I’m not really a gamer. Every time my friends and I play Mario Party I loose: Unless we play the candy shakedown mini game, in which case I dominate. When I play Fortnite I run around and hide because I don’t understand how building works which means I’m essentially useless. While I was reading this I was intrigued but also just doing my bestest to understand the examples they used so please bear with me.
Player Types
I will tell no lies. I am competitive. I feel no remorse when I beat children in games. When I was reading this I definitely thought about playing board games or JackBox with friends or family. I feel like in a context where you’re with lots of different people it’s easy to see the different player types and how they might react differently when playing games. I would strongly recommend/request an in class board game session to see this in action.
POV you don’t understand what’s going on
Ok the POV section confused me just the tiniest bit (understatement) because in the context of video games POV is very different than it is in books which is the kind of POV I’m most familiar with. I think I just need to divorce the concept from the term point of view and realize that all that matters is considering what perspective you give the player. The lens you give a player to perceive a game should be something you give a lot of thought too and it should make sense in the specific context of the game. This kind of ties into the decisions section in that the choices available to a player should be considered in tandem with the perspective they have.
Decisions decisions, all of them wrong
Ok this section was really great because yes, it sucks when your choices or actions in a game don’t mean anything. It’s kind of like participation trophies which I always hated as a child. I just always thought, “Why do we all have the same piece of plastic? It doesn’t mean I did anything special, we all have one.” If choices don’t have consequences in video games it’s kind of the same thing. Instead it’s more like, “Ohh so I stressed over that decision just to end up where I would have ended up no matter what?”
Comments
3 responses to “Am I a Gamer Now? (No)”
POVs in video games are more about the type of character you control. In something like Fortnite, you play as a blank slate. The skins that each person chooses is entirely visual. As far as I know, there is no difference between playing as Peter Griffin and Spider Man. On the other hand, you have the protagonists of more narrative driven games. Characters with distinct appearances, personalities, and character arcs. A lot to the time, you don’t really have control over where the story goes. There are some narrative driven games with silent protagonists, but you usually decide how they act throughout a story. Essentially, POV in games are a spectrum between customization and player limitations.
Frog also helps capture the ideas of what POV in video games means. It’s a hard topic within video games. Game-play POV often ends up being a question of where your camera is placed. This is in contrast to narrative POV, which, especially within video games, can get WEIRD.
Stealing Frog’s perspective (hopefully elaborating upon it) you can have an avatar, a character, or a blank slate (or often a weird mix). For example, MMOs are all about your avatar, as in that’s the “you” in the game world. Narrative games (such as Last of Us) take an actual character. Then you have blank slates, such as Link from Legend of Zelda, which often just serves as a vehicle for interaction.
The way I interpret it, the question comes down to how you want your players to think. “What would I do?” vs “What would Joel do?” Or if you want your player to not ask that question and instead focus on interacting with the game world itself (something more akin to Undertale, LoZ, or Metroid).
This allows us to ask the questions of decisions. For example, the hilarious case of people who forget to feed Arthur Morgan (character from Read Dead Redemption 2), which results in him being sickly. They then start making the choice to feed him regularly. There is minimal punishment for not keeping Arthur fed, but people cannot help but try to take care of him. Or the ethical questions Undertale asks.
You are not alone in the unobtainable victory seemingly lurking in Mario Party. I have thousands of hours gaming and I am still without it. I’m gonna regurgitate the above comments. POV in gaming is largely dependent on who the player character is. Baldur’s Gate comes to mind as a game where the player character dictates how the story goes, so the POV of the player is assumed by the player character. It can get a little semantical when playing as a player created player character, but it still matters. I’d encourage you to try the Mass Effect series where the player character assumes the player’s point of view, and contrast that with a game like Control where you play as a predetermined character. I really appreciate your questions & desire to know more!