August, 2017

CHARACTER DESIGN IN VIDEO GAMES
- POSTGRADUATE DISSERTATION

Throughout my Masters year, my love and interest in video games fully developed and I found myself leaning more and more toward making them the subject focus of my work. It didn't take me long to decide what it was that I wanted to write my 15,000-word thesis on when the time came. I simply combined my two great passions at the time; video games and character design.

In my research I found myself discovering games that I had little to no prior knowledge on, and have since gone on to seek out and play those games for myself. I was inspired by the interactive nature of gaming and how it offers up a very different method of storytelling - I'd spent three years studying film and television, which I feel offer a very bias way of promoting stories and scripts, and I wanted to delve further into the role of the active user and how gameplay can be affected by the types of characters you are presented with, whether they're the ones that you're playing as or not. 

This dissertation looks at games from first-person shooters to god simulators, female sexualisation and female censorship. The hardest part of this dissertation was not to become overwhelmed - The gaming industry is so large and, in the grand scheme of things, my research is nothing more than a small drop in the ocean. I really had to learn to focus myself in order to obtain the research that was necessary. I did often struggle with this, but bearing this in mind whilst I was writing meant that I could produce a piece of research that I was proud of, and that would inspire me to pursue my love of gaming.

Full Title:

How Does Character Design Affect the way Way We Play Video Games?