Tell Me I'm Evil - Complicity as its own reward

The relationship between a player and their avatar is a gray space of identification and distance. To speak of a video game's controllable protagonist as a self-contained character whose choices remain wholly their own would ignore the player's role in facilitating movements and actions that further a plot line - player-characters do not have total autonomy, and if they did, they would cease to be player-characters. Control plays a role, and when writing about our interactions with a game's narrative it's tempting to reduce the player-character to a digitized stand-in for ourselves. But it is equally wrong to assume that the sprite gallivanting from level to level is an unmediated projection of the player into the game world, and this becomes abundantly clear in moments that force distance into our relationship with the player-character. The hybrid nature of this entity is evident in the aforementioned portmanteau that we often use to refer to it. The player-character is a being unto itself, who is experienced by us, the players.

This is perhaps a poor reframing of David Myers' argument that games exist as zones of anti-form, where we enact performances and adopt roles with the implicit understanding that we are suspending our regular identities for a while. We understand that the characters' actions are their own in the context of the fictionalized narrative space in which we perform, but we still have some tether of complicity in the very act of performing. Traditionally, the mechanical component of this tether aligns with the narrative one: "Successfully" completing a difficult game offers a satisfaction in reaching a narrative "happy ending" for the character, and leaves players with a sense of accomplishment in the mechanical skills that it took to get there. Failure can elicit disappointment, frustration, or guilt in a similarly direct relationship between the narrative and the mechanical. Crystal Dynamics' Tomb Raider reboot offers a good example of this - when the player fails a quick-time event sequence (requiring them to respond quickly to button prompts during a cinematic cutscene section), they are not only made to start the section over again, but are forced to watch sympathetic protagonist Lara get gored in grotesque and disturbing ways (as you might expect the linked video is pretty graphic).

The goal of this conventionally direct pairing of player goals (mechanical) with character goals (narrative) is to create a unity of affective response. If you do well, you are unequivocally rewarded. If you fail, your failure is unambiguous. This is because video games have historically had win conditions rooted in reward and the generation of positive affect. In my experience, the "art game" has been the most eager genre to depart from this model and intentionally try to weave negative affect into the "win condition" that completes the game's story. Most often, this is done through a reveal that complicates either the player's relationship to their avatar or their understanding of the actions they've been performing (or both). In cases like Jonathan Blow's Braid, the twist exploits the complicity of the player/character relationship to suddenly alienate players from the sprite they've been controlling AND from themselves - it makes them realize that the character they've been experiencing the game through is not as he seems, and urges them to reflect on the assumptions that they've internalized about the actions and motivations within a game space that come naturally to them. We can pair this with Dennaton Games' Hotline Miami, a top-down action game that lets the player get comfortable with its familiar brand of grindhouse arcade violence before it asks you "do you like hurting other people?" The crucial difference here is that the player is at no point unaware that their gameplay interventions amount to committing copious acts of violence - the game needs only address this fact directly for the ethics of rote "kill 'em all" mechanics to come into question. Such games signal to us that our very involvement in the game is morally wrong (I'm specifically thinking of the flags at the end of each world in Braid that read things like "stop" and "go back" in nautical code, as well as the various screens in Liz Ryerson's Problem-Attic that read "GO FUCK YOURSELF" above the platforming challenges). But of course the developers don't expect that we'll stop playing. These games count on our continued experience of negative or conflicting feelings to effectively challenge us and convey moral or critical messages.

What I find interesting is that this kind of fourth wall-breaking generation of negative affect is so damn addicting. Looking at the response to games like these and the kind of cathartic guilt that players package in terms like "mindfuck," it seems like more often than not players love being problematized. The "You've Been the Bad Guy All Along" or its variant "You've Become the Bad Guy" are now narrative tropes that have found their way into Triple-A titles like Spec Ops: The Line and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (the infamous "No Russian" scene), and oftentimes this twist is treated as a selling point along the lines of narrative spectacle or a "deepness" quality toted by the game's fans. Players of these games experience a different kind of dual satisfaction having finished them - the "happy ending" narrative satisfaction is replaced with a kind of enjoyable guilt, a delightedness at having been tricked and a sense of reflexive criticism that doesn't go so far as to impede their mechanical enjoyment of the game. Hotline Miami wouldn't be fun if the player decided "you know what, I don't like hurting people" and quit to the main menu. More often than not, people don't feel like their experience of a game was negated or ruined in any way when the ending surprises them with an unpleasant re-contextualization of their actions.

Of course, this kind of "gotcha!" procedural rhetoric is only effective if you feel connected in some way to the player-character. I think such a counter-example comes out a little in Ryerson's highly personal essay The Other Side of Braid, where she interprets the ending of Blow's game as an unearned revelation for the character rather than a snare that is meant to suddenly distance her from her avatar. Ryerson's read of the game was much more diegetically-focused than I expected, and I wonder if it's because she didn't make the same assumptions about her relationship to her character as I did, and thus was held at more distance from Tim from the outset. As I tried to articulate at the beginning of my post, I think the relationship between the player and the player character is in a constant flux state of identification and distance. Player-characters are always "other" in a meaningful way, but this distance exists in varying degrees. It's also possible that I'm drawing faulty conclusions from Ryerson's self-reported experience of the game. I don't really know.

Since I made a bunch of assumptions about reactions to these games, I would love to hear about how all of you related (or didn't) to Braid's protagonist and how that effected your experience of the game's reveal! On the level of entertainment, satisfaction, etc, how do you experience negative affect in games? Is the guilt enjoyable for you, or does it deter you from playing further?