This tends to cause problems when the work gets adapted to other media. In most Real-Time Strategy games, the player is either a Featureless Protagonist or just a Non-Entity General who directs the action but doesn't even have a character. Media which try to put a definite name and face on the protagonist result in Canon Name. Often used in conjunction with Second-Person Narration. The result is often an extended form of Purely Aesthetic Gender, with little additional influence on the story.Ī weaker form of this attempt results in the Heroic Mime. Much easier to achieve in Interactive Fiction, for the same reason that text is better suited to the Tomato Surprise, and to this day, many text games still take this approach, and enthusiasts have been known to be disappointed if forced to play a character who does not reflect their gender or sexual orientation.īeyond adventures, most games at least need to graphically present the player, so some amount of customization is required. Less common in its extreme form today, as it makes anything like compelling storytelling highly problematic. Most often, the first thing to slip through will be a tacit assumption that the character is male. More often than not, a thorough examination of the game will cause this to break down as providing any kind of substantial interaction with a player character who is a cipher is problematic. In an attempt to reinforce the notion that the player of the game 'is' the Player Character, most early games went out of their way to avoid applying any characterization to the player character.

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