I get into trouble with storytelling, loving game designers from time to time because I have a couple of phrases that I’ve sort of deployed in a couple of blog posts. One of them is, there’s no such thing as a player character. Um, that’s a-an idea, I guess that’s borne of the notion that a-a player is like an actor within a video game drama or something like that. That’s fundamentally not true. The player doesn’t become a hero in a game. The player is not, um, if you’re playing a Conan video game, you do not become Conan, for example. Conan becomes you. The hero becomes the player. The player, essentially, is putting on a suit of clothes and then acting out within the game world, but they’re acting from themselves, not from an imposed personality. And self, as a result, makes players - this kind of idea of self, makes players quite selfish, on the one hand. Like, they often act in very self-interested sort of manner, they often um, treat a game much more literally than maybe a designer wishes they would. A very good example of this is the uh, game Façade. If you go on YouTube and have a look at how a lot of high people actually play Façade, it is not like, in the spirit of, like, trying to help to mediate the argument, and stuff like that. A lot of the time, players play the game to try and break it, to try and figure out where the-where the, where the um, where the, th-th-th-the, where the brakes are. But, the second part of it is, with self, is self-expression. So, a player will often love to have, say, a customizable character in a roleplaying game like Mass Effect, and spend a long time creating this kind of idealized avatar of him or herself that they then, if you like, project into the world from. They’re not roleplaying that character, really. It’s still them being themselves, but it’s them like, describing or finding an identity, or projecting an identity of themselves, some part of themselves, into the world. They still act as themselves, they still pretty much think as themselves, they still, um, sometimes they’re too literal about how they play the game. They’re sometimes too uh, not that interested in what the-the aesthetic dimensions of the game are trying to portray, but they feel a huge sense of ownership once they do that. They feel a massive sense of like, personal creativity. A massive sense of, um, the involvement of themselves within the game world
