Weasel's Game Theory Corner: Players As Characters

Complete immersion in a game is sort of a crap-shoot, I have to admit. For the games that try so hard to give you all the atmospheric noise and full-body awareness like Mirror's Edge, there are usually the things that take you out of the experience, such as seeing yourself in a mirror and concluding, "This person isn't me. I'm controlling them, but they aren't me." This really gets me to thinking about the games that try to go above and beyond mere characterization, and put in serious effort towards making the player feel as if they are truly a part of what's going on in the game.

Of course, in the older days, this was a lot easier to pull off, since games like this were primarily text-based narratives with parser interaction. The quintessential example, naturally, is the Zork series, where the "protagonist" earned the nickname AFGNCAAP due to the games' occasionally overt attempts at avoiding referring to the player by any gender-specific pronouns, or describing them at all. As games gained graphical capability, though, it became much harder to immerse the player in such a way.

It does seem, though, that there can be attempts to tell the player that they are the main character. Modern games seem intent on turning the player into a silent protagonist and refusing to show them their own face, but the characterization still comes into play since in-game characters inevitably need to call the player something, and it's often a generic name like "Gordon Freeman" or "Alex Mason" or some such thing. Adventure games like Myst do try to blur this line, though, by refusing to name the player. This even plays into the story, as important figures like Atrus never actually learn your name and even acknowledge such later in the series.

The most recent games, though, hardly even bother - why would a player want to play as themselves, after all, when the entire point is digital escapism, the ability to do anything with no consequences? So I suppose that's why games like Mass Effect, Saints Row, and Skyrim exist, where the player may create a new self to their own design and inhabit them as they would any pre-created character in any other game.

I do wonder, though, why more developers haven't tried to involve the player like Zork and Myst have.