However, this is because a game’s priority is not with the work presented to the viewer, but with how the player fits into it.Įndowing the player with choice, and therefore culpability, can give the player personal emotional investment in the story. Great video games will never be precisely crafted in the same vein as the classics of Stanley Kubrick or James Joyce. Even if most of the game’s story is told through pre-rendered cutscenes, any segment in which the player is in control will be a unique experience. By ceding control to the player, game makers forgo this level of precision.
Most media are carefully crafted to convey precisely what the creator intended - the perfect shot, the perfect phrase, the perfect order. In this way, a game can present a character’s emotional reactions not only as something that can be related to, but as an extension of self for the player.įrom a traditional standpoint, the ability for players to control their own experience with a game appears to be an obstacle to meaningful art. The longer a player spends controlling their avatar, the more their motivations become entangled with the character’s. All of these choices serve to build the connection between player and avatar. A player can design an avatar that reflects their idealized self, or choose whether to play as a burly knight or a stealthy assassin. Many games allow players to customize their avatars. A movie-goer might interpassively engage with a film by taking emotional cues from its protagonist, but a game can develop this connection on a deeper level because the player is both observing and acting through their avatar. In directly plot-driven games, players are expected to identify with the playable character and take the character’s responses to situations as a cue for how they themselves should feel as observers and implicit participants. When this avatar acts without the player’s direct control, players must forgo their agency and accept these new actions as part of the identity they project onto the avatar. Players project an identity onto their avatar within a game. Laeititia Wilson of the University of Western Australia defines interpassivity as “a mode of relating that involves the consensual transferal of activity or emotion onto another being or object – who consequently ‘acts’ in one’s place.” (Wilson 2) This mostly manifests in games through pre-rendered actions or scenes. Of course, even if a player appears to be given some choices, they are rarely, if ever, given every choice.
WHAT IS FACADE VIDEO GAME FREE
If we accept that individuals can possess agency in a reality without absolute freedom, why is a video game arbitrarily too restrictive to allow for genuine choice? Many games can accommodate every choice a player is reasonably likely to make, meaning a player may never even notice that they lack a truly free choice. Individuals are confined by the laws of physics, their resources and their abilities. This may give players the illusion of choice, but wouldn’t it also deny them true agency? A game’s world is certainly confined to its specifically laid out rules, but is the “real world” much different? No one truly has the freedom to do whatever they wish. Whatever semblance of freedom the player may have, they are ultimately confined to the options that the games developers had the foresight to account for. “When we play games, we operate those models, our actions constrained by their rules: the urban dynamics of SimCity the feudal stealth strategy of Ninja Gaiden the racing tactics of Gran Turismo.” (Bogost 4) If this is the case, then it appears to defy intuition that a player can have any true choice. When examining choice in games, there is one obvious limitation – most games are pre-rendered, every possible outcome anticipated in lines of code. This paper will explore the ways in which games can employ choice to explore morality, develop immersion, experience powerlessness, and subvert traditional narrative structure. By providing the player with choice, or the illusion of it, games possess an intimate mode of storytelling and expression which cannot be achieved with more conventional media. For games, this is the element of choice. But like all new media, video games are not just an assemblage of old tricks - there strength as a medium stems from what they do that other media cannot. The case is no different with video games, which have in many ways emulated the standard narrative devices of film and literature while supplementing them with competitive elements akin to most sports.
WHAT IS FACADE VIDEO GAME SERIAL
Early television series mirrored the tropes of serial radio dramas.
Movies were once viewed as an extension of what could already be done by stage theater. New media are often conceptualized in terms of the media they replace.
0 kommentar(er)
