Comments on: A Chain of Fake People

By: Maher

Maher — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 16:31:33 +0000

I think your diagram is really solid. Most folk clearly make the distinction of an implied author, but rarely an implied player, and I never really thought about that. Good work.

By: Gregory Weir

Gregory Weir — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 22:03:45 +0000

You’re right that most players aren’t thinking of these layers when playing; at any one moment, the immediate player and the true player are probably one and the same. But when looking back on the game, even before it is finished, there’s a disconnect there. The player’s “past self” becomes separate from the player’s current self. The most obvious example I can think of is when someone plays a “good” run and an “evil” run of an RPG. The immediate players of those runs are very different, even though they’re embodied in the same player.

I would say that immersion requires that the implied player and the actual player have little in conflict. Any obvious disconnect will break the absorbed engagement: “What kind of person would (find this fun/think of that solution/put up with that constraint)?”

Testing does complicate that diagram, as do updates and expansions. But as a general rule, authors can only affect the game in discrete, asynchronous chunks, and not in response to the actions of any one individual player.

I don’t think that narrative and simulation can be properly separated in a successful game. A well-made game has its narrative and simulation work hand-in-hand, so that the rules support the story and vice-versa. That’s why I lump the Narrator and Simulator together on that chart; they act on the same level, but perform different tasks. You can’t really say that either the narrator or the simulator is “closer to the author” than the other. The narrator is the output of the game, communicating events and images, and the simulator is the processor, responding to the player’s actions and updating the internal world state accordingly.

By: increpare

increpare — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 21:36:52 +0000

So with tetris, say, where does the agency of the player lie? I’ve thought about this a lot, and have never had my thoughts settle in a satisfactory manner: they just hang suspended.

It’s not really right, I think, to say that people are constantly interacting *through* this notion of the ‘implied player’ and ‘immediate player’. They very much have direct interaction with the player character. These other concepts might still pull weight, but insofar as a person is still pressing buttons, they may think of their actions in terms of those of an ‘ideal player’, they might not conceptualize it as so. I would rather say that, in terms of player experience, it’s the divergence between the actions of the player and those of an imagined ‘ideal’ player that are as imminent to the experience of playing (“I don’t feel I’m doing things right”, say, or “Ah I’m really getting in to this”).

To some extent, insofar as immersion is for a lot of games the ideal, your relations present only obstacles, but do not seem to deal with what might might call a state of absorbed engagement.

The one-way arrows deserve qualification, in that most developers test their creations quite extensively on players.

It’s also not *entirely* clear why you lump narrative + simulation in with one-another (other than their more obvious non-linear interaction).

I guess in terms of virtual agencies present during play, the list might be endless when one starts breaking these things down, and certainly game-dependent.