Video Game Characters. Theory and Analysis

2007

2019

This study attempts to construct a communication framework of video game avatars. Employing Aarseth’s textonomy, Rehak’s avatar’s life cycle, and Lury’s prosthetic culture avatar’s theories as the basis of analysis on fifty-five purposively selected games, this study proposes ACTION (Avatars, Communicators, Transmissions, Instruments, Orientations and Navigations). Avatars, borrowing Aarseth’s terms, are classifiable into interpretive, explorative, configurative, and textonic with four systems and sub classifications for each type. Communicators, referring to the participants involved in the communication with the avatars and their relationship, are classifiable into unipolar, bipolar, tripolar, quadripolar, and pentapolar. Transmissions, the ways in which communication is transmitted, are classifiable into restrictive verbal and restrictive non-verbal. Instruments, the graphical embodiment of communications, are realized into dialogue boxes, non-dialogue boxes, logs, expressions, m...

2007

Immersive and engaging are words often used interchangeably to describe the player's experience of gameplay without clear distinction between what these terms refer to, and without investigation of the underlying basis of each experience. This paper aims to build upon previous work by other authors on the nature of the player's experience of gameplay by focusing on how these experiences are mediated by the player's point of control within the game-world. The relationship between the player and their point of control in the game-world is discussed in terms of embodiment to articulate differences between the terms avatar and character, distinctions that are in turn used as a basis for understanding how different attitudes towards the activity of gameplay arise from the interplay of different relationships between the player and their point of control. Finally there is a consideration of how the relationship between the player and their point of control and resultantly their attitudes towards the activity of gameplay may influence different types of an experience of being-in-the-game-world, namely immersion, engagement, presence, and telepresence.

What is the Avatar? Fiction and Embodiment in Avatar-Based Singleplayer Computer Games. Revised and Commented Edition, 2022

What are the characteristic features of avatar-based singleplayer videogames, from Super Mario Bros. to Grand Theft Auto? Rune Klevjer examines this question with a particular focus on issues of fictionality and realism, and their relation to cinema and Virtual Reality. Through close-up analysis and philosophical discussion, Klevjer argues that avatar-based gaming is a distinctive and dominant form of virtual self-embodiment in digital culture. This book is a revised edition of Rune Klevjer's pioneering work from 2007, featuring a new introduction by the author and afterword by Stephan Günzel, Jörg Sternagel, and Dieter Mersch.

Proceedings of DiGRA Conference 2014, 2014

When game studies has tackled the player-character, it has tended to do so by means of an oppositon to the notion of the avatar, with the result that the ontological and semiotic nature of the character in itself has not been given due attention. This paper draws on understandings of character from the fields of narratology and literary theory to highlight the double-layered ontology of character as both a possible individual and as a semiotic construction. Uri Margolin’s narratological model of character signification is used as the basis for developing a semiotic-structural model of the player-character that addresses its specific medialities and formal nature – a task which is performed through illustrative close examinations of the player-characters in The Last of Us (Naughty Dog 2013) and Gone Home (The Fullbright Company 2013).

2020

This thesis analyses seven contemporary video games with regards to male and female stereotypisation. Contrary to the majority of previous studies, the analysis not only assesses visual cues to ascertain common themes of sexualisation, passivity or aggression of the characters within the game, but also suggests an additional methodological approach to measure the roles of each playable character. In order to categorise the thirty-three sample characters, the available skills for each character were analysed to subsume the characters under general archetypical roles related to overarching male or female stereotypes respectively, The roles deduced from this analysis, additionally can be regarded as predictors for the game play experience of players. Moreover, the sources of power deduced from the skill descriptors of each character were analysed in order to assess stereotypical tropes from a narrative perspective as well. Finally, the results of the visual analysis and the occupied ro...

The Play Versus Story Divide in Game Studies: Critical Essays , 2015

In this chapter we discuss key gameplay elements of one of the most important and influential videogame series of recent years, Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series. We propose that an essential part of the success of this game is due to its making a significant and innovative intervention in the meta-reflexive thematization of the avatar-form: the imaginative staging of the experience of the user and consequently the user’s necessary relationship to the game software and hardware is the underlying theme of the narrative itself. Within this staging, the concerns of narrative and the ludic parameters of the game world are extraordinarily strongly aligned. This alignment further offers a strong interpretation of the “real world” in which the game is played: that is, what Michel Foucault called “biopolitics”.

This article introduces a theoretical framework for the analysis of the player character (PC) in offline computer role-playing games (cRPGs). It derives from the assumption that the character constitutes the focal point of the game, around which all the other elements revolve. This underlying observation became the foundation of the Player Character Grid and its constituent Pivot Player Character (PPC) Model, a conceptual framework illustrating the experience of gameplay as perceived through the PC’s eyes. Although video game characters have been scrutinized from many different perspectives, a systematic framework has not yet been introduced. This study aims to fill that void by proposing a model replicable across the cRPG genre. It has been largely inspired by Anne Ubersfeld’s semiological dramatic character research implemented in Reading Theatre I (1999) and is demonstrated with reference to The Witcher (2007).

The purpose of the present study was to examine the effect of perspective-taking instructions (PTI) on (a) the tendency to project aspects of the self onto a video game character and (b) the degree of "telepresence" within a virtual world. Perspective taking instructions encourage subjects to imagine themselves as a story character. It has been found in the past that PTI may cause an individual to merge identities with a story character in written stories 1 and films 2 . This study replicated these findings using a video game. Male video game players were asked to play a video game and completed character trait measures about themselves and about the game character. Subjects given perspective-taking instructions (PTI) had more overlap in the character traits ascribed to themselves and the character than did control subjects. PTI did not significantly impact telepresence. Positive and negative implications of these findings are discussed.