"I BASED THE MAIN CHARACTER ON MYSELF."

Sooz
If you're not working on a personal story, I can't see why you'd bother mentioning the character being a self-insert. Either it's obvious, in which case it doesn't bear mentioning, or it's not, in which case who gives a crap?

Yeah, I agree with this. I feel as though I've been presenting my opinion here in a confusing manner. If the story isn't personal then a character heavily based on someone (and not just influenced or inspired by them) won't fit.

As a general rule, I think putting just the real you in a game is a HUGE no-no in game design. Like you said, there are too many pitfalls involved in it. So perhaps saying that you based the character off of x person is the wrong approach, as it generates the image of a Mary Sue.

I want to also clarify that (noawadays) the character I mentioned is more like Sooz's description of an original character influenced heavily by my own life. In case I came off as having a big double standard.

I like the idea of having myself in the game as a minor boss, allowing the characters to kill the game designer out of frustration with how annoying the puzzles are.

Yeah the main point is what your target audience is and what you're communicating to them.

Like, I have no problem if someone wants to make a game that's "ME: THE AWESOME ADVENTURES OF ME BEING AWESOME!" and just keep it for their own entertainment, or even the entertainment of people who know and like this person already. But it's a little ridiculous to put it up for general audiences, because nobody cares about your self-important stuff if they don't already care about you.

It's also kinda hard to step back far enough from oneself to determine if one's self-insert game is legitimately interesting or just interesting because "Well, I love me, so I automatically give a shit." (Or, in the case of family and friends, "Well, I already think you're awesome, so this is great!")

If I were going to self-insert, it'd probably be as a random pathetic NPC, probably one who gets killed by a monster, because I have a stupid sense of humor.

Everyone simultaneously love and hate themselves.

I base every character in my games off of me, but only the worst parts of my personality XD

In all seriousness, I agree with Unity. If you're writing anything by yourself or with a small team, bits of your personality are going to end up in your writing. Self-inserts, though... if you're not careful you could easily make a really obvious power fantasy or a Mary Sue. The first RPG story I wrote definitely starred myself, my best friend, and some angelicized hypothetical girlfriend ;-_- embarrassing. I suppose you could write an interesting autobiographical game, though... I've seen some good little ones, like Conversations With My Mother.

You gotta embrace yourself, flaws and all, and incorporate it when you write! Those kinds of honest stories are what make indie games really appealing to me - it's like having a personal conversation with the creator. But you also gotta be careful and honest about your intentions, too.

It's not good to be happy about every aspect of yourself, nor to be unhappy about every aspect of yourself. Most people are somewhere in the middle - feeling guilt and shame over all the things they've been taught are wrong or worthless but keep doing anyway, but still having enough self-esteem to not want to blow their own brains out.

This really is kind of important for understanding how mary sues get created. Mary sues are about making a character that includes the parts of yourself you like, or at least the parts you feel like are important to your identity, and replaces or reverses the parts of yourself you don't like. An idealized, flawless version of the writer, with a great deal more competence. And often this character will spend the entire story proving that the aspects of himself that other people see as flaws can in fact be good.

At least my "self-insert" character in my first game was different enough from me that you'd never realize it's a self-insert while playing it. He also had the unusual character flaw of not being a very good leader or decision-maker, and generally playing sidekick for the entire game. He wasn't even the main character.

EDIT: About the self-hate stuff...

author=Max McGee
Hmm..well, I mean...I'm 28. It's been going on as long as I can remember (maybe as far back as 8 years old?) so I'm not sure it's even treatable at this point or if treatment is even an applicable concept for a self-attitude I've held for at least 20 years.

I feel your pain, man, I feel your pain. -_-

I'm 26 and absolutely hated myself for about 18 of those, and only juuuust overcame the root cause recently (I realized at the end of August 2014 that I had been a doormat my whole life and decided "Fuck it. I'm worth something just by existing. Anyone who tells me I'm worthless because X reasons can go and piss off"). It was a life changing moment and everything has been better since then.

Any remaining self-hate comes purely from frustration at how hard it is for me to concentrate on stuff I don't like (like, say, the advanced math that they throw at me in University Computer science for no good reason), and thus my fear I'll end up a useless bum on the street. That problem will likely go away once I get my actual adult life together, so I'm not that worried.

If you can, find someone (Close friend, psychologist, whoever you can trust) to talk about WHY you have those feelings of self-hate. Find the root cause, and if it's possible to change it, do so. Life really changes when you do. It was the best damn feeling in the world to throw those chains off.

Good luck, man.

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On Topic:
Non-crappy "insert me" characters can definitely be done. But it's still a Red Flag for me because of how hard it is to make it work.

Trust me. I know. -_- I was on a project with some friends a long time ago and we were working on a large game where all the main characters were based on us.

When we started? It was awful. Pure distilled AWFUL. The character based on me was especially boring and stupid and out of place.

When we ended up putting it on hold? We had managed to change them up enough that they could stand on their own as pretty decent characters. Some of them REALLY changed a lot, and for the better.

We ended up taking one or two traits from each of us (The desire to be recognized as a hero, endless determination that doubles as a weakness because it overrides common sense, a desire to invent and create things, etc) and then using that purely as a base trait, while then building the character in a way that reflects their reality and the things they have endured. In that sense, they may have begun as "us", but they were something different by the time we took a hiatus.

So yeah. It can be done. It's just very very hard.

Personally, I don't recommend it. It's far easier to just find an interesting Base Character Trait or two, mix in a few quirks and flaws that work with the setting, and then build a character up around that. If you base it on yourself, you will not want to change them and thus your character cannot be refined into something better.

Hell, when we changed the character based on me, I was initially against it because it was a massive, rather dark and twisted change. But then, I realized "Wait...That sounds a lot more interesting. WAY more interesting in fact. You know what? Let's go with that!", and he became one of the more interesting characters in the game.

(Sorry if I can't be specific. The friend who essentially came up with the concept of the game would track me down and skin me alive if I said anything specific. We still want to make this game someday, or take just the base concept and turn it into a novel instead.)

author=Aegix
I feel your pain, man, I feel your pain. -_-

Here's the thing and again I am really trying to be the opposite of melodramatic and not drag this too much further off topic: it doesn't actually feel like pain. And it definitely doesn't feel like a handicap.

(There are things I'm not happy about in my life, sure, just like everyone. And I actually know that the idea of a "reason for being depressed" is a fallacious concept. Depression is basically defined as sadness for no reason.

But anyway I've been in a committed romantic relationship for eight entire years now, and my girlfriend is independently wealthy so I honestly don't even have to work for a living, and the only work I do is the work that I want to do, which is enough to keep me employed more or less full time. I spend almost all of my time doing the stuff I want to do and almost all of my energy on the stuff I care about. I have adequate friends and social interaction. I have really adorable pets. I have a TON of videogames to play. I have nothing to complain about.

And the root cause of my self-loathing is really not a mystery that requires psychiatric excavation. I have done shitty things. Things so amazingly shitty I would hate ANYONE that did them, even if that person was or was not myself. Things so awful I won't talk about them on internet forums in any but the vaguest of terms. I mean, I hated myself long before I DID those things so that adds a bit of a wrinkle, I'll admit it. And I am a massive failure based on the goals I've set for myself in life and the degree to which I've failed to reach them by now. The second of those things is actually fixable, but it's really hard to fix.)

My Crohn's disease, which is purely physical, that's pain. My crippling anxiety disorder, which makes it hard for me to do ordinary stuff because ordinary stuff is TERRIFYING, that is pain, that is something I suffer from.

The fact that I think I am more or less a shitty person and almost totally a failure? That is not in and of itself a source of pain for me. It just feels like an objectively correct perception of reality, like to the point where if I didn't feel that way, didn't have that level of self hatred that feels objectively, empirically accurate, I would actually fear for my sanity. Like I would feel like I was no longer capable of an accurate, unbiased self evaluation if I didn't hate myself.

Hmm...I guess I could see to how that might sound kind of fucked up, lol.

But I don't know...I guess I would say like...

author=sooz
Nah, if you have persistent feelings of hating yourself, that's not normal at all, and it's not really a healthy state to be in.

I definitely feel like it's one of those things that while it's probably not HEALTHY, I feel like it definitely is normal. I don't know, I guess I should talk to more people and ask if they hate themselves to be sure, lol. But I feel like the presence of self-hatred isn't innately that worrisome, so much as the absence of any self-love would be.

If anyone is interested, I made a microgame vignette teaser a few years ago that riffs on psychology, even though it's too short to be really about anything: Sinfonia.

A good example of a main character that's absolutely nothing like me, also. So there's that.

-SEGUE-

The movie Adaptation is fascinating and intelligently written. But there was definitely a navel-gazing aspect of pretentiousness to its "meta-film" gimmick that bothered me.

author=SnowOwl
I'm sure a skilled storyteller would be able to make it interesting, the problem is no skilled storyteller would actually put themselves in their own story.
Because doing that is something unskilled storytellers do.

The reason people do this is for several reasons, they can't write fictional characters well enough, they have a big ego so they can't imagine someone else being the main character (even a fictional character), and they are lazy.

This is very disingenuous. While I'll admit, I'd never base a character on myself, just because other people do it doesn't make them lazy, egotistical, unimaginative, or unskilled.

author=pianotm
This is very disingenuous. While I'll admit, I'd never base a character on myself, just because other people do it doesn't make them lazy, egotistical, unimaginative, or unskilled.

Well, no, not necessarily, but like 99% of the time these things are comorbid, sooooooo....