I am focusing on character development and there are many different facets to this. If one part of the overall character seems flawed in any way the players experience may not be the intended one. When considering what a character's appearance should be we should look at many different categories. In many RPG games the player can choose what his or her character looks like through various types. Some of these categories are pretty standard but can have a huge effect on what the character is able to do. Some of these categories include: height, weight, body type, eye color, hair style, race, facial hair. This is looking at a character from who they are physically. When you strip the clothes off and you see a character as their true self we can see how that character is and what our expectations of that character is merely through physicality. This is what makes game play great because sometimes this can be the most interesting part of a game because some characters will either over or under meet our expectations and this will cause a person to have some sort of experience depending what the designer tries to give off. Character appearance may be one of if not the most important part of a character. Not only does the physical aspect of appearance come into play but also the clothing and other objects on the character will give off a certain feeling about a character. Appearance can give off so many different feelings to a player and it is these emotions that connect the player with the game. The more detailed a characters appearance the more connectivity a player will most likely have to the game which is what games are supposed to do. Going to clothing and other items like jewelry or tattoos, will also portray a character in a certain way. Depending on the color or what type of clothing a character wears, different emotions will be portrayed differing on what experiences the player has had in his or her life. Not only does clothing give a sense of character development, but the lack there of or the increased number of clothing will show us different things. Clothing can show temperature or culture as well as someone’s style or personality. Clothes have so many different meanings and having different clothing on different characters can give a game a completely different effect. When we look at appearance we really had to decide carefully in what a character looks like especially if there is an intended meaning. Sometimes appearance doesn’t play as big of a role as other game features, but as technology advances and game plots increase in complexity we will see that characters appearance will be getting more and more critical to game play and we have seen this over the last few decades.
