Here's an idea.
There's an important difference between controlling and being
your video game avatar.
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Central to every video gaming experience is the avatar.
No.
Yes.
Sorry, just wanted to get that out of the way right
at the top.
The in-game avatar is our agent, meaning it takes action.
It has or gives us agency in a world
that we can't otherwise manipulate.
Even if you actually could leap, jump,
slide across all of the rooftops,
you can only perform those actions
in "Mirrors Edge" as Faith.
And though she's clearly very good at her job,
your actions are restricted to what she is programmed to do,
which is an idea that we're going
to talk about in a little bit.
Now, it hasn't always been wicked sweet jumps.
Avatars started out as spaceships, paddles, tiny men,
and very hungry pie charts.
Nowadays, they are, well, better looking spaceships, but also
complexly rendered spherical aggregates, anatomically
correct human beings, both realistic and cartoonish,
and of course, the first person perspective granting
floating camera, suggesting that the player themselves
is able to experience what exactly is going down
in gaming town.
Which, of course, raises a question-- because you're
watching Idea Channel, and what else would it do but raise
a quesiton-- when you're playing a video game, is it expected
that you are or are controlling your avatar?
Of course, it's different for every game.
When you control an avatar, you, like the player,
are an external force expressing your outside the screen will
through an on the screen character.
When you press X, they ask how high,
or jump the programmatically predetermined amount.
Your avatar is, in the words of video game programmer Rob
Fulop, your cursor.
In a game, Mario isn't a hero, he says.
I don't want to be him, he's me.
It's me, Mario.
Mario is a cursor.
Maybe you do want to be the Street Fighter guys,
but I think they're more like your tennis racket.
In this situation, the one screen character
is a tool, a means to an end.
Games like "Mario" and also "Halo", "GTA", and even "Zelda"
don't really support this assumption of the gamer
into the avatar.
Sure, you might identify with Master Chief right out
of the box, but that doesn't have
much to do with the game drawing you in.
A division is maintained.
You give the orders, and he obeys.
Encouraging and supporting the integration of the two yous
is no simple task.
Feeling as though you are your avatar
and that they're not just enacting your every demand,
but rather are you, digitized, involves
triggering some empathy, which is itself a whole other thing
we don't have time for.
But luckily, Game Spots "Reality Check"
nailed this if you want to know more.
Basically, your avatar needs to be important,
either because of its significance to you,
it's significant in the game, or both.
"Problem Machine" writes that games
hand us fragments of memory piecemeal
to allow us to construct a map, or show us our character's
past effects upon the world, landmarks
by which to trace their steps.
Neither of these can necessarily be trusted,
but they never seem to lie.
Sources in the doobly doo.
Because we go into most games with no pre-built affection
for the characters, it needs to be constructed and then handed
to us.
And that can be a house of cards.
Some games get it really right "Braid", "Earthbound",
"Journey", and "Beyond Two Souls"
invite the player to think of themselves as the character
that they play on screen.
And of course, control versus be is not a perfect binary,
and either one can become the other.
You might grow to love and closely
identify with Gordon Freeman, or the aiming rhetorical
for Missile Command.
Alternatively, you might start out
feeling like you are your "Fallout Three" or "Saints Row"
character, especially if they look like you.
Which, I mean, avatar design is a whole other thing
that Jamin from "Game/Show" has a lot to say about,
so you should check out his video from this week right
here.
Only to eventually realizing that they're
nothing more than a boring mute clone of your stunning mug.
Now before anyone starts to think
I'm saying that one avatar relationship is
better than the other, I'm not.
I'm not even saying that every game
has to fall into one of these categories.
Like in "FDL", are you the ship?
Yourself?
I mean, there is literally a cursor.
Controlling versus being are both useful and dangerous
in different ways.
For instance, I certainly don't need the emotional roller
coaster of "The Walking Dead" with every game that I play.
And that's the beauty of being removed
from intense investment.
A game can be a series of fun-to-complete tasks,
a set of goals or achievements, a progression
of levels or stages.
The risk is in feeling like you're just running errands,
or ticking things off of a list.
When you fully inhabit a game, it becomes engaging
and detains that ever-elusive characteristic
of-- get ready for the buzzword-- immersion.
You get sucked into the story.
You value your character and their relationships.
You feel empowered in the game world,
and you want to see everything through to the end.
Let's make a difference.
And it is literally all fun and games
until you, like you you-- because remember
that you and your avatar one of the same--
have to do something uncomfortable.
This is the downside to investment,
when the game asks you to or makes
you kill an innocent or morally ambiguous person,
puts you between all the rocks and all the hard places,
or asks you to choose in some way between your beloved party
members.
In a movie, you're along for the ride, but in a game,
you are steering the ship.
That's you in there doing that stuff.
So is there a line that game designers shouldn't cross
when making you do things?
Now, slow your comment role everyone
heading south to the submit box to write,
ye old, if you don't like it, then don't play it.
Saying, OK, yeah.
You can stop playing halfway through this game
that you paid for if you're not comfortable
puts the player in a weird situation.
I'm invested.
I want to finish, but that's not what I would do.
And that's me in there.
In his paper "Rethinking Agency and Immersion",
Gonzalo Frasca writes that if narrative is about description,
then simulation is about legislation.
Insofar as games simulate a world,
they also allow us to legislate or give orders within it.
But there's only so much that the game will let you do,
and here we are back at Faith only
being able to do what she's programmed for.
Jeff Murray describes this as the dialectical interplay
between agency and structure.
It would be neat if you could do anything, but a game is finite.
Ideas of what you could do in-game crash
into the limits of technology.
What actually happens is somewhere between the two.
A sometimes very convincing illusion of choice--
shout out to extra credits.
When that allusion crumbles and you
have to do something that you would not otherwise,
it can be upsetting.
Frasca might suggest that instead
of crumbling that illusion in front
of some immoral or violent task, it
should be done for a socially or culturally progressive one.
He describes a theoretical game called
the Sims of the Oppressed.
But in real life, we do have games
like "Gone Home", "Papers, Please",
and a bunch of other Indies that effectively erase
the rift between player and agent
while engaging in some amazing and interesting
critical purpose related to family, sexuality,
immigration, coming of age, you name it.
Is that better than the normal AAA action fest?
That's not my place to say.
And for the record, I like death defying jump, leap, slides
just as much as the next guy.
But it does seem like a powerful and powerfully underutilized
possibility for games.
What do you guys think?
Have you played a game where you felt
like you were your in-game character,
and did that cause you to think critically about something?
Let us know in the comments.
And if it doesn't make you too uncomfortable,
use your cursor avatar to subscribe.
We both have discussed, researched heavily.
Lets see what you guys had to say about Horse_ebooks
and spam as art.
Phillip F. Nylander says that Horse_ebooks,
beyond being a work of art, is actually
a way forward for literature, and that it
shows that a piece of text which isn't classically literary-- it
doesn't have the characteristics of what
we consider great literature-- we
can still affect people greatly.
Which I totally agree with, clearly.
Andy Baio, who I quoted last week,
said that spam is only an art work accidentally,
and that really what it is it's just course consumerism
and proclaims that the animated GIF still
reigns supreme as the internet's native art form.
There you have it everybody.
Dominic Wynter says that spam might not
be an art work, because you don't go to it to have
an experience, it comes to you.
And so in a certain sense, it is invasive.
I wonder if there is an unintended comparison
or connection here between spam and graffiti.
redxparasite questions the premise
that the internet even has one native art form
and says that there are many art forms on the internet that
are greatly impactful.
Relatedly, Stefan Hayden and a bunch of people
said that the internet's true art form is probably trolling.
Which, yeah, you could say that it is definitely
more of an art than a science.
maggieedna provided some insights
to the pronunciation book side of the whole thing, which
I was totally absent for, and says that it was actually
something more of a celebratory event
when it finally revealed what it was counting down towards
and not a disappointing piece of advertisement.
So that's a really interesting other side to the story.
To MacFlash, I think that the idea
of what counts as creativity is very much changing, but also
suggested by this statement is questioning whether or not
it is the intention of the person doing the thing,
or the intention of the person viewing
or consuming the thing that has the authority to deem it
art or not, creative or not.
Which, I mean, I don't have an answer to,
but it's a great question anyways.
Thank you, Amanda L. And to Nicole,
I want to sincerely apologize.
We'll call you Nicole from now on.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, Zachary Smith.
Are you saying it's not a soap opera?
I'm confused.
To AliciaEesh, I think a lot of people
would agree that Jeff Koons is in fact spamming the art
world with his work, so this makes perfect sense.
This weeks episode was brought to you
by the hard work of these in-game avatars.
We have a subreddit and an IRC.
Links in the description.
And this weeks tweet of the week comes from DP Goodfellow,
who points us towards a Verge article about a gallery show
and auction selling animated GIFS.
That is actually curated by my friend, Lindsay.
It's super interesting.
You should definitely check it out.
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