“There was a time – those of us who are growing up with videogames as a given may not realize this – when the minute details of the appearance and identity of the characters who inhabit our videogames were not etched out and trademarked, and each of us had room to fill in the ambiguities between a character’s pixels …
This is part of the reason why the cast of the ‘8-bit era’ resonates so much with us: because we define them, much more so than the talking, hyper-detailed characters of so many contemporary games.”
– Game designer Anna Anthropy (or Auntie Pixelante, of Mighty Jill Off fame) mulling over Princess Toadstool’s (or Princess Peach’s) hair color and the value of ambiguity with 8-bit character designs.
Scott McCloud sort of talks about the latter topic in his book Understanding Comics, arguing that the less specific a character/face is, the more the reader (or the player, in this case) can project themselves into that character.
