Deconstructing the player

 And reconstructing the world

The 'Avatar' is the traditional means by which a player interacts with a game, but the types of avatar's that exist, alongside the absence of one all together, number in the dozens. Typically, when we really take a step back and look at the grand picture, it's the way that we players are able to interact through our Avatar's which determines the genre of the game. Create any sort of world you want, built on whatever themes, or historical significance, you can fathom; but stick the camera above the player at an angle and you'll be typically looking at an ARPG. Throw it in their head and you're looking at a First Person Adventure game, give them a gun and it's a first person shooter. Throw them into the sky and give them dozens of NPCs to play around and it's a 'God Game'. Any genre starts and is built around the player and the experience you want to inflict them with.

When I was more of a Horror Game lover, I remember being somewhat fascinated with the divide that genre has when it comes to the way it treats it's players. Most horror games are first person, obviously because they want to place the player in the shoes of the unnerving situation so they lose themselves to the fiction of it and are more likely to be scared; (and high quality 3D models are hard to make, that too.) but there is a fundamental distinct between styles of Horror game that, to this day, I don't think has a name. I'm talking the types of horror game where your main interaction with the world is how you hide away from monsters and the stalking horrors, and the other type of horror game where you fight back, usually whilst managing supplies and ammo, thus adding on tension not present in usual 'shoot 'em up' first person games.

Obviously the vulnerability of the player is several worlds apart between those two different styles of approaching the player in what is ostensibly the same genre. In the former example you play the victim, forever at the whim of the experience and the centre of an almost passive procession of emotional manipulation. For the latter style the player typically starts off as a victim, but has the chance to change that power dynamic slowly through the game by becoming more proficient, earning more tools, and becoming familiar with the way the world works. Think the difference between a game like 'Outlast', where you run around finding batteries so you can avoid the scary men in the dark, and 'Resident Evil' where you're always fighting back and getting to the point where you win out on top of whatever horror of the night dares threaten you.

But then there are games when there is no player avatar at all, and the player is more a suggestion of a role- the aforementioned 'god game'. In this style of game the player is not usually the subject of directed manipulation, but rather given the tools of the manipulator. (Or rather, the illusion of those tools. Actually asking players to code the game would be a little much.) Maybe you take charge of a faceless 'city council' who dictates the layout of city blocks, or the entirety of a race as they evolve throughout history, or even the elements themselves! These are games all about control and freedom, and breaking players out of the fleshy bodies of a singular avatar is the first step to realising that sensation of total, unfettered, control.

In some games the player acts as something of a possessor, inhabiting the shell of a character who already lives within the world they exist, with a personality and goals- for which the player merely acts as 'puppeteer'. Of course, this is the traditional way that action games operate, and adventure titles, giving the player a titular 'character' to play as rather than a blank slate for them to inhabit. Of course, there's always an inherit degree of immersion between the player and their avatar in any game, and even the most vocal and loud-personality character is going to be built to fit into that space somewhat. Some Avatar's are designed to take advantage of that immersion, providing a slate that isn't entirely blank, for the player to write in the blurb. I'm talking about heroes like Master Chief, who is very clear about his goals, but didn't really talk about his moment-to-moment thoughts and motivations until the later titles by 343. (You know, around about the time that 343 decided to make him an ultra special 'chosen one'. Sigh...)

Role playing games boast a very special relationship between the player and their avatar, where they become the person they control (perspective irrelevant) to such an extent where they help actually design that character to some extent. Maybe you'll pick their looks, decide how their skills blossom, choose what choices they make in the story. These are the relationships where the barrier between what the player wants and what the character wants is made so thin as to be imperceptible, so that 'ideally' the player never loses that suit of immersion connecting them with the heart of the player character. Role Playing games thrive best with the cooperation of the player to buy into their fiction, immersion with their world and believing themselves to be the avatar they control.

And there are also the games where the avatar is a cast of characters that we choose from. In fighting games, racing games, or competitive multiplayer games- the player has a slew of distinct defined and designed avatar's that they slip into the skin of and play as. Whether it's a Nintendo character in Super Smash Bros., a Warner Bros. alumni in 'Multiversus' or a member of 'Overwatch'- the character's themselves are icons, pre-existing and defined, with the player merely controlling them for their talents, usually for short bursts at a time. Like stepping into the skin of a celebrity who is famous for doing a certain thing and acts a certain way, you borrow their mannerisms and their talent, but you aren't taking their talents and fame for your own.

The very concept of an avatar is so essential to the fundamentals of game design that we don't even think about it anymore whenever we engage with a new game. Whereas once there was a cognitive connection that any person had to make when starting a game, figuring out which one of these squares was controllable in Pong, nowadays it's become the breathing heart of design to make that process so utterly intuitive that the player knows what they're getting before they load the game up on their system. Of course, it is the most simple and intrinsic parts of any craft that seem the most immutable, until someone comes along and reinvents the wheel before your very eyes, redefining what you thought a game even was.

I think the next stage of transcendent game design lies in meddling with these fundamentals and reconstructing them, but by pure merit of being fundamentals, the very conception of such a 'meddling' seems like a nearly impenetrable subject. There's a reason why I'm discussing this topic in abstract indirects, you can't really define coming up with a whole new way of looking at the already defined. But what I do think is that in the years to come, as systems become more powerful and some of these superstar 'auteur' developers become ever more unshackled by corporate bounds, we're going to start getting games that push the concept of gaming in directions we can conceive of today and those we never even thought of. And then maybe we too can, finally, be Strand-like.