Art imitating (your) life in Gaming

[sammyc]

random question/idle curiosity

Do you find that your MMO characters, for instance, take on your own personality traits where applicable? Not necessarily in terms of things like aggressiveness or attitude, but little things. For example I always end up with a bankful of stuff that might come in handy, and that I'll only part with if I know it's replaceable - pretty much as in life. As you might expect I guess. Anyone have any interesting life/gaming differences or similarities?

[Toadem]

No because my in game characters all seem to have plenty of disposable income .

[jag272]

No because my in game characters all seem to have plenty of disposable income .

I wish I could say the same about my ingame characters.

As for character personalities, it kinda varies in my case, I like to play it how I feel best reflects me if it was based purely on my own reaction, disregarding other's expectations. That usually means my characters are still quite helpful but sometimes a little less patient than I would be IRL (played Mass Effect trilogy finally recently and the reporters annoyed me for example).

Sometimes however they don't really reflect myself at all. I've only had the time to play through SW:TOR on one character so far, a Sith Inquisitor, and after seeing the writing on it I pretty much went Dark Side wherever possible, I didn't play a total ass picking every horrible option available, but if there was a Light/Dark option I always went Dark. Had a bunch of fun playing it like that even though the non-allegiance chats I played much closer to my own personality.

So a bit of both really, and it depends on how appealing the game makes each path too. I went Paragon playing Mass Effect cos Renegade seemed too out of place for me there, though I used Renegade triggers here and there.

[sammyc]

No because my in game characters all seem to have plenty of disposable income .

Nice for you if you mean you can replace all your stuff with the wave of a hand. No odds & ends then - handy bits of string - old clothes - leftover quest items - bits of half-eaten food..

As for character personalities, it kinda varies in my case, I like to play it how I feel best reflects me if it was based purely on my own reaction, disregarding other's expectations. That usually means my characters are still quite helpful but sometimes a little less patient than I would be IRL

Would like to think I have a bit more oomph in my personae than in life, but I suspect I don't, much. I do get the cathartic benefit from a head-up two-handed sword-wielding swagger, that I lack for obvious reasons in reality; but as far as how I deal with other players etc, then yes helpful & a bit laidback is about the size of it. Can't easily fake authoritativeness, ego, & wisecracking superiority. Sadly.

[Toadem]

Nice for you if you mean you can replace all your stuff with the wave of a hand. No odds & ends then - handy bits of string - old clothes - leftover quest items - bits of half-eaten food..

Yea my in game character seem to drive Ferrari's while my PC IRL needs to have a wound up rubber band to power it

If I like a game I tend to invest a lot of time and effort in it at the start to make it easier for me later on so if this means grinding for weeks on skills and gold farming then so be it this generally allows me some wiggle room with cash flow meaning I can relax in the later stages and enjoy the game but IRL I think I will need to work till I'm 150 years old before I can afford to retire

[sammyc]

^ see what you mean, sorry, took you to just mean that's why your characters don't hoard stuff. got you.

yes, as far as wealth/property/goods & chattels go; no game/life parallels there whatsoever. though on reflection - my one in-game house is modest & half-finished, so actually yes, i realise I haven't exactly thought big, even though I could afford to.

[outwar6010]

No because my in game characters all seem to have plenty of disposable income .

This times a thousand. My gta characters are all billionaires and my elite dangerous character has 35 million in assets........

[Toadem]

^ see what you mean, sorry, took you to just mean that's why your characters don't hoard stuff. got you.

yes, as far as wealth/property/goods & chattels go; no game/life parallels there whatsoever. though on reflection - my one in-game house is modest & half-finished, so actually yes, i realise I haven't exactly thought big, even though I could afford to.

It was my fault, my one line answer was a little vague and seemed arrogant so I should have elaborated.

[MrDLips]

I do hoard in games because I don't know if /when the stuff will be useful / sell well.

In RL, I chuck stuff all the time. They only thing I hoard are the boxes for my hardware, even if I'm not sure I'll ever sell them on.

[stevie lee]

Do you find that your MMO characters, for instance, take on your own personality traits where applicable?

if they do, well I have a severe case of split personality.
in LOTRO I currently have 15 characters, 6 of which have duplicate names. so 13 unique characters all with completely different personalities, play styles, ways of fighting, everything is different between them. even the ones who are the same class as each other.
my sisters got roughly the same.

and its all Blizzards fault.
thanks to the original diablo back in early 1997.

we just decided to role play the characters and make up stuff for them to do outside of killing all the monsters.
it's so elaborate now that it involves the warhammer and 40k universes, star trek, some dr who, multiverses, stargate and a duck called smudge.

my main character that I solo play with does tend to behave the most like me and reflect some of my stranger traits.
so in answer to the original question.

yes, but only a little.

[DanceswithUnix]

Again, sort of.

I have a set of WoW characters that, if I could be bothered to renew the subscription, are basically self sufficient with all trades catered for so I can craft an item, enchant it and gem it up. I think that mirrors my liking to do stuff myself in everyday life.

OTOH, in reality I am quite a moral person. In WoW though I used to play the auction house over breakfast and generally got up to antics of anti competitive behaviour that would rightly get me jail time if I did that for real. Having said that, even when I had a market completely to myself I didn't fleece customers so I wasn't *that* bad

[sammyc]

It was my fault, my one line answer was a little vague and seemed arrogant so I should have elaborated.

Not at all, you were answering the actual question, I just had my example still in mind when I read it.

In terms of people talking of moral behaviours/self-sufficiency etc (definitely like to make my own stuff from scratch) - that brought me to issues of whether you like taking short cuts or not. Thinking of Runescape, it slightly used to irk me to see that people wouldn't do anything for themselves, because I would be there doing everything the hard way. Logging in recently I saw that a lot of things have been made simpler for players, and a few key things that everyone had to do (such as walk between certain points) have been given easy ways around. Used to have limited run facility also for example; now in practice you hardly have to walk anywhere - leading to a bout of 'in my day' syndrome. Thinking about it, a side of me thinks you shouldn't have it too easy, & there's something to be said for that, but I realise there's also a side that's prone to avoid perfectly sensible better ways of doing things, either because I look at it as 'cheating' or because of not being adaptable enough. There's a partial RL tendency in there somewhere.

Interesting responses thanks.