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Units and Avatars in City-Building Games

What would happen, if these units in city-building games would be treated more as avatars?

Recently there has been an interesting meme about if avatars in MMORPGs should be treated as mere game-tokens or rather as more than that, kicked off by Wolfshead with a posting about gender-issues in MMOs.
Tobold holds the opinion that “ultimately your avatar is just a playing piece, and reading too much into his gender or race, and then projecting real world politics onto that, can only be a bad thing” and should thus be treated as something akin to “a shoe in Monopoly“ even if an avatar offers the opportunity to be customized along the player’s ideas.
Raph Koster, in reply, expressed the opinion that “even if we wish it to be so (and indeed, much of game design demands that it be so, much of the time) it’s not actually humanly possible,“ because “in effect, our tokens have become rich enough to cause us to subconsciously treat them as people, whether or not we intended it” as the player’s choice of appearance of an avatar ultimately influences how he/she will be treated in-game.

My personal two cents are closer to Raph’s than to Tobold’s opinion—an avatar is more than a token to interact with a virtual world; the function of its customizability is not only to distinguish a player’s avatar from everybody else, it also creates identity. Let’s not forget where the idea of MMORPGs and avatars is coming from: the good ole’ pen & paper role-playing games—where it becomes even more obvious that a character is more than a mere playing-piece.
Anyway, I would like to take this discussion even further and apply it to city-building games and related RTS games. This might not be immediately coming to mind, but it’s an important issue for Coobico as a genre-mix of city-building game and lightweight role-playing game.

In city-building- and RTS-games, settlers and/ or units are mostly plain providers of resources or forces to attack and defend. What would happen, if these tokens would be treated more as avatars? What if they would have customizable traits that, in turn, would influence the game for a player—and which would be due to change throughout game-play? It’s quite plain to me that you would end up with something akin to The Sims if you think this out in all possible details—the degree of “avatar-ization” would be the very essence here.

In my opinion it would be possible to add new, subtle yet important angles here, without twisting the genre of city-building too much into a sim-like game.

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