Participation vs. Witnessing: An Examination of Video Games
I was at work, dealing with the banality that entails, and fell into a conversation with Art, a co-worker of mine, about film and video games’ similarities and differences concerning audience engagement. Him and I spoke about whether film had the same participation level that video games have when telling a story. Art argued that participation occurs in films similar to video games because the viewers’ imagination is able to produce more story after the film ends or change the story if the viewer didn’t like the story’s finale. He also argued that the viewer vicariously participates in stories and characters.
When a viewer participates in a film they do so through a character’s choices, cognition, reactions, beliefs, and feelings. These character’s actions then become a conduit for the audience to enter the story and experience what the character experiences. The audience enters the story through these actions because the audience has an emotional stake in what happens to the character. On a lower level of interaction, the audience also reacts to these character’s actions by judging both the character and the world the character exists in. These judgements, though, don’t have an effect on the film’s story. They remain wholly the audience’s.
I can see what Art meant by an audience participating with a film, how a character becomes a conduit to connect viewer and story. This connection is carried out by the conduit-character. An audience negotiates its identity potentially blending their identity with the character’s identity. This is closely related to Richard Allen’s summation that identifying “with a character as a spectator, [we are] assumed to adopt the entire psychological point of view of a protagonist.” When the audience makes this connection they are empathetically connecting to the character, putting themselves into the character’s mindset and emotions. But the audience has limited effects on how this connection to a character is set up. That’s because an audience doesn’t have any control in how they get to know a character in a film. Instead, a filmmaker manages how the audience gets to know and identifies with a character. The filmmaker crafts scenes to express and impress character actions. If a filmmaker does this well the audience understands the character’s actions. Through this identification the audience begins to care about the character’s well-being. This care an audience has for a character is dependent on the strength an audience identifies with the character. The more a filmmaker fashions ways for an audience to identify with a character the more powerful that empathic bond will become. An audience needs to connect to characters. Without an audience connecting to characters they feel separated from the character and the story the character inhabits, which can lead to an audience’s discontent and awareness they are disconnected observers to an uninteresting stranger. This character connection is one of the many reasons some movies you feel an emotional connection with and consequently believed they were good films. That connection hides the observational position the audience has in reference to a film. If a filmmaker can develop ways to identify with a character by what is portrayed on the screen, then how might video games’ interactivity produce more identification with a character? A player’s interaction with video games raises major differences between how audience members negotiate their identities with a character in a film versus how players negotiate their identities with characters in video games. These differences arise because video games don’t require empathy to identify with a character because the player takes the role of the character. Conversely, films require empathy because you are relating to a character.
Due to these differences, I can’t agree with Art that film contains the same participation that video games use. Art’s first point about a viewer’s imagination functioning as participation in a film has no effect on the story portrayed on screen. An audience has no agency to affect a film or a character. The story on the screen will not and does not integrate the viewer’s imagination into the plot itself. The imagined things from the viewer remain in the viewer’s mind, influencing only how that person perceives the film. The viewer simply can not have any influence on the film’s progression or end due to how film is structured as a pre-scripted dictation of events. Does imagination then have no power in this interplay between film and viewer? No, it does, it’s just an extremely personal relationship a person has to a film.
A person developing personal feelings about a film suggests that the film has some interaction with the viewer’s identity, possibly reinforcing or changing how that person perceives themself. Art’s conduit metaphor comes into play here when the audience begins to negotiate their identity in reference to a character in a film. When an audience identifies to a film’s character they will speak about that person in third person, saying things like “I am like him/her.” The pronoun distinction between ‘him/her’ and ‘I’ is vital since an audience does not have the required agency to participate in a film like the film’s characters. This distinction points to when the conduit-character connects story to audience, that it is the character who does the work to bring the story to the audience. The character enacts this by the audience feeling similarity between their own identity and the character’s identity. The character begins to function like a mirror where audience members can see some of their personality traits reflected back at them from a character. The audience assuming something about the character as representative of themselves produces the initial stages of the conduit between audience and film.
The conduit produced by the audience’s interaction with the character, however, differentiates games from film. In video games, players negotiate identity with a character-avatar over which the player has agency. The player must now handle choice and decide how they will act as if they are the character. This a a clear change in pronoun use from how a viewer associates with a film and how player associates with a game. Acting for the character removes the player from third person witnessing and into first person participation. The player doesn’t describe their choices as ‘he/she did this,’ but as ‘I did this.’
If a player does not choose an option within the story then a story will not occur. A video game must have a player to progress the story. If a player must be present then it is foreseeable that a video game story still requires the conduit metaphor to connect the player to the story. The conduit metaphor, however, doesn’t remain the same and now takes on a two way directional flow. On one side of the character is the story which is piped to the player through the character being in that world. On the other side is the player whose choices are piped through the character to progress the story. In this latter connection, the player interacts and affects the story through the character-avatar.
The shift from characters in a film to character-avatars in games occurs in the way an audience or player interacts with a story. Film stories simply can’t include an audience similar to the way a video game can include a player in a story. The distinction between characters in film and character-avatars in video games does not lessen the significance of film or state any superiority about video games. The distinction instead points toward how these two mediums differ when consumers engage with them.
Preston Johnston is the co-host of LudonarrativeFM, a podcast which airs at the beginning of each month, and streams on Twitch each Tuesday. If you want to find more of Preston’s writing, check out his other Epilogue work, where his essays on games as literature and ludonarrative can be found. If you appreciate Epilogue Gaming’s work and would like to support it, you can subscribe for as little as $1 a month on our Patreon page.
Allen, Richard. “Identification in the Cinema.” British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 2, April 2012
