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When you play a game, who are you?
Are you your character's mind controlling his every move or just a strange choice-making entity? He is 'your' character only when the creator gives up her power over him -- over you. Are you in control?
Don't fool yourself, player.
For a moment, let's consider the old style of graphical adventure game (one example pictured to the right) in which you have a very clearly presented set of verbs (plus some extra ones, not pictured: 'Use X item from inventory') to be applied to the world. You do not have perfect control. If you attempt to 'Talk to' anything, you are not choosing what is said: only giving your character no, your character's creator the green light to go ahead and play the 'Character Talks to Thing' scenario.
OPEN DOOR: You didn't want to kick the door down violently (and you certainly didn't expect that). You wanted to open it quietly.
TALK TO RIVAL: You wanted to talk to your rival in a peaceful way, but your character (too prideful) insulted her instead.
USE KNIFE ON FRUIT: You wanted to cut the orange in half with your knife, not peel it!
Any sort of arbitrary choice that your character makes for you detracts from your sense of self in a game world. Please keep in mind that this is not always a bad thing. For every action a character takes on her own, she defines herself (or if you want to think about it too hard, her creator defines her). This is sometimes what you want -- especially if it's important that a player take a certain role in a certain story.
However, if an entity acts only when and how you choose...
That entity becomes your avatar, through whom you experience the world.
I think you'll agree: we are both human beings. You and I have almost certainly grown up inhabiting our bodies and we have grown used to being able to exercise a certain amount of physical control over our environment through our bodies. In Real Life, there are a finite number of physical actions you are capable of and which you can perform at any time (and when you can't, it's often strange, even disturbing). It's only natural that when you want to do something, your avatar (whatever form it takes) responds without its own thought. This, of course, means that you will never have perfect and natural control over such vague commands as 'Talk to' or 'Use'.
Consider two games in both of which you take control of a person named Alex. In both games the arrow keys move you and you have one action button, but in the first game your action button is an RPG standard Interact With The Thing In Front Of Me button, while in the second game your action button is a kick button. Each game has Alex, a door, and a floor-mounted lever which unlocks it.
When you play a game, who are you?
GAME 1
You interact with the door, and Alex interprets that as 'open door'. It is locked.
You interact with the lever, and Alex interprets that as 'pull lever'. Alex pulls the lever.
You interact with the door, and Alex interprets that as 'open door'. It opens, and Alex passes through.
(Alex must have actually been interpreting it as 'open door & traverse doorway if possible'. Close enough.)
GAME 2
You kick the door, which rattles but does not open. It is locked.
You kick the lever from the correct side. It toggles.
You kick the door, which flies open.
You step through the now-open threshold.
Okay, so we might start to disagree here but let's start with the easy part. In GAME 2, you are Alex and Alex is you. Alex is your avatar, your body. The lever and the door 'chose' how to react to your actions, but they are not part of Alex and cannot dilute his or her avatar-ness. They are external.
In GAME 1, Alex is not a perfect fit -- and is not your avatar. Before the lever and door react to your actions, your character reacts to your actions. Alex cannot be your avatar because he or she makes decisions (fairly major ones when you think about it -- Alex could have knocked on the door, or tried to bash it in or pick the lock, or done any number of things almost all of which would not have been quite what you intended) in response to your decisions. This brings us back to the burning question:
When you play a game, who are you?
I'm not saying that it's always wrong to author some or even most of a player's character's actions (but I have a little bias as made too clear by the naming of this post) -- and I'm certainly not saying that granting a player perfect control over a character is always the right decision. It is, however, the natural state: if you make a very simple demo of a character who can walk around, maybe jump, you are providing a 'perfect & natural avatar'. On the other hand, directly involving the player in dialogue is pretty much impossible if you cling to this ideal, and so is telling a singular story.
I don't think I have anything else to say. Leave a comment below!
[EDIT] Oh, wait! Here are some pretty random examples of neat actions that adhere to 'perfect & natural' control:
* Movement and jumping in almost every game
* Shooting a gun in most games where you shoot guns
* The kick button in Radiata Stories
* Journey (flying, singing)
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But I think that's the main draw of those point-and-click games. You're exploring what is possible and being surprised by what happens or doesn't happen.
Even in most games that allow you to shoot, kick, jump, etc. You don't have complete control over the strength, direction, angle, etc of those movements. There are game physics and constraints on the types of movement you can do. Your jump can only go so high. You can't always load your gun with a certain amount of bullets. You can't breathe or go to the bathroom. Would any of these things be taking away "control" in your mind? You can always find ways in which a game isn't reality. So it's just a matter of degree.
It's also a matter of what will most efficiently convey the experience the designer wants to achieve. Full reality simulators are extremely difficult to make and probably distracting from the intent of the game designer's goals anyway. Is Pong any less entertaining and interesting because you can't move left or right? Or doesn't have a face on the paddle that represents a human? One might even argue that symbolic representations and constraints make a game more universal, more immersive, and more focused. Because anybody can embody that entity and the experience is focused on a singular activity that the designer has intended.
I'm not suggesting that we all make things as complicated as all of mathematics, of course x)
Oh, and I'm not -totally- sure what you're saying about Pong but let it be known that it is definitely this sort of perfect avatar that never takes control away from you. It is a very simple game but its boundaries and rules are clearly defined.
For unskilled players I think so. The way their avatar behaves in this circumstance is puzzling, and though it's clear that they are responding to the player's input, it feels like that input is being misinterpreted. Button mashing is not avatar control, it's shouting gibberish until the thing you're trying to communicate with hears a word that means something to them.
For skilled players, the unintended behaviours that result from failing a particular input are also predictable and familiar. Not much different from accidentally tripping over yourself or some other failure of coordination. In real life, you don't experience a moment of existential crisis when your body doesn't quite do what you intended it to.
On another note, I think this is one of the reasons why games which purport to be interesting by offering moral quandaries fail so miserably to do so. They are often dialogue-heavy to begin with, and at the moment of moral decisions they wrest all meaningful control away from the player. They are not really challenging the player with a moral question by posing that question to an entity which the player does not recognize as themselves.
Books and movies can put forward moral quandaries without interaction and I think they're often better off for not needing to struggle to get the illusion of interaction in there, somehow.
But not always.
If a game consistently maintains an avatar feeling, or consistently maintains the feeling of observing and advising a third party I think it can pull off a morality play.
That entity becomes your avatar, through whom you experience the world."
I just want to point out that this is essentially impossible. By definition, the game developer chooses how you interact with the world. Let's take your second example, where Alex kicks the door. You didn't choose what foot to use, you didn't choose how much force to kick with. The developer choose those things for you. Even if the developer makes more choices available, it is still the developer deciding upon what those choices will be.
In reality you are never your avatar. It's impossible for Alex to be a "perfect fit." The only difference is that this fact is more obvious in some games than it is in others, but hiding it doesn't change it. You never have freedom of choice, you only have the freedom to choose the options that the developer makes available to you. That's inherent to the nature of a game, or any type of interactive experience designed by another person for you.
No matter how much the player wants to play god, the developer will always be god. That is his role by definition. Personally, my suggestion is that rather than hiding the nature of a game, rather than pretending that the players have total freedom, developers should embrace the nature of games and be willing to take away freedom when it is beneficial to the experience.
You did not choose to be a human or what that would entail, but as you grew you learned that you had arms and could use them to manipulate the world around you. Likewise you did not choose your eyes, your face, your legs, or your body. We all suffer from physical limitations.
When you play a game there are physical limitations put in place because that is the only way for things to be -- but as you play you learn how to exist and how things react. I agree, you didn't choose HOW to kick, but after two or three kicks you'll quickly learn that the way you kick is a standard and reliable with which you can affect the world. (Sorry - this wasn't the best example; I go more in-depth with these things when I'm actually trying to design a game but this was a short and quick thing I came up with on the spot. I'll write something better soon.)
Conversation trees in, I dunno, Mass Effect, are made of blatantly authorial choices. The choices presented to you aren't reallly following any sort of rules you can believe are a part of yourself. The author springs forth from the screen and... it's not exactly control that's lost. It's our voluntary illusion of control that's shaken.
haha and I think that developers should absolutely be willing to take away freedom when it is beneficial to the experience: we just disagree on when, exactly, such is beneficial to the experience.
* The developer will not always be god. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4a6XMcUtwq4
Then, have you changed your mind about this:
"However, if an entity acts only when and how you choose...
That entity becomes your avatar, through whom you experience the world."
You're agreeing with me that there's no such thing as a video game character that only acts HOW you choose, right? After all, clearly the game developer has some say in what choices are available to you, and how your character behaves when you press buttons.
If that's the case, do you want to re-think your definition of the word "avatar"?
Put the emphasis on ONLY, and consider the way I was defining this sort of avatar in context. Your avatar may be incapable of doing certain things you'd like to do, but my point there was to differentiate it from the sort of character who does things how (and potentially when) they please.
I don't want to re-think my definition because I didn't provide one ;)
But it's not how the character pleases... it's how the game developer pleases. And there's no differentiating there, that's always true. So the character is always an avatar and you are always you.
And it's EXACTLY the same with any video game. You are no more inside the character than you are inside the chess pieces. That is the obvious reality... in fact it's so obvious, it's almost shocking that it has to be pointed out, isn't it?
1. I cannot punch an object that I would like to punch because the only action available to me is explicitly mapped to kicking. My only means of interacting with the world is by kicking things.
and
2. I cannot punch an object I would like to punch because my attack button is context-sensitive. My character decides to kick this particular object instead of punching it, although this same input will result in punching other objects.
Technically, in both cases, game rules are what prevent you from expressing your intent. It does not feel the same, though. In the first case, your intent violates a basic physical law of the game world. In the second case, precedent tells you that your intent should be possible within the game world, but it appears as if your player character is making its own decisions about how to act. They demonstrate their own limited form of agency and reject your control. This shifts your perspective on that character from "this character is an extension of my will" to "I oversee and advise this character's actions".
Here's two examples of perfect avatars off the top of my head (both, incidentally from Valve): Gordon Freeman and Chelle. Silent protagonists. No cut-scene movement, the player is expected to follow NPCs themselves using the same controls as always. In no situation do these characters demonstrate any agency of their own; they are purely hollow shells, puppets, that follow the player's commands to the letter (to the extent that the physical laws of their universe permit)
By the end of the game the answer to their question is a clear: YES, I greatly enjoyed hurting people in this game! In this case, Jacket, the main character, is the near-opposite of a "perfect & natural avatar", since in real life we would never think of committing the atrocities Jacket does. While Jacket is being controlled by the answering machine, the developers controlled, manipulated and shaped US into this terrible machine of murder without any other option.
The game's ending (without getting too "spoilery") has some interesting insights into control and loss of control, and why we played along with this gruesome deathmatch.
Then there's the case of the Swapper...the base set of interactions with the world are so limited - clone yourself, swap places, move boxes, open a door, read a console. And they pretty much do what you expect to the point where swapping moving about feels natural. But, even with all this control I still don't feel a lot of empathy with the character, or even much understanding of who they were (perhaps that's the point).
Your article brings up a good set of lens to look at a game through during/after play. To see how well it worked with that particular game's set of ideas,e tc.
And, like I said, that's totally not for everyone! I think there's more opportunity to feel things for yourself (rather than empathy for who you're controlling and what they're going through) but it's not like that's more valuable. It's just... different :)
I hate to post links to long articles, but I have written a bit about this a few years back:
http://frictionalgames.blogspot.se/2010/09/where-is-your-self-in-game.html
This goes through some general points on where "you" are in a game.
http://frictionalgames.blogspot.se/2010/11/how-player-becomes-protagonist.html
This is a more specific example of how we did it in Amnesia.