Your characters in games. Self Immersion or Roleplaying?

So either in video games or tabletop RPG games, as soon as you drop yourself into the character creation, how do you like to tailor your character and overall perception of the world around yourself? Is your character an avatar of yourself through which you can view another world? Or does your character have personal motivations that make his or her choices different from choices you would personally make? Do you play through every questline in order to experience all the game has to offer? Or perhaps deny certain questlines on certain characters because they personally would have no business say consorting with thieves and degenerates or snobby aristocrats? There is no right or wrong thing here, both are certainly valid options for enjoying, interacting, and perceiving a fictional world for your own amusement. Myself, I always tend to have elaborate backstories, personalities, and moral ethics with my characters, so I perhaps lean a little too far on the RP side. But the bottom line is; How do you treat the character who just popped out of the character generation? As your eyes and ears to a world as you forge your own legend from scratch and escape to another world for the time being? Or as say an elf ranger who tends to leer at the guards and authority figures untrustingly, regardless of if he's guilty or innocent of any crimes currently?

I do a little bit of both honestly, sometimes I make a straight up self-insert, sometimes I make characters with their own backstories, motivations, etc to RP as. Though lately I've mostly just been doing the latter.

Haha, yeah. You would be able to feel more emotionally attached to a character if you were in their shoes more. RPers are similar to writers in that they are known to be quite apathetic to their character's suffering. I remember people I RPed with over Gaia in the past being all like "Oh gosh, I don't want to do this to my character, but think about what this will mean for her character development."

i make my characters big and strong focusing on tank builds no magic or intellect for the most part such as d&d and fallout and because i love this color i go out of my way to paint EVERYTHING purple

both when i played alliance i had a human that i modeled after myself that i named lamby, but for the most part i prefer orcs and horde character, and the role play playing other species gives

I tend to just try to make something as visually appealing as possible (thank you Skyrim mod makers) and then play like a sugar-high child with a knife. Otherwise, if it is D&D, I will roleplay based on how the character is (usually this is based on how I had written their bonds, flaws, etc.).