Our first task in ‘Introducing Creative Practice’ was to create an avatar of ourselves. In class I decided to use the website ‘Picrew,’ a pretty popular character customisation website with various styles and types of avatar creators that can be designed and used by anybody. At first I created an avatar based off of portraits from a game I really enjoy, “Omori”. The creator of the Picrew was ‘sapgoon’. It was a lot of fun to reimagine myself into a game I really enjoy and see what I would look like in that universe.
iteration of my avatar, as inspired by Omori.
However, this avatar isn’t perfect, and I don’t think it represents me very accurately. With the Picrew only being fan-made, the options were naturally limited. This is prevalent in many videogames, with some allowing very little customisation options, which can be really frustrating to the majority of a games audience, where the design is only catered to a specific type of player. Nobody enjoys feeling unrepresented in something they enjoy, whether that be due to skin colour, gender or disability representation- or even more trivial things like hair colour or clothing options.
Since my first avatar was made within a time limit, I thought it would be fun to try again and create a character that I felt was more representative of me and take more time working on it. The second and (currently) final iteration can be found below. It is another Picrew, this time designed by ‘scrimsart’. I thought the pixel art style was very cute and slightly more to my tastes. There were more options in pretty much every category. It still isn’t perfect (for example, there isn’t room for much facial expression) but I personally feel it suits me better. I feel more drawn to games with character customization, I love to see myself (or someone that looks like me) in the worlds I interact with- it makes me feel more connected to the game. However, I feel like I may not ever be satisfied with it, considering I can still find shortcomings in the most customisable character creations, like Cyberpunk 2077 and the Saint’s Row series where you can even customise your character’s voice.
On the bright side, I believe that avatar and character creation has come far over the years. It feels like eons ago when Little Carla always had to pick characters like Princess Peach or Zelda just because they were girls. It also gives people the ability to express themselves in more ways than they may be able to in real life- again, both in serious issues, like non-binary and trans people being able to safely explore how they would ideally like to present themselves, or trivial things, like imagining what it would be like to have horns or hooves for feet.
After all, in my perfect world, I’d definitely have fairy wings.