Always someone else.
Even games like Elder Scrolls where they're entirely my creation, I think of them as characters in a story I'm writing (or rather, actors in a story I'm directing, since I can only control how they behave rather the whole story). Most of them tend to end up with little 'quirks' based on early decisions that I'll constantly refer back to in later ones.
For example, my Skyrim character, Fiolina, particularly hates necromancers, and will always stop to cleanse a location of them if she spots one in passing (by comparison, if I'm planning on doing a particular quest and pass a fort occupied by bandits, she might just carry on and ignore them.) And she's wary about stepping between standing stones. Both are just random thoughts that occurred to me early on, but I still act on them some 40-odd hours later. Even if it ends up making things harder.
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"My name is Ezio Auditore da Firenze, and like my father before me, I am an accountant"
Nothing is true. Everything is tax-deductible