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Game characters and age - what's your preference?
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Max has seen him some hard times in the past six years.
When I was a kid, I – like many others my age – was insanely into the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. While the object of my emulation would swing from the pop-culture spewing Michelangelo to the sardonic Raphael or the brainy Donatello (Leonardo may have had the coolest weapons, but he was a jerk, so I rarely pretended I was him), they always seemed to occupy a space above me, in a manner of speaking. They weren’t adults, set in their ways – they were teenagers, which seemed so eternally far away from me in 1987. Two years ago, the ninja reptiles actually had a CGI movie comeback, and I realized with a jarring shock that I was nearly twice their age.
So it goes, though, right? We change, but characters stay the same.
…But apparently not always. Mr. Max Payne is looking a smidgen like he got hit with the Aging Bus in revealed artwork for Rockstar’s Max Payne 3, and of course Solid Snake got a mustache and about 20 years added to him (and the moniker “Old Snake”) for Metal Gear Solid 4. PopMatter’s G. Christoper Williams tackled the topic of age and characters recently in the excellent article “The Realities of Aging in Video Game Characters,” which not only pointed out the semi-impossibility of again for certain iconic characters like Lara Croft and Mario, but also the interesting possibilities that age can lend to games:
Recurring minor characters in the Grand Theft Auto games have allowed Rockstar to show that time operates in the worlds that they build. From the balder and paunchier Ken Rosenberg appearing in the 1990s in San Andreas formerly as a slightly more vital, if completely neurotic coke head in the 1980s in Vice City . . . GTA characters bear witness to the consequences of time on their characters and create a more realistic sense of who characters are as people, not emblems, than, perhaps, other gaming worlds often do.
So characters fall into two broad categories – the iconic and the dynamic. Iconic heroes (such as Superman, one of the examples Williams uses) don’t age, as they are emblematic, always current in whatever time period they represent; dynamic icons (such as Solid Snake) evolve, adapt, and change. Even Jak from the Jak and Daxter series ages and adapts, even as his series got darker and made the changeover from an E to a T rating (you could argue that the T rating pushed his aging more than any over-arching plot, but his aging has continued throughout the series, while the rating hasn’t gotten higher. Personally I don’t want to think of an M-rated Jak game and I’ll thank you to never bring it up).
While I started writing this musing what sort of character age players liked – much younger, younger, older, much older, or the same age as themselves – I find the issue is a little thornier. If you can’t make the character, what age do you gravitate to? If you made the assumption that only kids would play games with a child-aged main character, explain The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, or ICO. If you assumed that only old people would care about the more geriatric of game heroes and heroines, explain the popularity of Heihatchi in Tekken, and Solid Snake in MGS4. It seems less and less about actual age and more about the world in which the game itself takes place.
…which makes me more and more irritated how much many market departments try to stick their fingers into game development to make demands of how the main character should look (I once worked on a game that eventually got torpedoed because the publisher couldn’t make up their minds about how old they wanted the hero to be). It’s less and less about age. But see, that’s into NDA territory, so I’m going to back off of that and move on elsewhere.
The question does still remain in my head – differences of iconic versus dynamic characters – and that fact that age seems to be a punchline in many games (show me a JRPG, for example, where the main character is over 25. And no, Lost Odyssey doesn’t count, because immortals don’t count. They just don’t). In Final Fantasy X, for example, Tidus calls Auron “old man,” despite the fact that he’s not even 40 – and many old characters are the stereotype of the aged kung-fu master, and is more of a curiosity rather than examined as someone with experience and the wealth of years of living behind them. They’re “fake” old.
Certainly having older characters in games does stretch believability for some titles – action games show feats that would be demanding for even people in their prime – but that’s sort of my point. That’s action games. There’s a lot of others open – and maybe we even could stand to have some titles where the main character isn’t geriatric, but maybe just a touch shy of their prime… even absent of the kvetch “I’m gettin' too old for this.” Just older, that’s all. Don’t we hear “40 is the new 30” all the time? (OK, maybe that’s just me. Telling myself that. A lot. Shut up)
My unanswered question is the one that William’s article – very excellent as it is – doesn’t touch on. 
When you can make your character, what do you tend towards? Typically people lean towards the same gender or prime age – but if you don’t, why? This game designer very much wants to know. And if you can’t choose your character, what ones do you find yourself gravitating towards? That’s a question, as stated, that’s loaded towards a much larger preference, and I admit while I like watching characters evolve and grow, but while the concept of a mid-40’s (or even mid-50’s) Samus Aran out there still killing space pirates is interesting to me, I don’t know how much I want to see it. And while the Daedalus Project has some interesting information – “Like the finding with height and gender, it’s interesting here that there is a mirroring effect as well; older players prefer older avatars” – it’s something I’d like to hear from people out there in Readerland.
As the internets say, plz to discuss.
- R. Dobbs
