Player and Avatar: The Affective Potential of Videogames

by David Owen

 Do you make small leaps in your chair while attempting challenging jumps in Tomb Raider? Do you say "Ouch!" when a giant hits you with a club in Skyrim? Have you had dreams of being inside the underwater city of Rapture? Videogames cast the player as protagonist in an unfolding narrative. Like actors in front of a camera, gamers' proprioception, or body awareness, can extend to onscreen characters, thus placing them "physically" within the virtual world. Players may even identify with characters' ideological motivations. The author explores concepts central to the design and enjoyment of videogames--affect, immersion, liveness, presence, agency, narrative, ideology and the player's virtual surrogate: the avatar. Gamer and avatar are analyzed as a cybernetic coupling that suggests fulfillment of Atonin Artaud's vision of the "body without organs."

240 pages, Paperback

Published July 3, 2017

About the author

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David Owen holds a Ph.D. in Performance and Theatre Studies from York University, and an M.F.A. in Directing from the University of Calgary, and an M.A. in Dramatic Theory and Criticism from the University of Alberta. He is an award-winning scholar, a theatre director, and a member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. His current research focuses on the intersection of performance, game structures, and digital technology.

He has written on a range of related topics such as LARP, burlesque, roller derby, and ideology embedded within planned communities. He resides in Edmonton, Alberta, where he teaches at the University of Alberta. He has written essays and articles on theater, digital performance and videogames in The Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds and The Canadian Theatre Review.

Reviews

[Jules Bertaut · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was all right. It wasn't quite the book I was hoping for, though (I was hoping for more psychology of video games and less philosophy of them). This book could use some better editing, also.

[DAVID · Rating 5 out of 5]

Insightful analysis. The case studies are particularly compelling.