Most of the time when people talk about palette swaps people are talking about ways the age old practice of recycling modes or sprites in order to cheaply and efficiently create more content. However, the thing that most interests me about this prompt is the relationship palettes swaps have with players and their characters. Specifically, I find the idea of expression in games always interesting, and due to my familiarity with fighting games (mostly, but other games as well) this will be the avenue most worth exploring for me.

In nearly every multiplayer game imaginable, there are multiple characters/races/classes etc., there are very few games where everyone is identical, if any. This started out as simple palette swaps, though. Mario and Luigi, Ryu and Ken, Pacman and Ms. Pacman, you get the idea. As games evolved, differences between characters began to emerge, with canonical* differences in ability. In Super Mario 2 Luigi gets his comparative height to Mario, as well as his heightened jumping ability, something that would remain a trademark distinction between and his brother.

In Street Fighter 2 Ryu and Ken also get more nuanced differences between them, but another change was introduced that convolutes the whole issue: palette swaps for individual characters**. Now there were four more of each character to choose from. If you and your best friend both played Ryu, who now had actual differences to Ken, you could still be individuals. You would play black Ryu, and through this expression of individuality you would become black Ryu, or black Ryu could become you. No longer a mere superficial difference.

This meaningfulness is present in a variety of different fashions. The first I’d like to explore is perhaps the sadder of the two I have in mind, but is nonetheless incredibly important.

Nearly everyone who I know or have heard of has a favorite costume for whichever characters they play, but that shouldn’t really be that surprising. In consumerist society today, we tend to express ourselves through what we choose to consume. You’re either Coke or Pepsi, Playstation or Xbox. And while palette swaps may not have initially been that significant, they are rapidly emerging as some of the most integral aspects of many game’s business models. Fighting games were likely some of the first games to offer new color palettes as additional paid content, but they were not the innovators that have forced palette swaps to make way for costumes or ‘skins’. Skins are similar to palette swaps in that they are only aesthetically different representations of characters, but they boast more intensive changes. Usually this only means a different outfit, but sometimes some of the character’s moves feature new particle effects or they have a different voice over. The game that has unquestionably been the herald of this change, which is now being scene across nearly all game genres, is League of Legends.

League’s business model is the most successful instantiation of ‘Free 2 Play’ the world over. The game has two currencies, IP and RP. IP is earned simply for playing the game, and can be used to purchase new characters
and certain bonuses that can only be bought with IP. RP is purchased with real money is used for acquiring characters as well, but it’s unique function is that it allows you to buy skins for your characters. This practice has been so insanely lucrative that nearly every other game has aped the system by monetizing skins in nearly every way. While perhaps a bit unscientific, I don’t think it’s too hard to argue that people’s affinity for displaying their persona through their consumptive, visual representation is the reason why this has been so successful.

Despite even my own negative predilections towards consumer culture, I don’t think skins and visual, virtual representations are actually too bad of a norm. Even in spite of the somewhat gross extortion of people’s desire to represent themselves, this monetization can allow for people with lower incomes to participate in otherwise exclusive cultural practices, at least in the situation of F2P games. It also allows people to further support developers they enjoy while still getting something they find meaningful out of the deal. Out of everything, it’s not even close to the worst things that have come out of the game industry. But instead of going into the dark depths of the game industry, let’s talk about some of the other good, or at least interesting, things that skins can do.

As I’ve hopefully established, skins can create personal affiliations and thereby meaning, but that isn’t the only way the can establish meaning. Back at the start of this post I mentioned that I wanted to discuss some of the ways skins work with fighting games, so that’s what I’m about to get into. So, I play a lot of fighting games, and even some on the competitive level. As a result of this, I keep up with a lot of the high level goings-on of the fighting game universe. This leaves me with a familiarity with a lot of the top personas of that universe, as I’m sure a football fan would with football stars (although admittedly I’m not terribly interested in celebrity/ies for the most part). But like football stars, fighting game personas are largely comprised of iconography. Football stars have a number/tag, a team, and a personality as their primary signifiers, fighting game players, on the other hand, have all those things plus one: a character. In the Super Smash Bros. Melee scene the top players all have recognizable characters associated with them, but those characters aren’t the original, they are almost all palette swaps. Mango (one of the top 5 players) is red Fox while PPMD (another of the top 5) is green Falco, etc. This creates a cultural mythos and iconography associated specifically with these versions of the character. Of course, this doesn’t mean these colors are ‘owned’ by these people, it does leave an symbological odor on all of them. Through cultural presence, the character becomes a symbol of it’s player even beyond and individual’s personal sphere.

All in all, palette swaps and their offspring are an incredibly powerful and engaging force that has shaped game culture throughout nearly all of it’s history. They can operate as catalysts of self expression and eventually become symbols of their operators.
*I make this distinction because often times certain characters could have minutely different abilities or properties due to programming errors.

**I’m not actually sure if SF2 was the first game to introduce this feature, but it’s popularity makes it the most meaningful contributor to this practice.