purinrin

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?

This is mainly about sword & sorcery type of fantasy games. By generic setting, I mean anything that copies D&D Forgotten Realms 1:1. You know, elves are nimble, long lived and good with bows, wizards have long white beards, orcs are evil or at the very least aggressive and violent.

Original settings are more like a Brandon Sanderson novel, where there might be magic but maybe not, we don't know how it works, or what the society is like. It could be fun to read about in a book, but it requires too much explanation (or exploration) in a computer game.

In games especially, it's useful to have stereotypes to fall back on. That way the game doesn't need to spend so much time explaining things, and can go to the more interesting things straight away: Tactical combat (gameplay) or character interaction (story). When you see an orc, or elf, you know what to expect, they're like shorthand. After all, most of the time in games, a fantasy setting is only an excuse as to why people fight in melee, why there's mana and spells, in short why there are game mechanics. So there's really no point in trying to "be creative" by changing up established tropes. (If you want to make an allegory about society, use a sci-fi setting!!)

(feel free to disagree and discuss)