Ambiguity Core
by colin spacetwinks
Character customization has become a more and more central part of video games, particularly among RPGs – the ability to make a person that looks like anyone, or even looks a lot like you. You might not see their face an awful lot, but still, you will see them. Your personal avatar in the game, growing more complex as also game technology gets more complex.
Despite all this customization, these options that get more and more detailed, more varied, letting me build a person to a level of specificity I never would have imagined possible before, I still think back to Armored Core for the PS1, which did not let me customize the look of the pilot in my machine. It did not even let me see the person inside. This went for everyone else in the game, too. Not once do you see someone climb in or out of an armored core, not once do you know what all these incredible, deadly pilots could possibly look like, including yourself. You are invisible, unknowable, outside of a few pieces of public information.
And that, then and now, feels even more incredible.
The first Armored Core has three major ways to define yourself. Your pilot name, the name of your armored core, and how your armored core looks: what weapons and equipment you give it. Of these three, the last is the most significant. Not just in terms of how it affects your gameplay style, like whether you prefer to play it flashy with grenade launchers and scattered arrays of missiles, to play games of keep away with sniper rifles and heavy boosters, or go straight for the kill and plunge laser swords right into your enemy, the armored core is also your physical you. Lacking a visible pilot, the armored core becomes how you see yourself in the game. It’s easy to spend hours inside of the garage, assembling, disassembling and reassembling your mech. Seeing how it looks with your standard bipedal legs. Tank treads. Spider legs. Plasma cannon arms. Radar head. Rocket launchers. Or tooling around with colors and patterns till I have a pink and white machine of death. And that’s what all my employers and my enemies will know of me. They’ll know my pilot name is LEMON, my AC name is F.PUNCH and I go into missions with a brightly colored mech with spider legs and a giant grenade launcher on my back.
They don’t know my history, they don’t know my personality, they don’t know my actual name, they don’t even know my gender. I am invisible and undefinable, beyond the pilot name, the AC name, and the AC itself, which I can change at any time outside of missions.
I felt strangely empowered as a kid playing my older brother’s newest game, swapping out legs and arms and heads and chest pieces with anything else I could get my hands on. I could be any kind of machine I wanted, I could change the colors and patterns at will, I could present myself to the world at large a completely different person, but still the same person, the same person that the enemies I crushed underneath me would know so little about beyond the weapons and style of my AC. Inside the garage, assembling my mech, I’d smile then, and now, playing it again, watching the legs suddenly jump from your standard upright bipedal affair to the most expensive spider legs in the game, and the smoothness of movement they promised. I’d get giddy, changing my arms entirely, watching the slide from one set of parts to another. It was so incredibly different than customizing a human in a game, where one generally messes around with three dozen slider bars till the features on the person match up with what one’s imagination wants. Instead, I was literally swapping out body parts. The dual cannon arms are no good for this mission? Kachunk. Now I have big bulky arms to carry the heaviest weapons. Put a dual set of warhead launchers on my back and a laser rifle on my arms. The standard legs aren’t fast enough to keep up with the enemy pilot in a mission? Kachunk. Brand new spider legs. Smooth, fast, can fire shoulder rifle weapons while moving at the same time. I was my machine, and my machine could be anything. I could change myself completely between each mission, and still the little me, the pilot inside that AC, would be a mystery. The game doesn’t even assign a backstory to them; once you join the band of mercenaries known as the Ravens, that’s it as far character goes for your player. Anything before that is a blank. Normally, I and others might knock that as weak storytelling in a game, but in Armored Core, to leave so much undefined feels so right, so powerful. In this game, nobody gets to know my past, to define it, but me. Nobody gets to know who I am, to define who I am, but me.
They get my pilot name, my AC name, and my AC itself, but that is all they ever get. There is a power in this ambiguity, and in the freedom to change how you present yourself, that I haven’t quite felt in anything since. To be unknowable and constantly changing and there’s not a goddamn thing anyone can do about it.
The thing beyond just the surge of power I feel from the presentation of ambiguity itself, to leave the definition of the self wholly up to me, is that there’s something more to the character customization in Armored Core that separates it from customization in things like the recent Fallout games, or Saints Row, or Mass Effect, or Dark Souls, or on and on. It’s that I’m taking body parts off entirely, and replacing them with completely new ones. This is not like with games with slider bars and watching bodies get larger or smaller, adjusting the placement of the eyebrow – I’m completely removing whatever chunk of my body I feel like to put in a new one, and what’s more, these body parts can be radically different. I can walk on legs, treads, or spider-legs. This is great not just for the feeling of power it gives, as tends to be inherent with the genre, but for the feeling of transformation. Sure, I not only can inject an ancient laser sword powered by the moon to cut everything I see into a mess of steel, but I can do it on a body that is constantly, constantly changing. Inbetween missions, whether to fit the demands of the mission itself, or because that’s just the way I like it to look.
Personally, I liked having spider-legs, a sniper rifle, a laser sword, and massively powerful rocket launchers. In pink and white tones. But that need not be permanent, and if I want to look like something else, I can do so on the fly. Out go the spider-legs, in come the bipedal style, or the chicken legs.
Being a robot provides a shell for ‘me’, so whatever self is on the inside of the machine is entirely kept to me, keeping that ambiguity up. Additionally, the robot is remakeable, over and over. While there’s a style I may feel more at home with, I can reconfigure it, again and again, swapping out your usual brand of arms for cannon arms that fire plasma waves if I damn well feel like it. Or the patterns and colors I apply to it. How I show myself to the world can constantly be changing, and no one can tell me otherwise. And then there is that sheer, raw power.
When I change the body of my character in Mass Effect or in Fallout: New Vegas, my power, my combat capabilities, they do not change at all. Simply the body does. There’s a different kind of relief in this, a different kind of transformative quality, but with Armored Core, when I change my body, I change how I take on the world itself. When I swap out a hand guided rocket launcher for auto-targeting missile pods that fire four at a time, I am changing what I can fundamentally do, and how I’m going to tear down whatever gets in my way.
The robot, the machine, the armored core is power. The body is a body, but the robot is power. And it is a power that shifts as ever necessary to defend itself and to destroy others.
I can make a giant queer robot whose sum definition is totally up to me, and everyone else is left to interpret. And if they attack me? Then this big queer robot, this me, this constantly transforming self, can wipe them out.
I can experiment being any kind of self, in the robot, the armored core and all those selves are powerful. Whatever I may transform myself into, that self still remains armored and powerful. A vast array of colors, patterns, and parts are available to me, and they give me the means to construct the self I want at the moment, and to make that self something to be reckoned with.
My favorite remains the moonlight blade, the most powerful laser blade in the Armored Core series. And whatever body, whatever phase, whatever experimental self I attach that blade to… that self becomes incredibly powerful.
A big queer powerful robot whose existence can be defined by no one but me, and that existence, thanks to the very nature of the Armored Core, is ever changing.
People talk about ‘phases’ in life, “he’s going through a phase”, “she’s going through a phase”, “they’re going through a phase”, and it speaks so poorly of phases, of change at all. As if there is wholly a “true” core at the inside of ourselves from almost birth and any deviation from this is false and to be shrugged off. It speaks so ill of the temporary, as if it’s so bad to be something else for awhile, and as if it can’t still be important as we change, transform ourselves, and go through a future ‘phase’. I find it far more liberating to be able to change and experiment with myself, to be something different for awhile, just to see how it feels, and for that change, however short-lived it might be, to still matter all the same. We are constantly changing, going through phases, like the waxing and waning of the moon, or the passing of time itself. What is a “true self”? Is that not also changing as the years go on, adding more and more to it, becoming a different ‘true’ than it was when it started?
Yesterday I was a robot with chicken legs and rocket launchers and cannon arms. Today I am a robot with spider legs and plasma cannons and a sniper rifle. Yesterday I was in a beautifully garish purple camoflage pattern. Today I am in muted blues and greys. All are the true me, and all contribute to the true me, that is known by, and defined by, me.
To everyone else, they get my pilot name, my AC name, and what my AC looks like, and what heat it’s packing.
The limited amount of personalization, the limited amount of character information, yet the great amount of customization in the first Armored Core drew me in and empowered me like no other game I can think of since. I was free to phase and change the way I wanted, as often as I wanted, and it was all up to me to define myself this way, not up to anyone else.
I change out the arms again, just because I like the way it looks and the satisfying sound it made
Kachunk.
How incredible it was, and is, to change myself so much in a single moment.
