Altercharacter and identity: The practice of choice-making in narrative video games

Abstract

This thesis investigates the relationship between player and video game through player-character relationships, choice-making, and the player's emotional engagement. Specifically, it rethinks the relationship between player and player-character in the context of player choice, emotion, and subjective experience. It addresses the role the different facets of the player-game relationship play in the player's choice-making processes, as well as the driving factors behind the player's choice-making behaviours in the context of the player's subjectivity, interpretation, and emotional engagement. This thesis also puts forward a comprehensive method encompassing gameplay analysis, autoethnographic research with a focus on the player-researcher perspective, and ethnographic research in the form of participant observation and semi-structured interviews to enable an in-depth analysis of the different aspects of the gaming experience, offering new ways to address the subjective and emotional dimensions of this experience. Throughout this thesis, I establish that the dynamics of the player-game relationship in narrative video games are not only informed by, but actively shape the player's engagement with an interactive narrative, drawing on a notion of agency as a communicative, interreactive process in which player and game affect each other reciprocally. The framework of the gaming experience that is formulated in this thesis acknowledges this interreactive relationship and the player's active role of interpretation, meaning-making, and choice-making by setting out the concept of the 'altercharacter' as the entity that is formed through the process of making choices. Building on the foundation of the player's subjective experience and the communicative nature of the gaming experience, I establish choice-making as a practice that is shaped by both player and game, and is embedded within a wider cultural framework of gaming behaviours and literacies. The player's choice-making practices are also shaped by the altercharacter, whose construction has emotional consequences for the player via a shared sense of responsibility.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Samantha Schäfer: orcid.org/0000-0002-0344-1851

ORCID for Seth Giddings: orcid.org/0000-0001-7323-9184

ORCID for Daniel Ashton: orcid.org/0000-0002-3120-1783

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