CHARACTERS
Video game characters are deceptively complex entities: They are at once interactive representatives of the player in the game world, fictional entities that serve to advance the story of the game world, and proprietary symbols of the larger game franchise they belong to, their recognition and value maximized through licensed products. Despite their superficial similarities to characters that originate in other media, video game characters require their own, medium-specific analytical framework to be adequately theorized and understood. Since their representational and ludic traits are subject to the rapid technological changes that typify their nascent medium, this framework must itself be thought of as a moving target. This essay examines some of the major critical debates surrounding video game characters as both player-operated protagonists and licensed franchise intellectual property.
Characters, Avatars, and Agents
Unlike the heroes of other, more traditional media forms, video game protagonists are controlled in some capacity by their player. As such, Andrew Burn (2006, pp. 72–73) argues, they play a dual role as both player agent and fictional character, belonging simultaneously to the “ludic” and “representational” systems that comprise the game (p. 72). Any productive analysis of video game player-characters must acknowledge this duality, and the constantly shifting relationship players experience with their character as a result, oscillating between identifying with the character as an extension of self, and relating to it as a separate, fictional entity. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman (2004) have termed this fluctuation the “double-consciousness” of play. According to Salen and Zimmerman, players are constantly shifting between cognitive frames that alternately place them “inside” their character in a relationship of direct identification and very much outside of it, aware of the character as an artificial construct and fictional entity, as well as their own status as players manipulating a tool or “puppet” according to the rules of the game (pp. 453–455).
How, exactly, players experience this “double-consciousness” varies considerably depending on the specific nature of the game character in question. As video games continue to mature as a medium, their player-controlled occupants have diversified according to the growing representational and computational possibilities of each new generation of gaming consoles and PCs, as well as the multiplying generic demands of the games played on them. Player-characters now vary widely in appearance and ability, ranging from the most complex, customizable player projections associated with such video role-playing games (RPGs) as Fallout 3 (Bethesda, 2008) and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Bethesda, 2011), to the larger-than-life superhero icons of such action game franchises as Halo (Bungie, 2003, 2005, 2007) and Uncharted (SCEA, 2007, 2009, 2011) to the abstracted characters of Facebook and mobile games. This diversity has prompted efforts within both the video game industry and academic studies of games to define and categorize different types of game characters, although little consensus has been reached in the development of an overall vocabulary.
Player-operated characters are often referred to interchangeably as “characters” and “avatars.” However, this terminology has been increasingly contested as players, scholars, and game developers alike strive to define precisely what the term “avatar” means, and which games have them. While it is generally agreed that avatars serve as the locus of the player’s actions within game space, there has been wide-ranging debate over the specific type of engagement and identity play the figure of the avatar provides the player, as well as the way it balances these ludic obligations with its role as a fictional character.
Avatar has its origins in the Sanskrit word “avatara,” meaning “descent,” and used to describe the visible forms Hindu gods took in our lesser, mortal world. In 1985, the term “avatar” was first used to describe virtual personae in digital worlds; the creators of Lucasfilm Games’ early online role-playing game Habitat referred to its graphical player-characters as “avatars” over the course of the game’s development (see Morningstar & Farmer, 1991), as well as in the context of its fictional storyworld (see, for example, Yakal, 1986). The term “avatar” was also used to describe the player-operated protagonist of Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar (Origin Systems, 1985). But the concept of the avatar was more widely popularized by Neal Stephenson’s cyberpunk novel Snow Crash (1992), wherein human users operate transformative, photorealistic digital standins called “avatars” in an online Metaverse eerily reminiscent of contemporary virtual worlds. The term avatar has since come to be widely mobilized by video game culture to describe the graphical, typically human or anthropomorphic forms that represent human users in interactive digital worlds. As Tom Boellstorff (2008) observes, while the term avatar “historically referred to incarnation—a movement from virtual to actual—with respect to online worlds it connotes the opposite movement from actual to virtual, a decarnation or invirtualization” (p. 128).
According to one prevalent line of thinking, an “avatar” denotes any stand-in for the player within gamespace, from the simplest abstract gun turrets and space ships of early arcade and console games, to the most photorealistic and customizable occupants of MMOGs (massively multiplayer online games) and virtual worlds. By this formulation, “an avatar will be any game-unit that has action possibilities and that answers to the player” (Kromand, 2007, p. 400). Pioneer game developer Chris Crawford, for example, defines avatars as “virtual constructs that are controlled by human players and function as a means of interacting with other characters” (quoted in Berger, 2002, p. 33). Player-driven “move acts,” to borrow Alexander Galloway’s (2006) phrase, can therefore even serve as rudimentary avatars, standing in for graphical player-characters via the swiveling, targeting, and steering that indicate and orient the flows of player agency (p. 22). The avatar is, in this most basic sense, the user’s representative in interactive digital space, responding to their inputs via the game or computer interface, however simple or complicated those inputs may be. In some cases, this means that the character strongly prioritizes this role of player agent, with a decidedly minimal obligation to any sort of role as a fictional being within the game’s diegesis. Packaging and promotional materials supply this fictional layer, however thin, through illustrations and game premise summaries, especially in the context of early arcade and console games. By this very broad definition, then, the sliding “paddle” of PONG (Atari, 1972) is an avatar, as are the roving perspectival crosshairs of the tank in BattleZone (Atari, 1980), as is the floating cursor in Myst (Cyan, 1993), as is Halo’s Master Chief, as is a level 4 Tauren warrior in World of Warcraft (Blizzard, 2004). Even the rotations and connections of the blocks in Tetris, Galloway argues, are move acts that serve to meaningfully represent the player within gamespace (2006, p. 22).
Rather than using the terms “avatar” and “character” interchangeably, some scholars have sought to locate them on a continuum wherein avatars function primarily as projections of their players, while characters may take on strong, fictional identities that are recognizably separate from those of their players. Ragnhild Tronstad (2008) suggests that the term “avatar” should be reserved for those “extended, prosthetic, part-of-our-selves type of character(s)” that prioritize “embodied empathy, in which the player experiences a kind of physical or bodily connection to the character” (p. 256). In so doing, Tronstad echoes James Newman’s (2002) influential argument that, in the context of gameplay, player-characters are evaluated primarily as a set of “available capabilities and capacities,” rather than their representational traits or rich fictional biography, and that the level of engagement or presence experienced by the player is largely based on the quality of “vehicular embodiment” provided by the player-character:
This is easier to come to terms with when we think of a racing game like Gran Turismo where we drive a literal vehicle, but I am suggesting that, despite their representational traits, we can think of all videogame characters in this manner. On-Line, Lara Croft is defined less by appearance than by the fact that “she” allows the player to jump distance x.
(Newman, 2002)
For Tronstad as for Newman, embodied empathy fosters a mode of engagement wherein the player identifies primarily as their in-game representative rather than with them as a separate, fictional character. It is this former mode of identifying primarily as one’s game character as an extension of self that Tronstad deems truly “avatarial,” since it most closely emulates the relationship between Hindu gods and their avatars, and precludes the more detached “narrative” empathy experienced with a fictional character in a film or novel:
In Indian mythology, the avatar is a god’s representation on Earth; thus it seems reasonable to reserve the term for player-character relationships in which the character functions as a representation of the player in the game—in other words, for relationships where the character (avatar) has no perceptible identity of its own. To describe the player-character relationship of a player who roams (the game world) as herself, not role-playing and with no consciousness as to the character (avatar) being separate from herself, “avatar” is definitely a better word.
(Tronstad, 2008, p. 258)
For example, Tronstad asserts that the role-playing affordances of such RPGs as World of Warcraft may actually make players more cognizant of their in-game representatives as fictional characters, thus preventing these figures from being true stand-ins (and in Tronstad’s terms, avatars) for their players: “In role play, the player is more explicitly aware of the character being different from him or herself, having a separate identity with a history, drives, and motivations of its own” (2008, p. 257). When the player constructs their in-game representative to play a specific, coherent role within the fictional context of the gameworld, Tronstad suggests that the resulting figure is best understood as a character, while non-modifiable protagonists such as Lara Croft or Gordon Freeman can be viewed as avatars because their fictional identities may be bracketed off from gameplay such that they serve primarily as vehicles for the player to roam the game-world as “himself” or “herself.”
Other scholars invert this continuum between character and avatar to suggest that that the term “avatar” should be reserved for those figures that don’t just represent the player in the gameworld, but also provide a rich and vital site upon which to “play” with identity. For some, this identity play hinges upon a privileged and highly specific relationship between the player and their digital stand-in wherein the player doesn’t just control but also co-creates and modifies his or her digital stand-in throughout the course of gameplay. Laetitia Wilson (2003) suggests that avatars are virtual selves that stand in for our real-space selves, at the same time as they function “as a locus for our extended agency; a locus that is multifarious and polymorphous, displaced from the reality of our realspace selves” (n.p.).
For Wilson, avatars represent the player at the same time as they permit meaningful experimentation with shifting and multiple identities via the creative choices and interventions users may make upon their avatar’s physical attributes and gameplay capabilities. Building on Slavoj Žižek’s notion of interpassivity, Wilson asserts that video game characters are interpassive entities rather than truly “interactive” ones, soliciting “a mode of relating that involves the consensual transferral of activity or emotion onto another being or object—who consequently ‘acts’ in one’s place” (n.p.). As the interpassive object or “surrogate self” who mediates the user’s engagement with digital space, the avatar provides a locus of agency and positive identity play by allowing the user to become “the author of one’s signifiers” (n.p.). This authorship most obviously occurs in the creation of what Boellstorff (2008) terms “slider selves”—digital stand-ins that can be tweaked and modified using in-game affordances to create the player’s desired representation of him or herself in the world of the game, even if that avatar bears little resemblance to the operator-player controlling them in terms of appearance and ability (p. 129).
The element of creative choice sets avatars apart from video game characters that can’t be modified and customized, facilitating as it does the creation of a “polymorphous” virtual identity that acts meaningfully on the behalf of the real-world user. According to Zach Waggoner (2009), creative choice is crucial to understanding how players become so immersed in video games through their in-game representatives. Waggoner proposes it as the central criteria for distinguishing between those video game characters that function as true “avatars,” and those which only serve as controllable “agents” for their user:
Pac-Man cannot be altered in any way by the user. He can only be controlled. His appearance and skills can never change throughout the course of the game. That makes Pac-Man an agent. The same holds true for Spacewar’s spaceship, Lara Croft of Tomb Raider fame, Mario of Super Mario Bros, Frogger, Sonic the Hedgehog, Duke Nukem, GTA: Vice City’s Tommy Vercetti, and Perfect Dark’s Joanna Dark. All of these famous video game characters are agents, and can only be controlled by the user, never altered in appearance or skill level.
(p. 9)
As will be discussed below, agents play a crucial role as recognizable, consistent icons of the franchise they belong to, their lack of affordances for player modification enabling their ready translation into a range of ancillary merchandise, from action figures to t-shirts to breakfast cereal. In this sense, “agents” more closely resemble famous film characters, and have been a point of convergence between cinema and games since their lack of customizability enables their ready translation across media platforms. Meanwhile, rather than merely providing their users digital placeholders or vehicles within gamespace, Waggoner argues, true avatars afford them the kinds of choices that are crucial to the player’s identification with their character. For postmodern identity theorist Diana Fuss (1989), identification is a psychical mechanism that produces selfrecognition, and thus, identity formation—what Fuss terms “the detour through the other that defines a self” (p. 2). Building on Fuss’s theory, Waggoner asserts that the avatar can provide just such a detour to its user, the co-creation, modification, and transformation of the avatar as virtual identity/“other” enabling the user’s transformation and affirmation of self (p. 26).
Inverting Tronstad’s argument, Waggoner contends that role-playing video games (and the high degree of character customizability, multi-faceted attribute systems and complex in-game social relations they afford their users) are the only video game genre that facilitates the creation of true avatars. It is precisely these role-playing decisions, Waggoner suggests, that ensure player investment in their character-as-avatar. In conjunction with a detailed consideration of players who spent extensive amounts of time operating avatars in the role-playing video games The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (Bethesda, 2002), The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (Bethesda, 2007), and Fallout 3, Waggoner argues that players
cannot help but identify with the avatar as they have created it and made decisions through and for the avatar throughout the gaming experience: when to fight, when to flee, when to talk, how to talk, and where to go. These continual decisions made by each user allow for the many psychic self-reflections needed for identification … particularly if the outcome of a decision is not desirable. At the same time, the user remains aware that the … gameworld is not of their own creation—it exists outside of themselves, the virtual creation of others (game designers and programmers).
(Waggoner, 2009, p. 173)
Waggoner contends that true avatars enable the interplay between the user’s non-virtual and virtual identities to form a hybrid entity—what James Gee (2004) terms a “projective identity”—that allows both player and character to transcend their individual limitations (Waggoner, 2009, p. 173; see also Gee, 2004, p. 56). While the player remains aware of their avatar as a separate, virtual identity that exists in the context of a fictional, digital world, their constant interventions upon their character ultimately gives way to a successful “blend” of identities that ensures the player-character cannot complete the game without undergoing significant transformation.
Characters as Brands: Movies, Merchandise, and Beyond
Strong, iconic characters have always been crucial to video game franchise brand awareness and marketing, since their distinctive images can be extracted and repurposed outside of the context of gameplay through merchandise and other cross-media spin-offs. This commercial function tends to primarily be the purview of the “agent,” since these non-or-less modifiable figures bear the greatest similarities to the ways in which more traditional media characters that have functioned as licensed intellectual property. Even the earliest forays into marketing video games through merchandising—such as those for the arcade hits Space Invaders (Taito, 1978) and Pac-Man (Namco, 1980)—demonstrated this reliance on character, with the alien attackers of the former and chomping yellow circle of the latter providing a stamp of brand identity to everything from stuffed toys to pajamas to board games to pasta noodles. Given the relative graphical simplicity of these early digital worlds, characters provided the most identifiable means of extending a game into other media and types of merchandise. As the primary means through which players identify with and become invested in a video game, characters provide one of the easiest ways to encourage fans to consume merchandise and other ancillary spin-offs in addition to the game itself.
Movies
Prior to the game industry crash of 1983, video game characters were one of the first sites of convergence between cinema and games. Well-known, recognizable characters that could be readily translated from film to game were crucial to this early period of movie-game convergence, since, in theory at least, these figures were typically the easiest way to tap into pre-existing brand awareness and set new game titles apart in a marketplace on the brink of being saturated by the releases of third-party developers. This character-driven motivation for game licensing was typified by toy and game maker Parker Brothers’ foray into video games in the early 1980s, drawing on the well-known heroes of such prominent licenses as James Bond, Spider-Man, and Jaws, to name a few. As the industry-focused “Eye On” section of Videogaming Illustrated’s August, 1982 edition observed at the time:
Recognizing they were wading into heavily populated waters, Parker Bros. decided that going with “famous faces” was the best way to go. “Licensing is a factor which sets you apart to begin with” (Parker Bros. Director of Marketing Richard) Stearns notes. “It gets you recognition in the consumer’s mind, and if you can back that edge with very good gameplay, you’re on your way.”
(Anonymous, 1982, p. 10)
In video games of this era, to be visually “faithful” to a character licensed from an ostensibly “realistic” medium such as cinema was simply to ensure that, in terms of appearance, the character in question possessed at least one trait recognizable from their original medium. The most basic iconography of character thus became key to player recognition, boiled down to one or two essential traits that could be ported across media—Indiana Jones’ hat, defiant, arms-akimbo stance and undulating bullwhip, E.T.’s telescopic neck and unexpected speed, The Man of Steel’s billowing cape. In the decades since, the history of the video game character has been defined by an inexorable march toward photorealistic representation as the technology allows, a telos that seemed to suggest expanded possibilities for the convergence of cinema and games. For example, according to its press release, the game Iron Man 2 (SEGA, 2010) featured “a cast of characters that transports fans into a deeper and more authentic cinematic video game experience” through their overwhelming resemblance to their big-screen selves, while EA’s website for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Pt. 1 (2010) claimed that advances in facial animation software granted its game characters a new range of emotive expressions, all of which “add to the highly realistic and cinematic feel of the new game.” However, the mixed and, at times, even hostile reception of these photorealistic movie-licensed game characters suggests that technological convergence—evident in the shared digital imaging processes that strive to remove the aesthetic distinctions between film and game characters—does not necessarily mean these figures will succeed as converged content (Aldred, 2010).
Merchandise
Nintendo’s success in putting forth distinctive characters that translated readily into mainstream child- and youth-targeted merchandise fueled the Japanese console and software manufacturer’s rise to dominance of the North American console market in the latter half of the 1980s. Marsha Kinder (1991) suggests that, by situating the world of video games within other, more familiar contexts associated with children’s culture, video game merchandise sought out a larger audience for the games themselves at the same time as it diversified revenue streams for the game company (p. 109). Children unfamiliar with the games might seek them out after seeing or playing with the toy spin-offs of mustachioed plumber Mario of the Mario Bros. series (Nintendo, 1983–present) or the elfin Link from Legend of Zelda (Nintendo, 1986–present). Conversely, those players wishing to expand Mario’s or Link’s in-game adventures beyond the finite number of levels of their respective games could do so through imaginative play with the action figurines based on their favorite characters.
Game characters became proprietary symbols, their recognition and value (and thus, that of their attendant franchises) ensured through licensed products. Nintendo’s Pokemon franchise still represents one of the most successful examples of character-driven merchandise designed to capitalize on all facets of the youth market. (At the peak of its popularity in 2000, Nintendo had dozens of licensees producing hundreds of different products based on the franchise; see Kline et al., 2003, p. 240.) With a Nintendo Game Boy game that necessitated the capture, collection, and training of various, adorable creatures called Pokemon (or “pocket monsters” in English) at its center, the Pokemon franchise created licensed merchandise that was tightly integrated with the game’s focus on creature collection and reinforced by the emphatic franchise slogan, “Gotta catch ’em all!” Younger kids could collect the toys, move on to the trading cards, and then to the various video games in the series. Spin-off animated television shows and a Pokemon movie supported this exhaustive, cross-media consumption by emphasizing the name, identity, and importance of collecting each character—who, for example, tended to chant their own names repeatedly, so that children quickly figured out who was who.
The merchandising appeal and potential of prominent video game characters has since come to transcend the boundaries of children’s and youth culture. Some of the most critically and commercially-acclaimed console game franchises of the past decade have featured extraordinarily-detailed “collector’s edition” models of their most prominent characters, the appearance and hefty price tag of which appeal far more to the adult enthusiast than the doll-and-toy collecting child. For example, a “Fury Statue” of Ezio Auditore, the hero of Assassin’s Creed II (Ubisoft, 2009), will cost its buyer nearly $500, making the $100 price tag of Arkham Asylum’s (Rock Steady, 2009) hideous Joker action figure seem a bargain by comparison. Meanwhile, other notable franchises have promoted “limited” and “collector’s edition” game releases rife with accessories, costumes, and gear that seek to extend the reach of the character into the player’s everyday life—by donning a replica of Cole McGrath’s sling backpack from Infamous 2 (Sucker Punch, 2011), or a full-size Master Chief helmet from Halo 3, or even by practicing some unofficial covert ops with a working pair of Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 (Infinity Ward, 2009) night-vision goggles. And while it remains doubtful that any hardened criminals are roaming the streets with a replica of Nico Bellic’s duffel bag and safety deposit box from Grand Theft Auto IV (Rock Star, 2008), the quasi-gritty realism of these items speaks to the widening generational appeal and impact of the video game character, at the same time as it testifies to their complexity as both player-representatives and fictional entities.
As video game characters come to serve as but one node of a fictional identity within a franchise-driven, transmedia landscape that forces the movement of intellectual property across multiple media platforms, their various obligations to the ludic, representational, and extra-diegetic commercial systems that comprise the game and its promotion will increasingly overlap and coalesce. Furthermore, the elision of technological and aesthetic boundaries between video game and cinema characters suggests a future where these boundaries may no longer matter. However, as this essay has argued, it remains necessary to analyze the video game character through a medium-specific framework that acknowledges its particularities—ever changing though they may be—as an object of study.
References
Aldred, J. (2010). A question of character: Transmediation, abstraction and identification in early games licensed from movies. In M. J. P. Wolf (Ed.), Before the crash: Early video game history (pp. 90–104). Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
Anonymous. (August 1982). Eye On. Videogaming Illustrated.
Berger, A. A. (2002). Video games: A popular culture phenomenon. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
Boellstorff, T. (2008). Coming of age in second life: An anthropologist explores the virtually human. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Burn, A. (2006). Playing roles. In D. Carr, D. Buckingham, A. Burn, & G. Schott (Eds.), Computer games: Text, narrative, and play (pp. 72–87). Buckingham: Polity Press.
Fuss, D. (1989). Essentially speaking: Feminism, nature & difference. New York: Routledge.
Galloway, A. (2006). Gaming: Essays on algorithmic culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Gee, J. (2004). What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kinder, M. (1991). Playing with power in movies, television and video Games: From Muppet babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Kline, S., Dyer-Witheford, N., & De Peuter, G. (2003). Digital play: The interaction of technology, culture and marketing. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Kromand, D. (2007). Avatar categorization. In Situated play: Proceedings of 2007DiGRA conference. (pp. 400–406). Tokyo: University of Tokyo. Retrieved July 7, 2011, from www.digra.org/dl/db/07311.16435.pdf
Morningstar, C. & Farmer, R. F. (1991). The lessons of Lucasfilm’s habitat. In M. Benedikt (Ed.), Cyberspace: First steps (pp. 273–301). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Newman, J. (2002). The myth of the ergodic video game: Some thoughts on player-character relationships in video games. Game Studies, 2(1). Retrieved August 15, 2012, from www.gamestudies.org/0102/newman/.
Salen, Z. & Zimmerman, E. (2004). Rules of play: Game design fundamentals. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Tronstad, R. (2008). Character identification in World of Warcraft: The relationship between capacity and appearance. In H. Corneliussen & J. W. Rettberg (Eds.), Digital culture, play and identity: A World of Warcraft reader (pp. 249–264). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Waggoner, Z. (2009). My avatar, myself: Identity in video role-playing games. Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland.
Wilson, L. (2003). Interactivity or interpassivity: A Question of agency in digital play. University of Western Australia. Retrieved July 6, 2011, from hypertext.rmit.edu.au/dac/papers/Wilson.pdf.
Yakal, K. (1986, October). Habitat: A look at the future of online games. Compute! Magazine.