Participation versus Witnessing: An Examination of Video Games – Part II
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.
An Update
Video games are ways to participate within a narrative, where as film remain observational. This was discussed above, showing how games and film utilize similar features, yet remain different species when it comes to storytelling. The most challenging storytelling concept so far that both film and video games have introduced is capturing and representing mental illness. Film has attempted to capture mental illness in some capacity, think “Girl Interrupted” or “Rain Man.” Films like these attempt to portray mental illness as affecting an individual or a group. The film does this through observational scenes where an audience witnesses what an individual or a family does when confronted with mental illness. Film has done a magnificent job at piecing together the experiences from others to allow an audience to view other’s perspectives through telling stories. Yet as Tameem Antoniades, the director behind Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, stated “games are capable of drawing you in for hours on end, playing the role of a character who’s different from you, experiencing their perspective, and actively involving you in a world that functions with a different set of rules.” Antoniades gets at the main goal of games, to dunk you into another person’s reality and get you to experience another person’s rules and how those rules govern their world and resulting perspective.
Antoniades’ statement also describes our world as well. Rules help define our experiences and the reality our experiences take shape in. We begin to learn these rules when we enter the world as children. The world is novel and seemingly endless as a child. As novelty declines we come to understand that rules govern how to move physically, socially, economically, mentally, and emotionally through a world. The world begins to take real shape and we see the boundaries and accept them. We internalize those rules and boundaries and apply them to how we act. This isn’t so different when we enter a game’s world. A game’s world is novel to the first time player. It feels endless and enveloping. The game introduces us to the controls, abilities, what we should expect from game mechanics. With these stated we enter the world to learn the rules that are placed upon the character and begin to notice the boundaries that surround the character.
These boundaries that players come to grasp about a character is best expressed by Senua, the main character in Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. Senua suffers from psychosis and so her journey to retrieve her lover’s soul is fraught not just by physical dangers, but also misleading and disorienting mental ones. Yet those same mental health issues structure the rules for how Senua moves in the world. As the player interacts with the world they come to find that “there are many things that happen in the world of Hellblade that make perfect sense within the context of Senua’s mind.” Outside of that mind they don’t have the same efficacy. This is a major rule in Hellblade. You must experience and act out Senua’s perspective in the game’s world. Ant deepens this by how he and his team structured the game’s mechanics demanding that “to complete Senua’s quest, you have to internalize and accept the logic and meaning behind these things to progress.” If a player doesn’t accept the rules and boundaries placed on Senua then the player misses the main joust behind Hellblade’s rule creation. That the world is entirely Senua’s to create, experience, come to terms with, and most importantly, for the player to take the role as Senua and experience her rules and boundaries which govern her world.
The power with which Ninja Theory developed the rules and boundaries surrounding Senua are substantial. Her seeing the world in illuminated shards to puzzle together or how mundane shapes take on supernatural roles helps to produce a rule governed by her psychosis, subsequently played out by the player. A player has to internalize these rules and see them as true and real in Senua’s world, for which all these rules and boundaries have lasting effects. The black rot that creeps up her arm each time you’re knocked unconscious plays an important role as both storytelling device and health meter. Without the black rot creeping up her arm you lose the rule in which Senua’s story resets and a player must restart the entire game. You also lose the impending gloom and degradation that is slowly affecting and gnawing at Senua. How Ninja Theory integrated a health meter HUD into a character as a narrative device, lore component, and a rule issuing device stuns me. Both the lore component and rule issuing device are the most thrilling of the revelation about Senua’s HUD and character integration. The lore and rule in how they are expressed in the game also makes them meld, becoming rule bound lore. This lore component bound by rules takes shape on Senua’s arm near the game’s beginning where Senua is ostensibly killed by Northmen during a player controlled fight. As she dies a scene ensues where her body turns to rotten flesh as she scrambles towards the camera screaming in pain and terror until she dies. Moments later the camera pans up and we see a living Senua walk up to her own corpse. The game utilizes this surrealistic scene as the way to introduce Senua’s combat rules and the rule bound lore which functions as a health meter on her arm. this corpse as a learning lesson and looking down at her hands sees she shares the same black rot staining her hand.
Since players participate in video games they are actively entering into experiences have and enforce a set of rules a player must follow. Rules create boundaries. Limits we can’t cross or can’t cross until a rule is followed.
Rules and boundaries are the way the game structures the secondary-reality a player enters. We must follow and accept a game’s rules very much like the rules in our reality. Our reality places constraints on us as experiencers in this reality. We can’t jump twenty feet into the air, think something into existence, or take bullet after bullet in a fire fight. Instead, we have a rule in our reality that states if we are to be good at something then we must give lots of time to developing that skill to better it. Our boundaries in reality are innumerable: economic, social, class, racial, intellectual, temporal, mental. The list goes on and on. Video games press similar boundaries onto a player. When a player enters a video game they must undo the constraints of the present reality and shift into thinking with the new boundaries in a game. These boundaries are vital since a game is purposefully removing the player from their subjective reality and replacing it with a manufactured reality for the player to exist in. To do this a game must deliver consistent boundaries to a player.
A player who experiences boundaries in a game is able to interact with a different experience from their own. Their own experience is overlaid on top, yet being able to see, feel, hear, and perceive in any other way another person’s boundaries is fantastically engrossing. That video games can take mere player participation and reshape it into integrating a player into another person’s experience expresses the power and potential still to explore in what video games can teach us about understanding narrative and other people’s perspectives. Games are participatory engines that tackle problems and unique angles simply impossible in other mediums.
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.
Resources:
Allen, Richard. “Identification in the Cinema.” British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 2, April 2012.
Hellblade: Senua’s Psychosis (in-game documentary). Ninja Theory. Ninja Theory. 2017.
