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The Character of Character
The danger of the immersive fallacy is that it misrepresents how play functions—and game design can suffer as a result. If game designers fail to recognize the way games create meaning for players—as something separate from, but connected to the real world—they will have difficulty creating truly meaningful play. To highlight these complexities, we now take a detailed look at just one aspect of a game's representation, character, to see how an understanding of metacommunication can impact the game design process. We have already looked at character once in this schema, examining the way that procedural representations construct fictional personas in Zelda: Link's Awakening, Virtua Fighter 4, Deus Ex, and The Blob. Now we'll take aim at the other part of the simulation equation, pointing out the way that character representation relates to the "reality" outside the game.Two key questions arise: How does the player relate to a character in a game? And how can this relationship be understood in terms of the "reality" of the represented world? Just to keep things focused, we will limit our analysis to protagonist characters that a player directly controls, such as Mario in Super Mario World or Pai Chan in Virtual Fighter 4. The immersive fallacy would assert that a player has an "immersive" relationship with the character, that to play the character is to become the character. In the immersive fallacy's ideal game, the player would identify completely with the character, the game's frame would drop away, and the player would lose him or herself totally within the game character. These ideas have some validity, but they represent only one element of a much larger and more complicated process. A player's relationship to a game character he or she directly controls is not a simple matter of direct identification. Instead, a player relates to a game character through the double-con-sciousness of play. A protagonist character is a persona through which a player exerts him or herself into an imaginary world; this relationship can be intense and emotionally "immersive." However, at the very same time, the character is a tool, a puppet, an object for the player to manipulate according to the rules of the game. In this sense, the player is fully aware of the character as an artificial construct. This double-consciousness is what makes character-based game play such a rich and multi-layered experience. In playing the role of Cloud in Final Fantasy VII, the player has a portal into the complex narrative world of the game. Through Cloud, the player encounters the settings, characters, and events of the game world; many players report a strong emotional attachment to their digital counterpart. At the same time, Final Fantasy VII is a complex role-playing game. The play experience occurs by watching cutscenes, navigating Cloud and his comrades though virtual spaces, managing a detailed inventory of weapons, items, and magic, taking part in constant strategic battles, and engaging with the game's intricate spreadsheet-like interface. Through these diverse activities, the performance of play acknowledges and celebrates its own hypermediated construction.
The psychologist Gary Alan Fine, in his excellent book Shared Fantasies, offers a model for understanding the complex relationship between player and character. Shared Fantasies is an ethnographic study of tabletop role-playing game communities. Borrowing from psychologist Erving Goffman's theories of Frame Analysis, Fine identifies three "levels of meaning" within which the player/character game experience takes place: First, gaming, like all activity, is grounded in the "primary framework," the commonsense understandings that people have of the real world. This is action without laminations. It is a framework that does not depend on other frameworks but on the ultimate reality of events. Second, players must deal with the game context; they are players whose actions are governed by a complicated set of rules and constraints. They manipulate their characters, having knowledge of the structure of the game, and having approximately the same knowledge that other players have. Finally, this gaming world is keyed in that the players not only manipulate characters; they are characters.The character identity is separate from the player identity. [21]
This three-fold framing of player consciousness—as a character in a simulated world, as a player in a game, and as a person in a larger social setting—elegantly sketches out the experience of play. The player and character frames both take place within the magic circle, whereas the person frame gains its primary meaning from the cultural context outside the immediate space of play. Fine makes the important point that movement among these frames is fluid and constant, and that it is possible to switch between them several times in the course of a single verbal statement or game action. In digital games, the same multi-layered phenomena occurs. Imagine a player, holding a joystick-like controller, looking at a glass screen. The player is deeply engrossed in a game activity, sweating and anxious, focused completely on the space in front of him, leaning his body in synch with the visceral rhythms of the game, smiling and grimacing as he battles opponents and his actions play out in the world on the other side of the glass. What game is he playing? Try on both of these answers for size: He is playing Tomb Raider. Our hypothetical player is looking at a television screen and manipulating a console controller. In one sense, our player immerses himself in the game's narrative world, taking on the identity of Lara Croft with her requisite strengths and weaknesses (I feel lost… I can't believe I survived that trap!). Simultaneously, he views her exaggerated anatomy from behind, pushing buttons and manipulating her like a puppet on his quest to find power-ups, overcome obstacles, and unlock doors to reach the next level (What was that cheat code again? This cutscene sucks.). He is both character and player. In addition, the larger social and cultural context in which he plays constitutes Fine's category of the player as person. Maybe he is trying to impress a friend with his skillful play. Or perhaps he is taking mental notes for a lecture he is going to give at an academic conference. In any case, the player is always present as a person connected to and situated in the real world. He is competing in Comedy Central's BattleBots. In this case, the player's character is a battling, remote-controlled robot moving about the real world, the pane of glass not a television screen but a large sheet of plexi that protects the players and audience from flying scraps of metal. The BattleBots player is immersed in his activity too, and like the Tomb Raider player he is always aware that his actions are governed by the rules of the game. During game play, he might switch between the character/player/person frames many times, moving between emotional identification with his robot character (Ouch! I just got slammed!) and his role as player in the game contest (Let's see if I can get my bot out of the corner). He might even break the frame of player to wave to a friend in the crowd or to offer a sound bite to the television host.
Fine's three-layer model is an extension of the double-con-sciousness of play. Players always know that they are playing, and in that knowledge are free to move among the roles of person, player, and character. Players of a game freely embrace the flexibility of this movement, coming in and out of moments of immersion, breaking the player and character frames, yet all the while maintaining the magic circle. This model applies even when players are not directly controlling a game protagonist. In any game, players move constantly between cognitive frames, shifting from a deep immersion with the game's representation to a deep engagement with the game's strategic mechanisms to an acknowledgement of the space outside the magic circle. Devotees of the immersive fallacy tend to see this hybrid consciousness as a regrettable state of affairs that will only evolve to its true state of pure immersion when the technology arrives. Play tells us otherwise. The many-layered state of mind that occurs during play is something to be celebrated, not repressed—it is responsible for some of the unique pleasures that emerge from a game. [21]Gary Alan Fine, Shared Fantasies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 186.
