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<   No. 3890   2018-12-13   >

Comic #3890

1 Iki Piki: I'm not a human, you know.
2 Iki Piki: Hey, that's a point. Why are our cyberspace avatars all human? Except for Quercus.
3 Paris: Everyone knows human is the default baseline species. Anything else is more complicated to simulate.
4 Iki Piki: But why is that?
4 Spanners: Because we're better than them.

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Human always seems to be the baseline character type in roleplaying games. Other playable races/species get adjustments - they're either stronger/weaker, smarter/stupider, more or less dextrous, etc, than humans. Humans by contrast always seem bog-standard and boringly middle of the road, with no adjustments either way.[1]

It makes sense, because we are all familiar with what being a human is like, and we have a good understanding of a human's capabilities and limitations. Projecting those on to a fictional character is easy, or at least easier than projecting capabilities outside the human norm on to a fictional character. In fact, projecting human capabilities on to fictional characters is so much easier than anything else that often we make the mistake of assuming non-human creatures are more human-like than they really are.

So this is why when originally choosing LEGO figures to represent the cyberspace avatars of the Space crew, I chose human figures despite the fact that three of them are aliens.[2]

[1] Unless you're playing Bunnies & Burrows, in which everyone is a rabbit.

[2] Or I just didn't have any alien LEGO figures to use...

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