Clothes In Videogames: The Definitive Review

The Joys Of Costumery And Defining The Personal

I, like any sane videogame fan of a reasonable disposition who sports a faith that premium print models will save us all, recently received my copy of ON: Volume One. While initially converted by Keith Stuart’s article on the Sega Model 1 arcade board,¹ it was really the prospect of ‘dream articles’ from the likes of Nathan, Keza, Christian and Margaret that sealed the deal and got me to cough up. On arrival and reading, little did I expect to be so drawn in by Jen Simpkins’ piece on dress-up gaming that I would be inspired to dedicate this week’s entry of the Discourse Affectionate to one of my most pride-filled pleasures: dressing up characters in videogames.

I’m not going to pretend that I have a gram of the insight or lived experience required to get anywhere near Jen’s piece, but I can attest that merely having some degree of control in your character’s appearance ushers its own kind of joy, and that joy is surprisingly valuable to me. This is distinct from the standard formal structures of work and reward² we undertake in videogames and in some cases, is almost accidental and unintentionally joyous. But still, when a game lets you don some item that either makes your character delightfully comedic or suddenly pulls together a satisfying look of devastating coolness, it’s a kind of rare, priceless serendipity. And this can be entirely separate from clothing items carrying some hugely beneficial stat or ability reward. The joy often springs from the aesthetic alone. But the critical aspect is how choosing your character’s mode of dress personalises your presence within the game. It creates a uniqueness to your instance. It makes the game, as defined by your saves, visually personal to you. I’ve certainly made plenty of avatar outfits that are extremely personal to me, as I doubt anyone else would want their Tenchu Z character doing ninja shit in their underwear while wearing a Kitsune fox mask and with a long piece of straw in their mouths. As for me, I figured minimal clothing would make the least sound and the mask would protect my anonymity with some serious panache. The straw was merely for cool points. Likewise, dressing my Way of The Samurai 4 character as permanently smoking a stupendously long opium pipe was a source of much delight. But such is the attention to fine accessorising from the pre-2015 AA-tier Japanese videogame industry. If only the rest of the world could follow suit, eh?

One that nearly did was Czech and curiously European. This is the accidental-ish dress-up within Hidden & Dangerous 2, where quite a few occasions saw my team reaching the end of most missions wearing a hotchpotch of Wehrmacht and Nazi regalia. This included some unnecessarily risky jaunts to acquire a particularly rare cap or fancy-looking pilot’s helmet, should they look tantalising enough. Picking up these trophies of victory served no purpose other than my own perverse pride in giving the Schutzstaffel a good dose of cold British steel and leaving their corpses suitably desecrated and denigrated. Rank-and-file soldiers I felt less inclined to commit war crimes against but then, who wouldn’t run off with a hat or two after pulling off flawless stealth in one of the most tactically demanding games ever made? In game, I loved the idea that as an SS officer, being suddenly confronted by a vengeful tommy wearing his superior’s Hugo Boss-designed hat would be both colossally insulting and hideously terrifying in equal measure. However there was a point to dressing up; like Hitman, Hidden & Dangerous 2 had a nifty disguise mechanic. As far as I recall, this meant getting the AI to surrender without shooting them (thereby spoiling the clothes), which was unbelievably hard to pull off. The outfit had to be spotless to work as a disguise, so finishing a level with all four men in working disguises was quite the achievement, if vanishingly rare. Still, it showed my dedication to dressing-up and as the only tactical shooter of the era that dared to implement such a thing, it’ll always stick in my memory as another shining example of why Hidden & Dangerous 2 was probably the very best of its breed.

Of course, the real heavyweights here are the big RPGs, where costume is almost as important as equipment or skills. Though weirdly, this wasn’t as big a deal in Elder Scrolls titles as it was in Fallout. Inevitably I’d succumb to fancy stealth clothing in the end, as that utility tended to outweigh my sartorial urges. That said, Fallout’s stupendous absurdity is beautifully summed up by a character cleansing the wasteland with a minigun while wearing seductively flimsy nightwear. There’s something glorious about breaching the curves at endgame, to the extent where you can conduct business in whatever clothes you want and not have to worry about armour ratings or stat bonuses, or the validity and plausibility of your post-apocalyptic cowboy outfit. Naturally I would generally tend towards Recon gear, and when I found out there were Chinese stealth outfits hidden in the Hoover dam, my New Vegas look was pretty much destined to go all invisible-with-dots when crouching. Well, at least for the rest of the run. With Fallout, it’s often the opening and mid-game stretches where the best dress-up happens, as you’re compromising between the best available stats and whatever style you can improvise before gaining the skills or the gear sets that bake you into a singular look. But there was always that sense in the pride of the collection, and in whichever home I took I’d often fill a container or two with all the clothing I’d nabbed, so I’d always have the option to dress up nicely if I really wanted to. Back in Skyrim, it took me far too long to be bothered to set up mannequins and such as I’d made my home in Whiterun, so the ludicrous prospect of hauling my vast wardrobe to a house with mannequins was off-putting in the extreme, to the point where it outweighed any drive to set up costumed statues. That said, I think I actually ended up imbuing a suitably sinister black hooded cloak with sufficient attributes to make me very happy, both in terms of form and function, with the rest of the outfit a disturbing mirror of the Tenchu Z minimalist stealth professional vibe. As I’ve already voiced several times, I’m heartbroken and eternally grieving that I can’t do the same in Starfield. And having just embarked on building a definitely-final-forever-home outpost, you can imagine my delight when I set up six mannequins with awesome spacesuits, only to have them glitch out and end up hanging 20 metres in the sky, quite a distance from where they’re supposed to be. Such joy, such Bethesda joy. I’m now walking around in Neon club dancer attire as a form of dirty protest.

Leaping across to Cyberpunk 2077, I did very much enjoy the allotted slots for outfits. It’s as if having them available is an insistence that they must be filled. I was able to make a natty suite of looks for any occasion, be that cyberjacking in figure-hugging mil-spec netrunner suits (with a dashing bolero to keep the chill off), to an assemblage of neon-soaked camo armour and assault helmet chic for those loud-and-proud frontal slaughters. Not that I ever changed that often from the sleekest stealth-ops look I could acquire, but I did enjoy putting together a formal office outfit for those briefing meetings and some ludicrously gaudy clubwear, and rounding off with the classic pervert’s uniform of a grubby coat with nothing underneath. While I continually baulked at Cyberpunk’s weirdly restrictive range of colourways, it’s quite surprising how it could offer you such varied looks - from underclass urchin to Night City royalty - and hence, made shopping a really quite enjoyable distraction. What made me laugh is that I never gave a single shit about the stats any item carried. It was always 100% about the style. However, the one game that hangs in my memory as perhaps the greatest dress-up I have ever indulged in is, for some, an unlikely one. Of course I’m talking about the best Grand Theft Auto ever made, Saints Row 2.

A few years ago, I booted Saints Row 2 up just to check out the outfits. I was brimming with pride as I rotated the wardrobe. There were three distinct and hyper-cool military uniforms, from staff officer to spec-ops. There was a chairperson of the board outfit, gangster loungewear. All delicious, but given my utter dedication to going everywhere in that game by motorbike, my best look by far was an almost Kill Bill bride-aping gold-and-white jumpsuit with cannabis leaf motif and gold facemask. On a gold-and-white bike with accompanying gold-and-white ninja bodyguards, the overall effect was so spectacular that I almost lost consciousness. There was a special magic in Saints Row 2 that was lost in 3 and never recovered, and part of that was the absolutely wild dress-up options. I remember it took me quite a while to buy every bit of clothing on offer and the colouring options were simply perfect. It was a game that wanted you to have fun and included the dress-up and visual customisation as a really valuable part of that. And beautifully, the game’s cartoonish conceit meant it was always fun to mess around with contextually - nothing you dressed your character in could be out of step with the world. But that’s the mark of a game that understands what it is, and understands it perfectly, and isn’t ashamed of what that means. Saints Row 2 has a particular honesty and willingness to mock itself that few games dare to express. And perhaps that’s why Starfield’s clothing feels like the worst range ever seen in a Bethesda open-worlder. Saints Row 2 also comes from the cusp of monetisation steamrolling cosmetic choices into premium cashcows, a glorious last-dance for that sort of thing before online gaming would alter the entire concept of dress-up forever. I can look back at games like the Watch Dogs or the modern Ghost Recons and feel that I did put together some reasonably satisfying looks with their wardrobes, but conservatively so when there could have been so much scope for fun. In some ways they took themselves far too seriously despite their often ludicrous settings, attitudes to realism, player abilities and mission setups. Dress-up in line with what the game actually did, or asked you to do, would have been much wilder than the drab conventionalism they offered. I mean, the way Warzone happily parlays with Fortnite’s visual excesses into its own kind of spec-ops chic is worth admiring. I look at the decal editors of Forza and Gran Turismo and wonder why we don’t get that sort of thing for t-shirts and clothing in Grand Theft Auto or whatever, particularly in games with social online modes. I fear it’s because granular customisation of the avatar is now an economic, mercantile pursuit for the industry bigwigs. Too frivolous a concern to devote development capacity to if it’s not an additional revenue stream, perhaps? But if you wanted a chink where gen-AI could make a valid contribution, maybe that’s it. Let me generate wicked t-shirts forever, please. I promise I wont don’t swearwords. Much.

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1. I have already written a strongly-worded letter of complaint about Keith REFUSING TO MENTION how Virtua Fighter's Dural is a magical realisation of Hajime Sorayama's Femelle en métal Sexy Robots. These went from airbrushed artworks in 1982 to a Robert Abel and Associates early-CGI Superbowl Commercial for canned foods (of all things) in 1985. The commercial ended up on a Japanese-only Laserdisc CGI compilation and lo, in 1993 we get Sorayama's robot woman in realtime polygons with Model 1, Virtua Fighter and Dural. I think this evolution, from airbrush to realtime 3D, highlights the amazing pace of development over just ten years. Sorayama's robots, objectification aside, were icons in the sense that they married the prevailing zeitgeist of Sci-Fi with the airbrushed hyper-realism illustration phenomenon, yet were able to become totems for the burgeoning CGI revolution and then become playavble in videogaming at the cutting edge, thanks to Model 1. I MEAN, COME ON, HOW COULD YOU MISS THAT?!?!?!!?!?

2. Let's not forget the fact that I will undertake gruelling missions of the very worst construction and checkpointing if the reward is a particularly excellent costume item.