Standardized Character Creation in Video Games

A lot of video games allow players to create their own character, selecting gender, build, skin color, and facial features. Some people stick with the default character or one of a number of preset characters. Others like to create characters at random, with no real inspiration other than what their imagination comes up with. I, and players like me, try to create an avatar that resembles me as much as possible. If I’m going to be playing the game, and there isn’t a protagonist created specifically for the game, I want the main character to be an extension of myself.

The Problem

There are a number of problems with character creation systems when trying to make a character look a certain way.

For one, the way people look can be very hard to describe. I could spend pages describing myself, or I could include a headshot and a full body shot in this post, and you’d have a near perfect idea of what I look like instantly. “A picture’s worth a thousand words” may actually be an understatement in this case. I could probably spend a few thousand words describing my appearance, as vain as that would be, and there would still be facets left up to the imagination. I know what I look like, and I recognize myself in pictures or a mirror, but I can’t fully tell someone what I look like enough that they could recognize a depiction of me without a shadow of a doubt.

Not only is it hard to describe a person’s appearance, but every character creation menu in video games is different. Some allow very granular control, with sliding scales to adjust minute dimensions. Others give a few options in a few different categories and let you pick which one you like best. Hair is typically limited to 30 or fewer different styles, and maybe 20 different color variations. Facial hair might have a few different options, or may just be a simple on/off toggle. Of the 7 billion or so people in the world, there are massive variations in what people look like. Much more than what most character creation menus offer.

The Solution

So what can you do? I propose that there should be a standard across all character creation menus that would allow people to reasonably recreate themselves in any game that offers such a feature.

The Mii creation system on Nintendo’s 3DS would be a good starting point. Players can use the handheld’s camera to take a picture of themselves after lining up their eyes and mouth with on-screen indicators. This isn’t perfect, but it gives the software a good idea of where your features are, and represents them in the game with decent accuracy. I feel like this could be taken quite a few steps forward, however.

What if players took several pictures of themselves from several different angles? Maybe have a uniform pose of arms outstretched, feet together, etc in order to calculate the dimensions reliably. Pictures taken from the front, both sides, and from behind, one from far away for whole body shape, one much closer to pick up fine details in face structure. Almost like motion capture that is already done in games already, have a system that could do this in a low cost way for anybody. The final result would be a 3D representation of your whole body, and one of specifically your head.

So you have a 3D model of yourself, but good luck showing or describing that model to a video game. The next step would be to measure a number of different dimensions to put this into a quantifiable data format. Distance between eyes, distance between pupils, length of nose, width of lips, height of ears, color shade of skin, among numerous other data points. If there were a standard created, and enough data points recorded, any compatible system should be able to recreate your model fairly accurately.

With all of these data points and a standard to go by, video game developers could incorporate an option to load from a file into character creation menus. If I put my 3D model details into a specific folder on my PS4 or PC, any game should be able to access it and load in that data to visibly recreate me as the game avatar. If a certain game isn’t going to use certain metrics, it could just ignore those supplied parameters. Players would still be able to create their own characters should they so choose, but I wouldn’t have to spend an hour or more tweaking every little setting and end up with somebody that barely resembles me at all.

An interesting extension of this system would be a hub in which players could upload their 3D model to allow other players to use them as a character. If celebrities got involved, I could download the model for say, Samuel L. Jackson, and play as him. No need to manipulate every setting by hand in order to try and recreate him, when I can submit data that does it automatically.

Obviously, there could be some serious privacy issues with a system like this. There was a big controversy a while back when a model of Ellen Page appeared nude in “Beyond: Two Souls.” Even though the developers of the game never acquired a nude scan of Page, they tweaked features of the character to make them look mostly like Page. It isn’t explicitly morally wrong, but there are definitely some questionable actions in a situation like this. Having uniform 3D model data available for so many people is bound to experience some similar situations.

Perhaps there are more complications to this idea than I’m aware of. I don’t work on video games, I have no experience with graphic design, I’m just musing about something that would be cool to have. I want to play a video game as myself. Is that really so much to ask?