Remember Golden Ax? Remember how you would choose your character to start the game out? You have 3 guys to choose from and you spin the merry-go-round to select between them. Or how about Street Fighter? You have this tile of guys to choose from, you make your choice and the game starts. It’s like choosing a car. It’s pre-fab. It’s static.

Then what about The Sims or D&D or the upcoming Spore game? That’s a little bit more organic. You might pick a base dude but you can customize them to a certain extent. In the Sims, you can customize the clothing. In D&D (and all other nerdly clones) you roll some dice and your relative power is determined by luck and such. You might be lucky: “Oh, I’m going to rule!” or you might roll horribly like bad cards in poker: “This is going to be tough”. But the game adapts to your strong or weak start. Eventually the playing field should level out a bit.

So my limited and under-developed idea is this: picking out the tallest blade of grass that has proved himself already. You watch these little guys run around, as they do good things, they become bigger or shinier. You pick one out and bake him into a hero or “your dude”.

This kinda happens already in Rise of Nations. You send out hordes of generic troops. Some of the troops succeed and get experience. They flash a little icon over their head and “ding!” they are a general or something. When I was playing RoN, I was compelled to keep the succeeder alive and make him more uber. So in this way, you let them prove themselves first, throw in some luck and you get rid of the pre-fab start.

Of course, this wouldn’t work for street fighter, which wants action, action, action.