Your connection with the main character

Somehow I enjoy games a lot more when I feel I have a connection with the main character or at least one of the characters in the group you´re playing with. It doesn´t always have to be about appearance, but I´ll admit that it helps sometimes. For example I have that rugged look like Bigby Wolf in the game the wolf among us, so playing as him is more fun than playing as a smooth skin child or a woman. It can still be fun, but it´s a lot more difficult to put yourself in that position. Which helps me a lot in enjoying the story, but maybe that´s just my way of playing games.

When the main character looks nothing like me, both in appearance and in personality then I find it difficult to play as that person. Especially if there are role playing elements in the game, because I constantly feel like I don´t belong there. As if you´re a spirit trapped in the wrong body or something like that, not really something that helps you enjoy the game. But a lot of games don´t really put you in that position, as Edward Kenway you have no control over what he says so in a way it feels more like your watching a movie where you can control some actions. But the script stays the same, which means that you don´t really need to put yourself in his shoes. Some people might prefer it that way, to have that distance with a character but when I look at a game like Mass Effect or Dragon Age: Origins then I know how much some players like to make those decisions and be the person they play as. Still that doesn´t take away that there are a lot of default Shepards out there, people who didn´t bother to customize him or her and just went with the default Shepard. I know it´s not that important to everyone, especially when you´re crap with customization then I can definately understand you don´t want to go through that. I´ve had that with a few games and sometimes made a character that just looked silly, for example the nose was too big or the eyes too tiny. That´s frustrating when you´re stuck with that look for the rest of the game. But does your character really need to look like you to play as him or her?

Personally I prefer it that way, if I´m being honest. But I´ve played plenty of games where the main character looked nothing like me, even when I had the customization options to do that. Sometimes it´s just fun to make something else, maybe the way you want to look or just something silly that makes you laugh every time you see him or her. It doesn´t always have to be that serious, sometimes you can just do something that you´ll enjoy. It´s something I did in the pc game the Movies, where I made a movie with all my friends from school and they looked a bit extreme. Like a guy with giant ears, someone that looked like a boxer (the dog) and my girlfriend at that time had giant breasts. But don´t worry, I made myself look like an idiot so I do know how to make fun of myself as well! Eventhough we all looked a bit differently, my friends knew exactly what character was based on him or her. So it´s funny that even if you have a different look on someone, if you know eachother well enough then you´ll probably know what they mean and recognize yourself in their view of you. That´s kind of how I see some characters in games, I hardly ever look like the characters I play as but that doesn´t mean that there isn´t a connection. Sometimes it´s a part of the personality or even a slight thing as something they do as a response to something else. It´s funny to see that, a little bit of recognition in a character. That definately helps me connect with the character I play as.