MMORPG.com's Jaime Skelton writes her column this week on the different ways that MMO players try to make themselves different from the herd.
An interesting question was once posed to the masses: "Where's your will to be weird?"
As players of massive multi-player online games, we don't worry too much about being weird enough, at least to the outside world. Inside our virtual worlds, however, it seems our thirst is for that element of strange. It's not enough that our characters have bizarre powers, and sometimes look even more bizarre than anything to be seen on our own world. Everyone in our virtual world is equally unnatural, and so it becomes our personal quest to become even more different, to stand out among the cut-cloth clones that surround us.
The character creation screen is our first task in the quest to be different. We aim to create a character that is both a combination of our vision: a goal with either an intent to convey us as we want to see ourselves, or with a specific character concept in mind. We often, over the course of a few games, settle on a general persona that we like to take with us wherever we go. If it isn't this particular persona we seek to emulate, we usually go after a very distinct and 'ultra-unique' look, like the ugliest possible combination of customizations.
Read A Quest to be Weird.
