What Does It Mean To Player Character?

[Music] when I sat down to write an episode about player characters I tried to do a bit of research and what I found was that the writing surrounding role-playing for digital games is kind of awkward game studies writing tends to downplay role playing itself in favor of looking at systems where role-playing happens for example here are some passages from the chapter and sälen and Zimmerman's rules of play where they define what a game is quote a game is a system in which players engage in artificial conflict defined by rules that results in a quantifiable outcome end quote from there they bring up role-playing games quote there are RPGs that the emphasized power statistics and advancement and instead focus on storytelling and narrative this form of RPG seems very unlike games as we have defined them unquote basically the book argues that role-playing by its own as an activity doesn't have a quantifiable outcome and as a result can't be called ludecke play proper but if an RPG can be beaten or if we can look at role-playing games in the context of their battle systems which present encounters that can be won then we can look at RPGs through the lens of games because they have a quantifiable outcome this leave systems designed to facilitate role-playing itself kind of a blind spot and that's emphasized by the fact that the following is the only real mention of role-playing in the entire book quote from a social play point of view when a player enters into the system of a game that player is given a role to play by role we don't mean that the player becomes a character in a story rather we mean that each player has a role in the social network of a game role-playing in this context is centered on the nature of a player's relationships being recontextualized within the context and framing of a game that is to people who might barely know each other or might even be friends can suddenly become enemies actively working against one another when playing a pickup game of basketball now there's something to be said about the nature of the magic circle and how all games confer a degree of role-playing but that's not the sort of role-playing I'm interested in talking about here also it's important to note that this book came out in 2003 and a lot has happened in the last almost 15 years and Eric Zimmerman was quoted as recently as GDC 2019 is saying that systems are actually one of the most restrictive things about modern games so I don't want to frame this one book as indicative of all thought on the matter but this line of thinking is out there and it's pretty pervasive in game studies at least in my experience meanwhile the research that does focus on role playing were one steps into a character is largely focused on the sociological nature of role-playing divorced from its nature as media indeed some of these texts posit that the traditional people's history of role-playing games might have a bit of a Ludo centric vent to it quoting dr. Sarah Lynn Bauman in her 2010 book the functions of role-playing games quote though historians focus more on the influence of war games and fantasy fiction when explaining the development of RPGs the loose format of improvisational theater had already begun to spread in popularity therefore the concept of improv more than likely provided a model for the burgeoning new art form emerging at the same time role-playing games that book is actually super interesting if you want to look at the sociological aspects of role play as an empathetic exercise as therapy as ritual but it is expressly more interested in role-playing as a window to our collective unconscious as how we define roles for one another and how role-playing Connect is a transformative experimental liminal playful space but not so much how role-playing functions as authored media to quote dr. Bowman again quote I believe that a true role-playing game must involve some combination of the following three major elements first a role-playing game should establish some sense of community through a ritualized shared storytelling experience amongst multiple players RPGs should also involve some form of game system which provides the framework for the enactment of specific scenarios and the solving of problems within them finally for a game to be considered role-playing the players must on some level alter their primary sense of identity and develop an alternate self through a process known as identity alteration this definition manages to focus on player expression but sort of disregards the notion of what the system itself entails and completely disregards symbol play RPGs all of this makes sussing out the nature of player characters and role-playing mechanics in digital games somewhat difficult because there's not much in the way of a cohesive framing for the topic if I want to talk about players taking on a role or engaging in some sort of AI identity altering performance that research largely ignores the systems which enable people to do that and instead focuses on the sociological aspects of it the identity transformation itself rules and boundaries may enable the ritual and performance of role-playing but it is the ritual and performance itself that matters in this view not the system's if I do expressly want to talk about the design of those game systems that facilitate role-playing the actual performative character-driven role-playing part tends to be pushed aside or at best referred to loosely as expressive play were the expressions from players themselves matter less than the systems that facilitate them the discussions and game design circles are less about the performances of players and what they might mean then how to design a sufficiently wide possibility space for players to explore and play around in and all of this is super frustrating for someone who like me wants to discuss the design of player characters and role playing in digital single-player computer games but there are some reasons for this divide for one role-playing is historically a social activity if I take on a role in an RPG that role is validated by the game master and other players observing my performance and responding to it and kind it is true collaborative storytelling where a small team of individuals work together to make if not a traditionally structured narrative a compelling adventure that they feel that they themselves have been on but what does it mean to roleplay to oneself validated not by the observation of others but simply by the joy of creating a character or empathetically trying to step into someone else's headspace what does the ritual of giving up your identity and taking on the mantle of another mean if no one is there to witness or validate it and how expressive can one possibly be in a digital space in the world of video games the dungeon master is absent the possibility space isn't the broad anything-goes nature of a pen and paper role-playing session in Dungeons and Dragons you may be able to play a braggart in a tavern you could see an attractive person at the bar and drunkenly boast of your previous adventures a Bleakley referenced in your character bio and the dungeon master could use that as an excuse to get you into a bar fighter have a character approach you with a proposition for a quest that sort of natural back and forth can't happen in a video game where the possibility space has to be defined in advanced by rigid systems and rules and prepackaged content like writing and voice acting in a sense digital single player role-playing could be seen as something of an aberration an attempt to fit a round peg into a square hole so maybe it's best to step back and look at how player characters are used across the board in video games as with everything I see on this channel that's sort of an overgeneralization half researched academic thing everything I'm about to say you can find some really cool counter examples - and none of this is meant to be a rigid ontology with hardline definitions games and characters can use more than one of these ideas at once and this is more of a casual observation to spark discussion or series of musings than anything all of that said at the risk of oversimplifying 50 some odd years of game design and development historically speaking I feel like there's sort of two philosophies regarding player characters and video games that is there's two broad traditions that generally guide the designs of mechanics surrounding how we define a player character and what their role in a game is or maybe how a player is supposed to approach the relationship with the player character first there are the player character as avatars these are characters where the player has no strong influence as to who the character is in any way think of pretty much any iconic playable videogame character from before 2010 or so Raziel from soul reaver doom guy Mario Sonic the Hedgehog Solid Snake Altai err duke nukem Guybrush Threepwood Master Chief Nathan Drake and Lara Croft are all characters that fit this loose description when playing the game you may embody or puppeteer the character and guide them through the game world but there's a solid line between you the player and them the character there is nothing you can do that really changes the expression of the character in the text we were only temporarily disabling the Tao you need to remove each lens individually carefully release the hinges these are also usually not always but usually games were the story and gameplay are pretty well divided allowing the characters to exist in cutscenes and marketing materials while in game they more or less just facilitate gameplay by acting as an avatar for your actions and in that sense they sort of oscillate between being new and being themselves and because these characters exist independently from you and your in-game self there's a distance there if you die in Super Mario Brothers you tend to say I died not Mario died Mario is a cartoon plumber who saves princesses by jumping around that's who he is and what his story is Mario the character is infallible his story is set he saves princesses he defeats Bowser you the player are not infallible and it was in some sense you up on the screen falling down into that pit failing to tell Mario story properly rather than Mario failing to save peach your failure in these games isn't viewed as a legitimate outcome it's a miss telling of someone else's tale but I knew with a certainty I could not explain that those winged creatures had a master the man who had tricked me into opening the our paths now had his prize no no no that didn't happen massed out again in these games gameplay feels like it's the domain of the player rather than the character this can be useful in some games the Stanley parable makes delightful use of the players impish desire to not play along with a set narrative when Stanley came to a set of to open doors he entered the door on his left this was not the correct way to the meeting room and standing you it perfectly well perhaps he wanted to stop by the employee lounge first just to admire it Stanley the character goes left but you the player can go any which way you please but other times it can be harmful to the game take BioShock Infinite for example in the opening of the game the player character booker dewitt arrives in the cloud city of columbia once there he needs to be baptised before entering columbia proper now that the baptism is not optional it's the only way into the city and it triggers a plot critical cutscene so there's no way you can skip it and as a result some people found this uncomfortable enough to ask for a refund back before Steam even did refunds one could read this as extremely empathetic role-playing after all earlier in the game Booker finds a basin with a wash away your sins sign plastered above it and he responds like this good luck with that pal but I would actually argue the opposite that because it was the player that had to push the button to initiate and accept the baptism and because it was done in first person and because religious content can be so personal and because Booker is a scripted character that we've only known for five minutes there really wasn't an insulative fictive barrier between Booker DeWitt and the player to make it his action and not yours to sum this scene felt tantamount to the game asking them to commit to a virtual baptism and I think it has to do with the fact that Booker DeWitt only really exists in cutscenes and it's not just the players actions and gameplay that can be impacted by how you approach a player character keeping this distance between player and protagonists can be a useful storytelling tool I think this is actually critical in games like The Last of Us spec ops the line god of war or yes even BioShock Infinite games where the player characters actions need to be questioned by ensuring a line in the sand between the actions and personality of the player character and the in-game actions of the player the player character can be portrayed as flawed malicious broken wrong or dangerous in ways that become difficult if the player has more direct control over how that character gets expressed or what their personality is meanwhile the other tradition of player characters traces the roots of their design back to pen-and-paper role-playing games the fundamental differences between these characters and the player characters as avatars is an emphasis on collaborative storytelling and empathetic role-playing that is the player is asked to step into the role of a character to internalize their thought process and behave like them and are given mechanics and choices that allow them to enact that performance in the space of the game where avatars are created entirely by the game developer the authorship of role-playing characters if not the adventure they go on lies with both the player and the game developer role-playing characters are co-authored creations where the player has real agency in determining who these people are the breadth of player expression with these characters can vary and a lot of instances they are in the truest sense of the word player generated characters players can determine their gender their appearance their skills their play style players are sometimes encouraged to write a bit of backstory for these characters to help solidify a context history and motivation for their behaviors again games with a direct line to pen and paper RPGs but other times narrative or other reasons players may not be able to fully define the character but that doesn't mean they aren't expressive take tyranny where the player has to definitionally be a high-ranking commander in the evil army that does evil things for the evil Lord's will but it's how that character deals with that position that really drives the narrative and defines the character or look at Planescape torment where the players take on the role of the nameless one a character with a set physicality and appearance and gender and starting play style and even a bit of set history but from there players can control what sort of person the nameless one becomes how he solves problems and what the ultimate conclusion to his story is it still invites you into his headspace and it still gives you the expressive space to figure out who this person is and for you to behave like them these are games that tend to emphasize player choice as an expressive act with an eye towards minimizing the distance between the player and the character these expressions can come about in any number of ways and there's a whole myriad of role-playing systems that we could talk about I'm not going to get into all of them here but let's go over the usual there's stat systems that allow you to describe a character that has specific strengths and weaknesses you could have a ninja character that's great at sneaking and melee combat but terrible at haggling with vendors for a good price or romancing people or you could have a super charismatic genius who is terrible at combat and tries to just talk their way out of as many problems as possible it's a way to systemic Lee codify a character's skills training behavior interests or abilities by allowing them to have strengths and critically weaknesses another approach may be dialog trees that allow you to express your character's views in-game and have the world react to those views in kind you could flirt with the lady at the club or be all business I can tell you and I are going to get along just like fire hoses when we get turned on bouncing you smell new little girl like fabric softener dew on freshly mowed astroturf I'm not frightened and my duckling I was just thinking about this delicious little pancake who came into my club and wasn't so sweet because she was soaked in vinegar or you could have your character threatened the schlubby nighttime guard or just sneak into the art house unseen with feats of strength stats help determine your character through their actions and abilities but dialogue options and how the game responds to them help you to find your character's place in the game world their position relative to other people and how their scene finally there may be narrative choices or quests with multiple endings that have an impact on the narrative your character literally shaping the world in the story around them less is an expression of character than as an actual act of collaborative storytelling the point is that the game wants you to express a character through choices and that choice is validated not through the observation of a game master or your peers like in pen-and-paper role-playing games but by the system tipping its hat and accommodating your choices by having the other characters in the world respond to the decisions you make now this approach to player characters tends to be less common in computer games like we discussed earlier single-player role-playing games are something of an aberration and so you don't see them as often as you do in multiplayer or pen and paper games but they do exist and they're some of my favorite titles there's a distinct pleasure in the creativity involved in sculpting a whole person using the context of the game as a springboard and there's also a pleasure in the performance itself to be the strong if dim brute who critically bungles a simple conversation check but then beats his way out of the room regardless of how many enemies he makes would you please use your special talents and read my garden of the plants of dark so your aura grace my presence when you are oh come to my door when you're done and I'll give you something good or to be the smartass super science hacker that is obnoxious and worthless in a fight who survives just by running away from almost any encounter even if it's when he antagonized his way into there's a perverse joy in trying to think of the way those characters would think to internalize their motivations and see the world as they might however briefly and then to have the game reflect those decisions in the game space it's a beautiful dance but it's hard to get right and it's also one that's kind of a hard sell to mainstream audiences it's fun but it's a dorky kind of fun that's hard to get people to just spend a Saturday night doing and yeah I think historically those are the two approaches you may have seen to designing player characters with player characters as avatars far more common than the expressive role-playing kind but recently I think we've seen the emergence of a new philosophy regarding how to approach player characters and it's one that seems to have cropped up primarily though not exclusively in big-budget games trying to integrate role-playing mechanics for their longevity while still providing a scripted cinematic narrative and this is the idea of what I'm going to slogan here and call the role flexible player character a sort of player character that imparts a degree of player authorship but not enough to fundamentally alter who this character is you've seen this approach to player characters all over blockbuster games lately you are Alexios or cassandra grandchild of Leonidas and the magical assassin bloodline runs through you you are Geralt of Rivia which are trained to hunt monsters beasts and demons in exchange for coin and despite your gruff exterior you find yourself emotionally attached to the people in your life you are Adam Jensen security guard in love with Megan who was brutally injured on an attack at a state job and given a robot body he famously never asked for you RA Lloyd the outcast nor a woman who has some unknown connection to the technology of the Ancient Ones these are characters with set personalities set attributes set worldviews set characterizations they have extensive speaking roles where voice actors conferred their take on the character into the delivery any final lessons before I headed No you've learned every lesson the wilds have to teach it was you who taught me not the wild they are definitively not the players creation and they are fully formed when you the player arrived to take over their role but they are also undeniably bendy flexible able to be toyed with a bit yeah why don't you tell us a little more about yourself Lee where are you from I grew up in meek right here in the heart of Java Adam Jensen can be insolent about his augmentations or he can be indifferent your version of Geralt may always get his coin or he may violate that rule in the name of the greater good your Alexios can sleep around most of Greece or they could be largely chaste you're a Loy can have moments of mercy or moments of short tempered determination these aren't roles you create they're pre-written roles that you get to slip into but the games intentionally provide you with the expressive space to make them your own a little bit think of it as an actor who's allowed to have a little fun with the character as written you can ad-lib a line or two or come up with an effect but you're not gonna escape what's written on the page and I feel like this represents something of a new approach to designing player characters that we haven't seen much of before because it takes ideas from the role-playing approach and sort of warps what those mechanics are used for unlike player characters as avatars players do take some degree of ownership over expressing these characters and there's an attempt to break down that distancing wall between the player and the character at least a little bit did you find my brother whisky he didn't survive I'm sorry no to save his own life he chose to work for the Pirates they would have killed him otherwise there was nothing I could do what my brother would rather die than work for pirates pirates killed our Father last summer he said that everything about the sea since then tell me the truth your brother's dead I didn't what you dare Assassin's Creed honestly doesn't really give you the option to roleplay but it does give you the option to make Alexios kind of a dick but at the same time these games are not about facilitating collaborative storytelling where players guide the narrative itself or even just allowing players to scope the character through their choices like let's break down some of these mechanics and how they're fundamentally different from the role-playing approach in role-playing games dialog options exist not just for lore but for character expression or stat based skill checks to pull off conversational feats like intimidation again the world responds to your expression of the character your performance in order to validate it in games with a more role flexible take on player characters you still end up with dialogue choices but they aren't really expressive take for example this exchange between vesemir and Geralt across poem won it in a card game while you run around might come in handy do we chastise vesemir for gambling or do we make fun of him for handing us a decidedly non witchery weapon both options feel more or less appropriate for the character and they have literally no impact of the story that always lectured us on the evils but you're a gambler yourself stop talking got a griffon to kill which with the crossbow we breaking with tradition stop talking got a Griffon to kill I would argue this isn't really a role-playing option per se but it's shaped like one for one the game doesn't respond to the choice in any way vesemir doesn't even respond differently it's also not really so much about making a choice from the mindset of the character it isn't asking you to be Geralt and make an informed role-playing decision from his mindset instead it's more asking what you would like to see happen next if it is an expressive choice at all it's an expression of your interest in thoughts on the situation not Geralt at its most effective these sorts of choices allow you to explore different angles of a set character by slightly altering the dialogue to unearth various sides of their personality or to bounce certain quips off of the person you're responding to horizon zero dawn for example has at various points along the game the option for a lloyd to respond to characters in different ways the game literally defines these as an inconsequential choice based on various aspects of her personality that are totally up to you to explore hey Lloyd can use her intellect or a low I can show her compassion or a Lloyd can show her vengeance none of these choices really alters her character in any profound way because she shows all of these attributes throughout the game but letting you select her response lets you shade her a bit towards whatever of her personality traits you like the best it's potentially a really neat way to poke at a character's edges without giving up authorship dialog choices in these games are less about expressing a character than they are about exploring the text whether that's optional or in exposition or exploring how a character may interact with others another key mechanic co-opted from role-playing games but then stripped of its expressive nature our modern skill systems these are endemic to open-world titles these days and I've been mown than before in games like fallout 4 basically we no longer sculpt the character that has strengths and weaknesses but instead get presented with a series of abilities typically from three tiers for some reason open to the character and simply pick the order in which they are unlocked there's no such thing as a character who is bad at things and good at other things just characters who have a set list of abilities and aren't the best at something yet everyone's Alexio sir Cassandra were stealthy assassins who were also bold warriors who were also expert marksmen with a bow and arrow the only question is the order in which you became hyper proficient in each of those categories much like in the player character as Avatar approach it feels like the ideal versions of these characters already have all these powers we just need to grind up enough to live up to them finally there's the aspect of narrative choice in player character as avatar games you don't really have them in games where player characters take after pen and paper role-playing characters narrative choices come about as a consequence of the characters influence in the game world but much like the dialog options decisions in these recent games aren't really driven by the player making decisions as a character who you save at the end of the first chapter of The Walking Dead is more of a hoodie like more choice than a who would Lee Everett save in this scenario choice big narrative choices in these games are there to make the player feel like they matter to the game world not the characters themselves and that's the thing that tends to unite all of these mechanics and how they're used in this roleplay flexible system they're centered not on role-playing but on the player choosing an outcome that's favorable to them as a player / person they don't engage players with the inner workings and belief systems of their pre-scripted characters but instead occasionally allow players and indulgence of control their role-playing choices but stripped of the roleplay and focus solely on the idea of choice in the abstract but at the same time maybe this is how you fit that square peg into the round hole it's no longer about the validation of a performance but about exploring a pre-written text which is what digital games are really more suited to and the process can produce fleshed out well-written player characters that we feel more attached to and have some sense of ownership over while still allowing them to have the integrity of an author dark so those are what I would argue are the three dominant approaches to player characters and story driven single-player games today if we want to put it in terms of vampires because that's fun you have Raziel the avatar vampire the masquerade - role-playing character and dr. Jonathan Reed sibling murdering World War one vet that you have some modest power over the presentation of there's probably even more that could be said about games where player characters are even more abstract like civilization or Alpha Centauri or where the relationship between your play and the characters on the screen is more complicated than a one-to-one relationship like in say The Sims again none of this is meant to be a Thorat ativ concrete or complete more like researched musings to get us talking about all this stuff I feel like the use and applications of player characters is an under explored concept like rules of play said you step into a role whenever you play a game that role recontextualizes your relationship with everything around you thinking about how that role is structured can help us understand how that recontextualization works in the system's we build the stories we tell and the characters we explore [Music] [Music]

Channel: Errant Signal

Views: 117,365

Rating: 4.9166093 out of 5

Keywords: errant signal, player character, player characters

Id: fKY1ORCSICY

Length: 28min 2sec (1682 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 04 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Narrative_Causality]

I don't know, I'm just not feeling this one. I was hoping for some kind of exploration into what it means to the player to play a character different from themselves(Either racial, gender, etc.), especially in multiplayer spaces.

But it's basically a history and analysis of what player expression means for game systems in single player games. That's cool, I guess? But definitely not what I was hoping for or wanting.