I saw a video essay where the author argued that games have a unique way of making the player feel the same way as the character they're controlling. Here's a link https://youtu.be/mf9XVWt1D4Y?si=YFp-xpMpTIfjQpyN but I'll try to summarize it. Basically, there is empathy, where you feel "with" a character as you see what they experience. Then there's sympathy where you feel "for" a character (as in the character feels distress and you feel pity). But the video argues that in games, you can feel "as" the player character, too, and illustrates this with the final moments of Super Metroid, which I won't go into detail here but it's more or less about being confused and scared at the same time that Samus would be confused and scared. (It's explained a lot better in the video lol)
I find this an interesting idea, and I always like story telling concepts that are unique to computer games, to set them apart from other media. I'm also having trouble coming up with other examples of the player feeling "as" their character, so I thought I'd make a thread about it.
I guess whenever the player feels any sort of emotion and the character is a mute stand-in for the player, you could theoretically attribute the same emotion to the character, right? But then you might as well say "you feel the same triumph as Mario, as he defeats Bowser", or the tension of the spaceship pilot in Asteroids, when you narrowly fly between two boulders. After all, Super Mario kind of tells a story, and Asteroids...? Hmm. At least with games, there's always the chance of an emergent story, something that the player makes up in their head, independent of whatever narrative the game might have. I feel like the point of the video is to say that video games can make the player feel as their character, even when there's some more narrative going on. So yes, does anything in particular come to your mind here?