Sunday 3 April 2016

Week 6 Game Blog


This week I played Grim Fandango Remastered. Before I answer the question for this week I just want to say that I did not enjoy this game, the story by itself was interesting it was just aspects of gameplay the ruined the experience for me.
On to the question!


As the player, do you interact with a character or an avatar and how does this affect your involvement in the narrative?

In Grim Fandango Remastered you play as a character called Manuel "Manny" Calavera, One of this week’s readings talks about characters, avatars, agents and the differences between the three. After going through this article I have decided that Manny is neither an avatar nor a character but an agent this just means that he is unable to be changed or customized by the player,

“Waggoner proposes it as the central criteria for distinguishing between those video game characters that function as true “avatars,” and those which only serve as controllable “agents” for their user:
Pac-Man cannot be altered in any way by the user. He can only be controlled. His appearance and skills can never change throughout the course of the game. That makes Pac-Man an agent.”

This fact does not make agents less important compared to characters and avatars because they play an important role to be recognizable icons of the franchise they belong to.

But as the player, playing through an agents in a game make it feel like my personal involvement means less and doesn’t affect the narrative, but ultimately the amount of  involvement I have in the narrative for Grim Fandango Remastered does not change just because I was playing through an agent.

 
Jessica Aldred. 17 Dec 2013, Characters from: The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies Routledg

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