Gamer Banter: Character Round-up

A shamefully long time ago, I used to participate in Blog Banter, a blog circus with a monthly theme and a bunch of great games bloggers. Terence Bosky resurrected the old group back in April and this month’s topic is…

“Which game character do you identify yourself with most/least and why?”

I didn’t participate – given the choice, I play western RPGs so I’m basically identifying with myself. Kinda cheating, no?

Silvercube is Luigi. Sorta.

“While I don’t really identify with him on a character level, I do like Italian food.”

Terence himself reckons he’s Gabriel Knight:

“Gabriel Knight may be a sexy adventurer, but he’s also bookish.”

(haha, out-of-context quote FTW!)

Pioneer Project also prefers self-made characters:

“…the characters that I have created, these are the personas I can identify with best as through time and emotional toil I’ve had a hand in their making. They share my personality entirely rather than me attempting to bash mine into a predefined character.”

While I think the above comment is a little harsh – I’ve never felt that I need to bash my own character into a predefined persona – I do agree with her later sentiment around the generic male persona. It does break the immersion when other characters refer to me as “he” and playing the Hulk SMASH! role can get pretty tedious.

You can tell that Aim For The Head is a zombie-lover just from the blog title, and it comes through in the choice of characters, too:

“Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2… …because the game is light on cut scenes and outside the quips and banter the characters are player or AI controlled and not just standing around, these games have given me a group of friends to survive the zombie apocalypse with. And through them and their banter, I care about them.”

Keith on Extra Guy loves Sonic the Hedgehog:

“If it wasn’t for Sonic’s love of chili dogs on the Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog Saturday morning cartoon I would have never tried them because as a kid they looked like “yucky hotdogs with poo on them”.”

Next Jen is (yet) another female RPG-er who struggles to identify with game characters. I think I’m spotting a theme here:

“There’s not many characters from the video game world that I can relate to. Sure, there are characters that I like but those that I can relate and identify myself with, not so much.”

And finally, Cat from Carocat likes so many characters that he just couldn’t decide:

“Alistair, Carth, Garrus, HK-47, Mira [not a BioWare, but an Obsidian character], Mission, Morrigan and Tali are just some of them I’ve fallen in love with over the years.”

Come to think of it, years and years ago I did identify with Grace Nakimura from the Gabriel Knight series. She was smart, snarky, did her research, didn’t take crap from Gabriel and IIRC, had to save his ass on several occasions. I really liked Lara Croft too, until they gave her a bunch of annoying male sidekicks that she needed to talk her through every little puzzle.

Thinking back on it, my university room-mate when I played GK3 once accused me of being just like Gabriel Knight. “No wonder you like that game. He says exactly the same things you do. You’re both so sarcastic,” she said. Yeah, that’s me. I’m a 6-foot blonde hunky Schattenjäger that eats werewolves for breakfast. Didn’t you know?

This post was not exactly part of Gamer Banter, a monthly video game discussion coordinated by Terry at Game Couch. If you’re interested in taking part, please email him for details.

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