What do your choices tell others about you?

Like most of what I say, today's post may be full of wisdom or it may be full of nonsense depending on what your perspective is.

As many of you I am sure know, I play and have played a lot of different mmo's over the past couple of decades. The most recent game that I am into is called Marvel Heroes and it not surprisingly deals with quite a bit of the goings on within the Marvel Universe.

The general idea of the game is you choose a character that you will use to defend the innocent good people of the world from evildoers. The line gets a little blurred somewhere along the way because several of the available characters to choose from are known "bad" guys.

There have been some hiccups. But, more or less, the devs have done a pretty good job of balancing out all of the characters so that they are all viable and within the same ballpark as far as damage dealing and survivability. So there really isn't a best character per se. It comes up all the time though. New players are all asking who is the best character to play.

While watching probably the millionth chat discussion about that very thing, it occurred to me that one could very easily and probably accurately, psychoanalyze players based on the comic book characters they chose to play from a given pool of available heroes and villains. People often tend to strongly relate to the characters they choose to be in video games.

There are characters that choose to shoot first and ask questions later. There are some that prefer to be up close and personal for their damage dealing. Others like controlling the circumstances from behind the scenes. Amongst those that do physical damage some of the options are martial arts, bladed weapons, guns,explosives, arrows and boulders. For energy damage we have things like lightning,ice, fire, tornadoes and earthquakes. Mentalists can do damage with bolts of mental power or by actually controlling their opponents.

Some of the characters, even those that are thought of as heroes want their opponents to suffer, people like the Punisher and Ghost Rider. Others like Captain America just want justice to be served.  And then there are those like Spiderman that do what they do just to protect others that cannot protect themselves.

Unless you choose completely randomly, who you choose to play and what strengths, weaknesses, and philosophies those characters have says a lot about you and your mindset. The first character chosen would probably not be enough to make an accurate overall assessment of a person. But with each successive choice the picture would become sharper and sharper. What order a person picks things in out of a group shows what things that person values more and what things are of less value to them.

Multiple similar choices tends to show a strong preference for a specific thing. (ie. picking several tanky type characters in a row) Whereas choosing many different types of character shows a tendency for balance and a want to always have the right tool at hand, rather than believing that one tool will solve nearly every problem.

I suppose nearly any game with a large number of very different character choices could be used to pyscho-analyze people. Remember how you handle things in one area of your life tends to be the way you handle things in most areas of your life.  What do you think the choices you make in the games you play tell other people about you?