This is actually something I dealt with in the main article. I think you are exactly right, and your point brings into focus the dual nature of the PC as I see it. It is totally fine for a ledge to have invisible walls, as long as we don’t notice it, or more, as long as it does not impede our own understanding of the character’s situation. The PC cannot be simply understood as an objective role laid down by the game’s rules, as half (or all) of the magic happens in the mind of the player. Really the PC doesn’t exist, we are only imagining we are battling monsters on a precarious path. The “Sloppy Design” comes in when such measures actually interfere with what we perceive is happening – the whole point of staging a fight where there are lethal drops, is that this adds danger and drama to the situation. If it so happens that the invisible walls are noticed by most players, and cause most players to clock their characters are not really in any danger, then that is sloppy design. A better solution might be another illusion – maybe a tripping animation, were characters stumble as they approach the edge and automatically walk back or maybe have characters always grab onto the ledge as they fall off, only to be helped back by another character, Left 4 Dead style. While these are still illusions, if they trick people into thinking they are on a precarious ledge then the designer has done their job. If the measures taken break the suspension of disbelief and make us realise we are in a different role to the one we are being told we are in then that is a failure of design. I’m willing to be pretty hard-line about this. If you can’t make me feel I am on a precarious path, change the story so it doesn’t involve one. We all know this kind of rule-breaking is the first thing non-gamers try, and quite rightly so imo. I don’t think its wrong to ask more of our games, or want them to do whatever they do right. It’s over things like this that non-gamers turn off – “why can’t I step over that fence?”, etc.

The fact that all this hangs constantly in the balance is pretty fascinating imo, and like you say it puts us in an interesting position trying to do cultural analysis. With my next piece I want to try and explore that, and say something a little more provocative about were a theory of a Player Character can take us.

Absolutely! I agree with that. The game exists at that instance of player *and* code. This, in turn, is why judging games in common cultural terms is so hard. How can you make a valid interpretation of a game without having played it? You can’t, to use an old saying, judge a book by just its cover.

“Conversely, you could almost say that taking part in the “Simulation Gap” is a negative action for the player (this is a common argument) as we are pretending to be someone we are not, merely involving ourselves in a fantasy and being distracted from the _real us_. I think this is a bad argument, but it might hold some water if we were to decide that gaming had no aesthetic value whatsoever.”

The MDA (Mechanics-Dynamics-Aesthetics) framework provides several interesting ways to render /how/ we might be escaping into games. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDA_framework and http://www.cs.northwestern.edu/~hunicke/MDA.pdf) However, I agree with you that escapism, in and of itself, is a very dangerous way to define /why/ we might be enjoying games. If the whole reason for playing games is to get pleasure, then they are essentially a drug in software form. (This is why Jon Blow sees many MMOs, and especially many Facebook games, as being unethical in their blatant use of rewards to keep people playing.)

“What interests me is why, in games when these are meant to be one and the same, they end up so disparate. I think it is fine for there to be a distance, but this distance should itself be part of the overall aesthetic of the game – the moment we realise we are not the Main Character should mean something, not just be a result of sloppy design.”

I was going to save this for a post of my own, but I’ll spill the beans on what I was going to say here. I disagree with you about this. Having a close connection between the POV character and the player-character is important, yes, but the game should be about the story elements, if there are any, and the mechanics that correspond to those elements. That is, I think games, if they have any story at all, can be interpreted, like any other medium, in different ways. Ideally, each player’s experience will be a slightly different one — hence the “travel journalism to Imaginary Places” — which they can then tell other people about.

It is not always “sloppy design” that some ledges will not allow you to fall off of them. The developer has made the decision to step in and not allow that action. This can be a good thing. In my recent time with Dragon Age: Origins (as soon as I got to Ostagar), I tried to jump off the first ledge I saw. I was, as you might imagine, not successful in my intention. Was this a bad thing?

If I had succeeded, the game would have been over right then but my interpretation of the events would have been highly unique. The problem lies though in reading that intention of the player. What if I had tripped off of the ledge or had been pushed by another NPC? Do you force the player, every time a possible death situation happens, to reload the section or even game? Even more complex, as Heavy Rain tried, do you branch the story at every possible choice and potentially make a game take decades to produce?

I agree with you /in principle/ but not practice. Yes, the ideal experience would be one that never breaks the fourth wall while you play. All exposition and scenes happen to you, as the player-character, and not just the character (in a cut-scene) or the player (loading screen text). But we are not there yet and might not ever be. Even Valve, praised though they may be in their use of immersion, achieve such a status by taking away the story from the player.

However, I think your objections spring from a misreading of the text. I was probably a little careless with my language. When I say in raw mechanical terms the PC is the “negative” space, I don’t mean it in the normative sense. I simply meant that the PC is the gap in the code – the NPCs after all are governed by AI systems, whereas a programmer has no way of knowing what the PC might do at any moment. The PC is an empty space in the game, the only part the designer cannot control with code (a slight exaggeration, but you get the point). Conversely, the “positive” element when looking at the PC-player relation is “positive” in the sense that we are taking on a role we do not inhabit in normal like. During gameplay we become in some ways an extra person. The negative/positive aspect here is quantitative, not qualitative. One important note is that a good designer will understand this dialectic of negative/positive, and be able to guess at what the PC will be like in his or her game, and shape the game itself with this in mind.

In the normative terms you use, I’d actually say that things are more like the other way around to how you read me. A game simply isn’t complete until there is a human playing it, and a Player Character present. It is an unfinished artefact – nothing can be gained by observing it, until we add that magic ingredient. Conversely, you could almost say that taking part in the “Simulation Gap” is a negative action for the player (this is a common argument) as we are pretending to be someone we are not, merely involving ourselves in a fantasy and being distracted from the _real us_. I think this is a bad argument, but it might hold some water if we believe that gaming had no aesthetic value whatsoever.

You might be right about my use of “Main Character”. My interest is primarily in RPGs and adventure games, where there is a clear protagonist. By “Main Character” I mean the protagonist we are given to be playing in terms of the game’s traditional narrative. Not all games provide us with a character like this, that we are supposed to identify with. I think it is useful to contrast this with how we actually are in terms of some RPGs (like Oblivion for example), but may not be in other cases. In a game where you control a party of people there is no direct relation and no use for the term. I choose “Main Character” as a term because it reads well with “Player Character”. What interests me is why, in games when these are meant to be one and the same, they end up so disparate. I think it is fine for there to be a distance, but this distance should itself be part of the overall aesthetic of the game – the moment we realise we are not the Main Character should mean something, not just be a result of sloppy design.

Anyway, thanks again for your reply. This sort of meaty discussion is the whole reason I write these things. :p