Unlike “non”-interactive media, the player of a game is always a character in the story of the game. Even if they change roles or avatars many times. Even if they only appear to be a cursor. There is a continuity of participation, and of the development of understanding the world.
The viewer or reader of conventional media is also an acting agent: the text or object is interpreted and altered through the attention of the observer. But this is not a character in the same way—it is more like a force. One crucial distinction is that the player, through having to perform some somatic actions consciously, continually redraws the line between the acting agent and the player. In a book or film, there is the possibility of a deeper unawareness about the viewer’s participation in the story. This is why the viewer is more of a force and less of a character; its winds of participation are still and then hurried; quiet then absent.
Fairy tales are surprisingly like video games: you are assured that the central character stays until completion. The youngest of the three siblings is the only who finds the sublime object, whose persistence sustains the world, whose excellence births new events. As in a game, the connection between protagonist and reader, the working of the avatar, is insisted upon—though not as strongly.
Fairy tales are considered antiquated, are they not? You can see why not so long ago some people may have been resistant to video games as an artform: if critics are immersed in conventional story-telling media, they were likely aware of the fluidity of the identification that comes with the viewer-as-force. In a game it can be a struggle to affectively inhabit a secondary character, if you are having to take actions on behalf of another character! So much modern literature is about a multivalence of views, and the obvious way to go about that is to have a varied bunch of characters that the viewer/reader can flow into and out of whenever.
For a game to achieve that effect, it is not typically enough to have multiple playable characters, because the control of one character at a time insists on an identification with that character for at least the duration of events that occur during player control of them.
No matter how often the player changes avatars, they are aware of their own trajectory as a player through the story. This is especially clear in games with no clear completion-state: if a new playthrough is initiated, or a new build is made, that becomes “the beginning” only in the sense of a beginning of a chapter. It is only a sequence in the broader story of the player’s experience with the game.
One might say: well, doesn’t this too apply to all storytelling media? If I watch The Shining several times throughout my life, isn’t that a continuation of my role as an observing force within that world? After all, there is development of my understanding of this world each time I return. Actually!: that is the difference between the development of the viewer-force and the player-character. The continuation of the force may animate its world in new ways each time, but it does not introduce new content. The story plays out the same, more or less, each time it is viewed. But few moments in a game can ever be repeated frame-perfect, let alone the full trajectory of the experience. Beyond that, the player of a game develops a unique posture of attention for any game they play, far more concretely than with any book or film. The way a player partitions their awareness in order to take action within a virtual world becomes something like a body for their character. The viewer-force never coheres in this way.
The role of the player is so much more somatically active than the viewer, and personalities tend to bend differently in relation to distinct games. A player may demonstrate certain preoccupations playing Mario Kart that are totally absent when they play Call of Duty. A player may embody many of the same qualities in Fortnite that they do in Minecraft, but become a totally different person when they pick up Team Fortress. Some proclivities may carry through to games in the same genre, but some may not. People will be differently sensitive to particular aesthetics, or discover idiosyncrasies in the shape of their learning curve with specific mechanics.
Is there an overarching gamer persona that is inhabited in any game? Maybe, but judging by the variance in the affective capacities of the player, we should assume that this persona is not the primary entity that is conditioned by the gameplay. Rather, each combination of game and player has its own character, who is introduced when they first play the game, and terminated when they play for the final time. This being, the player-character-aggregate, transmits and filters select psychic content from the player, to the fixed field of the game, where it is mutated, and then returned. This being is one of our many masks, as much a part of ourselves as the face we show our lover or our co-worker. None is definite.
WIP of a “Mutants and Masterminds” tabletop RPG character “Madam Ink” a graphic novelist and professional tattoo artist with the superpower to make her artistic creations real.
Once the ink dries I get to erase the pencil and then try to draw her numerous tattoos.
