I swapped avatars on here from a placeholder (was of Froshmin from Art Sqool, an excellent little game about telling a very good joke) to one of my standard ones. This got me thinking about games, because of course it did. Specifically the perception of the self in the context of a game.
Players are generally expecting to embody a single entity in games. In a traditional 2D fighting game ala any given Street Fighter it's very easy to figure out "who you are", for example. Where it gets trickier is games where you "are" multiple characters and aren't given a direct avatar, or even more interestingly, are given nothing at all. In those cases our brains do a decent amount of automatic justification and explanation, but I find that odd in its own way.
Who are you in grand strategy games? You function as some kind of unseen, immortal Commander God. Leaders in the Civilization series are clearly some kind of demigod, right? The recent X-Com titles take this approach down a few pegs by simply calling you a commander whose actions matter, but who doesn't suffer any kind of consequence beyond whatever comes of dooming humanity if they don't save/load enough. Who are you in Populous or Black and White? The easy answer is "myself", but are you?
