A lot of people end up using pictures as a supplement to their character profiles. That’s fine, if it meets certain criteria, and even then, it shouldn’t ever be mandatory. It is madness to me, to see that people wish to supplement/replace the description of their own original characters with the face of real-life celebrities and popular fictional characters.
When a GM (or forum) tries to make pictures mandatory in the story (usually to avoid having to read characters’ descriptions) they are ignoring the fact that only a very small number of people are capable of drawing their own character or finding someone to do a decent job of doing it in their stead.
Despite there being a lot of overlap in creative disciplines for both writing and drawing a character, this is still an extremely uncommon combination of talents for a hobby most people intend to remain a free, creative exercise and not an excuse to commission art work. Even those who have the money or talent become unwilling to get unique imagery for every individual character they create to meet the draconian demands of someone who won’t read in writing hobby.
The picture in a character profile, when demanded by site/story owners is, 95% of the time, not drawn by the user of the picture.
What most people resort to doing is taking an image off of some aggregate website like Pintrest that is NOT designed around their character, just to play the game. They’re using someone else’s work, probably without their permission or with a remote idea who even drew that piece of art they’re using. The definition for that is plagiarism.
This means any combination of three things:
- You’re either using a picture with only a rough approximation of your character, meaning the picture is pointless; you’re introducing conflicting information that confuses readers and keeps everyone on a different page when they’re imagining the scenarios that you write together.
- You’ve based your character off of another person’s character design, or personal appearance, stealing a large portion of their identity; you have plagiarized not only artwork, but at least half the character.
- You’re too lazy to type an actual description of the character out and took the closest match to your mental image out of convenience, to enable people people in a hobby about reading and writing, to avoid doing just that.
I’m a 26 yr old male with no interaction with my teenage cousins, and no interest in their music, but I still know this is Harry Styles from One Direction, not James Everstar, high-school freshman and guitar enthusiast.
All of that isn’t enough of an argument, here’s another point to ponder; people often use the likenesses of celebrities, popular anime and video game characters, and real-life models in an attempt to describe their character.
What does this mean?
Most people in a role-playing community will be old enough to identify these images for what they really are. Unless you’re using a character or a celebrity in context, (Brad Pitt probably didn’t buy a time machine from Tom Nook to stop the Futurama crew from killing Stalin,) the writers you have provided the image to will not be able to disassociate the picture with that person or character.
They’re going to subconciously connect the image you have stolen whether or not it’s accurate to the character, in some way, with who you’re writing.
This could be a complete subversion and ignoring of all of your differences from the base image, meaning they’re not even imaging the same person you are, or on a lower level expecting certain behaviors, voices, and forms of dress that would be normal for that person or character.
If you are an artist and you’re willing to draw your characters out, all the power to you! I’m genuinely envious, my penmanship and drawing ability are extremely poor. I cannot draw and I use too many characters to keep a stable of pictures ready. I would simply rather describe them once, cut the crap and call it a day.
I am not in the minority, and any of you that make drawing your business (or even just your hobby) are familiar with. For example, I know how many people will selfishly ask for your free time to draw them or something they like with no form of compensation and rarely, if ever, praise, only blind criticism.
I refuse to be one of those people and if I’m going to comission any artwork it’s going towards my system and its rulebooks or settings, not a one shot character.
Yet, for everyone else in my boat for whatever reason, here’s one final point: If you didn’t draw the character and had it drawn as a gift or commission, you were capable of describing a character to a total stranger for them to draw it.
Why can’t you do that in a character application, profile, or description?
If the artist drew it accurately, you were clearly capable enough to write an accurate description of your character; you are not exempt from the same standards as your fellow writers.
Replacing the description sections with pictures forgets many important things:
The description of a character should be clinical like you’d expect a government or police agency to maintain with as much information about the character they can find without literally intruding into their home and the drama in it. This is a description for authors and designers to other creatives, and a simple, single image isn’t going to convey as much information as a proper description.
The pictures commissioned, regardless of how well drawn, is not able to convey a character’s varied wardrobe, traveling supplies, or choice of weapons and armor. They don’t describe how they travel, whether or not they like them, or any general known opinions they’ve voiced in the past that would be common knowledge in their community or amongst their friends.
While all of this knowledge isn’t necessary, some people supplement their main picture with a small gallery to replace the need to describe this information. This takes just as much time to digest as a few paragraphs of text and often doesn’t allow for the imagination to apply context to their current image, such as how they’d look after a rough day or having recently been in a fight.
People have a lot of names for this brand of lazy, they call them ‘face claims,’ ‘look-alikes,’ or ‘play-bys,’ which are bubbly, generic terms that aren’t self explanatory. The practice is so different between communities there’s no solid definition and if anything, the bigger a website gets the harder it is for more and more people to plagiarize, leading to more arguments, confusion, bitter feelings and division within the community. You basically have thieves accusing each other of theft, of course it’s going to get messy!
In a majority of the casual writing/roleplaying scene, this practice is extremely difficult to define, maintain, and is generally just unacceptably lazy. People stopped reading picture books in my school by the time they were five years old.
Fan-art of a series or a good cover picture is nice but it should always come secondary to the main story in the book.
An attempt to take the descriptions out of role-playing, is an attempt to take the bread out of a sandwich.
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