HOW WE CREATE AND EMBODY THE OTHER

Any act of character creation is likely to entail stepping outside of the self. With regards to diversity and inclusivity in games and other character-centric media, the outcomes (e.g., whether certain media are sufficiently diverse, authentic, sensitive and inclusive) receive considerable attention from game designers and researchers; we think it critical to also study and glean insights from the processes of character creation. In this paper, we present two complementary studies focused on understanding the role of diversity and identity in character creation. First, we present a qualitative interview study (N=14) with individuals who are deeply involved in character creation processes across various domains. Next, we present a survey study conducted with a more general population (N=101) recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT), in which participants were instructed to conceive of and describe a fictional character before completing a parallel self-description task. From this pair of studies, we observed that the ways in which people relate to, understand, and struggle with their
characters are deeply intertwined with understandings of the self. Moreover, in defining themselves and others, participants included but often transcended demographic traits, with non-demographic traits such as personality or ways of thinking about the world often outweighing demographic traits. We discuss how our studies can enrich discussions of diversity in games and play, and outline next steps we will pursue in this research.