There’s something disturbing about seeing an old and much-beloved videogame character in a new redesign. Like seeing the movie version of a book you loved, it reveals how much of the character you had imagined, and how other people’s vision of them was very different.
My version of Guybrush Threepwood, will always be the cheerful pixelated chap in Monkey Island 2, with a toothy grin, cheery demeanour, pirate coat and messy hair. That’s all I ever needed to know. I didn’t want to wonder whether he was attractive or not, whether he was stubbly or shaven, or what colour his eyes were. I didn’t even like it when the pixelated cutscenes showed him in higher resolution. But videogame art becomes more sophisticated every year, and – just like TV viewers having to deal with the first colour TV, and then high-definition – we can’t leave as much to the imagination any more. It’s a shame in a way that we think of this as “progress”. Sure, it’s nice to see a recreation of renaissance Florence in high-resolution detail in Assassin’s Creed. But, as Scott McCloud notes in his book Understanding Comics, simpler cartoon imagery can be more universal: “The more cartoony a face … the more people it could be said to describe.”
This means that more high-resolution characters are likely to be more alienating. Once Guybrush had stubble, a lantern jaw and a recognisably male silhouette, it was more obvious he wasn’t meant to be me. And videogames, more than any other medium, rely on the identification between player and the character you’re playing on screen, so the disconnect is even more disturbing than in a movie or novel. It might be partly for this reason that games are increasingly allowing players to design their own characters. After all, if the hero of the game you’re playing is you, there’s nothing more troubling than looking into the screen and not recognising your own face. So perhaps the ultimate conclusion of these high-def characters will be that I can be all of them: Naomi Threepwood, Naomi of Persia, Naomio the Plumber. Now there’s a thought to give you nightmares.
