The Digital Reality of Video Games
On the characters we created and the selves we have portrayed
By Peter The Phong Nguyen
The Art of Creation
For majority of my life, there was two characters I embodied.
One that would wake up, eat, study and walks through the streets of Melbourne, and another that would wield a blade, glowing with a fire imbue and acts with confidence. One was built upon the human lifecycle, and the other was sculpted pixel by pixel build inside a character creator.
When I began this investigation into digital identity, I wasn't really expecting confession to be part of it at all. But it will be impossible to reflect on the ways other people construct themselves in games without doing the confession yourself.
Feature Article — Act I
The Digital Character Creation
In every role-playing game there's a moment where the real world will just disappear in the mind.
Every customisation through the series of sliders, toggles and traits – something that cannot possibly be achieved in the real world would now take a form. Skin-tone, hairstyle, strength, charisma, and voice is more than just character creation. It's a construction in the form of a UI.
Crafting Identity, Pixel by Pixel
The Starting of a Second Self
The very first digital characters were very basic. Avatars were taking on monochromatic sprites and the-now cringey usernames in 1980 Multi-user dungeons (aka MUD). But even so back then, your identity was custom-made. You could be "KnightofLight", not David. You could be "FrozenWitch", not Sarah. As technology kept evolving through the years, so did our freedom to "rewrite ourselves".
Today, games like Baldur's Gate 3 or Final Fantasy XIV don't just let us change our appearances, they also invite us to embody our ideals. As Goffman once said, human interaction is a "presentation of self", to the point of "performance" adapted to a social context. The world of gaming truly proves this statement right.
From Mask to Reality
In Baldur's Gate 3, the illusion of choice hides a deeper truth. That is, the fact that our digital personas are shaped by who we are offline. Given the infinite freedom in an online game, we tend to recreate ourselves in our digital character.
Accounting for the players who report the opposite, they say that they become more honest in-game, often sharing stories that they have been uncomfortable to share in the real world. Psychologists called this the "Proteus Effect", which is when our behaviour shifts to match the traits of our avatars. Playing a confident hero long enough and your confidence will bleed into the real world.
What is the Proteus Effect?
"A psychological phenomenon where the appearance of a person's avatar influences their behaviour"
Feature Article — Act II
Customisation isn't all just aesthetic. Each slider and option carry emotional weight.
To choose horns instead of wings, or to change your demise of being short to create a tall character. When you're online, you experiment with gender, ethnicity, and morality in a way that the real life rarely allows.
For a sophisticated example, I will use Final Fantasy XIV. Entire communities have been formed around the concept of fashion shows and what is known as a "glamour contest", and these are entirely player-run. Avatars would gather up and parade in a digital catwalk-like venue created entirely from FFXIV's in-game furniture. Behind every outfit would lie the "negotiation of identity": who exactly do I want to be seen as today?
MMO worlds could be said to be a function of global laboratories for identity. For example in Baldur's Gate 3, player statistics say that the vast majority of players choose morally ambiguous paths, ones that are good, a self-interest neutral which suggests the likelihood of grey-area ethics.
With that being said, in VRChat and Second Life, entire economies revolve around avatar modification. Skins, gestures, and body physics are all traded like real world designer brands. This isn't just escapism.
Virtual Runway
Where Identity Becomes Fashion
The Collision of Worlds
The irony is, while digital characters feel deeply personal, they also get put into massive databases. Every choice, every skin colour, moral dialogue, maybe even the romance option is stored, quantified and used. In shaping our identities we are also in a way, training algorithms to predict them.
"We give players freedom, but every freedom lives inside a rule-set we wrote."
This tension between individuality and design, is what defines the modern character. It's liberation bounded by code.
Portraits from a Virtual World
Four players. Four realities. One question: What do you think of avatars?
groundchicken — Baldur's Gate 3
"She's everything I couldn't be. Reckless, romantic, brave. I made her to see if those traits could fit me too."
NyxEcho — Final Fantasy XIV
"I used to change outfits every day. That made me realise that each outfit was an emotion made wearable."
Chroma_Knight — VRChat
"People say avatars hide us. I think mine made me louder. You can't whisper in neon."
DTOX — Starfield
"When the character creator asked for a name, I just typed my real one."
The Bleed
When the character looks back.
There's a moment, ever so subtle, private and never mentioned in game patch notes, when a game stops feeling like it's just pretend. It's when your decisions stop being about winning and losing, but when it starts feeling like truth.
You know it's happened when your character's emotions suddenly begin to feel like your own. This is what psychologists call "bleed". Bleed is the emotional transfer between the player and their character.
The barrier between the digital and real world isn't breaking. It is becoming more penetrable. Players would bring their pain, loneliness or curiosity into video-games, and those worlds give something back. Through playing, we are simulating humanity until it begins to feel real again.
Games are not escapism anymore.
In Baldur's Gate 3, I watched my friend spend like twenty minutes adjusting their character's jawline, and just in seconds, make a choice in the story that I would think contradicted their true beliefs. When I asked them why, they said "In this world, I wanted to see what it feels like to be someone who forgives."
Then it struck me.
These digital selves of ours might be better versions of us.
Or maybe worse?
Either way, they're on the honest side.
Bleed goes both ways, we take our characters into real life, which become a little braver, a little crueler, and maybe a little bit more complex. And when the next login screen appears, the self we bring back has already changed.
Maybe identity was never meant to be still.
Maybe your digital identity wasn't digital after all.
It's human.