization is going to be worth it.  Each new installment of GTA offers gameplay for dozens of hours, and you can play WoW, for better or worse, for as long as you can stand it without running out of things to see.  In games of this calibre, the new customization options are a welcome sight, and I enjoy discovering what new options are available as time goes on.

In a new game – particularly one without the backing of recognizable names – customization screens can have the opposite effect.  Without knowing a little bit of what I’m in for, it’s hard to muster up the enthusiasm to define my character.  If it’s a requirement, which it often is, I make rash decisions in a show of contempt for the system that end up making my avatar look something of a mess.  The remainder of my play experience is then realized through this hash of a character, and ends up tarnishing my experience of the whole game.  A difficult-to-implement feature, that is often considered a must-have for social games, can end up ruining it.

So customization screens as a first port-of-call are annoying, but so is a lack of customization options.  It can be made an optional, progressive task, as in GTA: San Andreas, but most games can’t afford to demand the sheer amount of time that GTA can.  In addition, games in a highly-connected, social space have to make this a requirement in order to make concurrent players distinct, so it has to be done, and done before a lot of the fun can begin – so the question we’re left with is “How do you give people a meaningful custom avatar without forcing them into a customization screen?”

Web development to the rescue

I’ve done time as a web developer before, and one of the technologies that has made the job much easier since the 1990s is the development of  Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS.   The Cascading part refers to a neat technique where more general definitions are are inherited by more specific ones, unless otherwise specified.  Basically this means if I want all text to be red, I say “All text should be red”.  Then, headings, subheadings, body and caption text will all be red – unless I want caption text to be green, in which case I say “All text should be red but caption text should be green”.  This has a significant advantage over defining each piece of text colour by hand in that it’s smaller to load, faster to write and easier to change if you decide you want to go with a slightly less gross colour scheme.

..So?

What I would like to borrow from CSS here is the idea that definitions can start out as vague, and become more specific with time – not just definitions of web pages, but definitions of character customization too.  Say I often have pale skin, wear glasses, grey shorts and a red-and-blue T-shirt (I do).  It wouldn’t be a bad place to start for every character I start out as to possess these properties,  and if I want to refine them further, I could.  If a game demanded a character that was an elephant instead of a humanoid, I might decide that I would prefer it not to wear glasses, but I’m not likely to resent the attempt, particularly if it was done automatically.

To an extent, Nintendo already does this with the concept of the portable ‘Mii’, which can represent you in a number of different games.  However, Nintendo requires that the Mii be presented indentically in all the games it appears in, which either limits the aesthetic of the game to the standard set by the Mii art, or jars with the artistic style employed in the game.  On the other extreme is Second life, where there are next to no restrictions on what you can do to your avatar or to your island.  The results of that aren’t pretty either.  I’d suggest we not go there.

I think it would be possible to find something in the middle.  If players could define a character appearance once. with some kind of open standard, then it would be possible to use that as a basis for any new character in a game.  If those parameters were made available to game developers, they could be integrated into the game in a manner that was in-keeping with the artistic direction of the game.  Players get avatars that they can immediately identify with, without having to invest time in building them,  Developers get a recognizable source of customization data that they can interpret how they like.  Everybody wins!