It’s this choice in the hands of the player that represents the most obvious way in which games are interactive, which in the original definition is one of the prerequisites. Interactivity is the cycle of attention and interpretation present in all art. In most art, however, this interactivity is largely a metaphor. When we give a painting our attention, it could be said to "change" us by causing us to think about its subject in a new way, and we could be said to "change" the painting by seeing it in a new way through interpretation. However, though there may be some tangible difference in our worldview after interacting with such a work of art, we do not actually cause the flecks of pigment on the canvas to reshape themselves in a new way depending on our perspective. In Robert Scholes’ words: "Our experience of fiction is more like dreaming than like our normal waking activity. […] In terms of our performing any action in it, this special world is absolutely unreal, whether we are reading a history bok or a science fiction story. We can do nothing to affect either the Battle of Waterloo or the War of the Worlds. And yet, in a way, we participate." (Scholes 4.)
Games bring something new to this phenomenon: they remove the “in a way” from Scholes’ remark. We still give games our attention and interpretation, but of a very different sort. The attention we give games is less contemplative and more involved; a player does not usually have time to appreciate the landscape on the screen when his or her onscreen representative is in constant peril. The attention given to a game is less that given to a book or, again, a painting than it is like that given to a film. It is much more demanding simply to keep up with what is happening in a game than it is with the written word, where the audience can flip back pages to remind him- or herself of important events.
But going even farther than film in the involvement of the audience is gaming’s method of interactivity. Perhaps more than any other medium, games inspire a heightened sense of identification between the audience and the work. This identification is the basis for all interpretation in art: when we experience a work, before we can derive any sort of conclusion or message from it, we must figure out where it stands in relation to us, and what of us we see in it.
The identification need not be on a very specific level. When we see a painting of, for instance, a landscape, the first thing we latch onto is the feelings associated with seeing real landscapes like it in our own lives. Only once that identification step is completed do we have a basis for comparison, and thus interpretation. Failure to identify may be the reason untrained audiences have difficulty enjoying more abstract art; without a reference point to begin understanding it, the average man may just scratch his head and move on to the next piece.
Narrative art has even more well-established principles of identification. In order for the audience to understand or care about what happens to the protagonist of a story, they must identify with him or her on some level. Not only the protagonist, but the antagonist as well—when they see themselves in the villain, it leads to greater involvement in the story, as David Foster Wallace notes in his essay on Blue Velvet:
"The climax … is the moment when Frank turns around to look at Jeffrey in the back seat of the car and says 'You’re like me.' This moment is shot from Jeffrey’s visual perspective, so that when Frank turns around in the seat he speaks both to Jeffrey and to us. […] Jeffrey’s response is to lunge wildly forward in the back seat and punch Frank in the nose. In the film’s audience, I, to whom Frank has also just claimed kinship, have no such luxury of violent release; I pretty much just have to sit there and be uncomfortable."(Wallace 207)
Conversely, when there’s no recognizable human behavior in the story’s main villain, it results in complaints like Paul O’Brien’s assessment of Transmetropolitan’s finale: "I just can’t buy into [Warren Ellis'] villain, who’s a demonisation of politics rather than a character."(O’Brien)
The unique achievement of video games is to bypass the question of identification by forcing the issue in almost every game. To show how this is done, consider science fiction novels and films. A certain large subset of the genre deals with exploration and inhabitation of outer space; it follows from this premise that alien characters and races figure heavily into many of these works. Yet amongst these thousands of novels, short stories, movies, and television shows, there has never been a successful work that casts an alien figure into the central role. A few come close: Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, the TV show Alien Nation, and even Disney’s recent Lilo and Stitch all feature aliens in a lead role.
But take a look at what’s going on in these stories: Stranger’s viewpoint character is Ben Caxton, an Earth citizen, not the Martian-minded Valentine Smith referred to in the title, and Smith himself is a biological human. The Newcomer morphology in Nation was identical to the human form, save for hairlessness and spots on the head; furthermore, they spoke English, ate human food, and generally were treated more as a human ethnic minority than anything really alien. The weird, violent, seemingly insane Stitch is almost there, but once again our viewpoint character is the human Lilo, who eventually teaches Stitch a more acceptable mode of Earth behavior, thereby eliminating his strangeness.
It is not the fault of these works that they fail to present a truly alien character for the reader or viewer to identify with. Such a feat simply cannot be accomplished in traditional media. It is beyond human imagination to present such a character on terms an audience can understand. Either the writer fails to put himself inside the mindset of a character wholly unlike anything human, or he succeeds—and the audience, having nothing to hold onto, fails to appreciate his effort.
However, there is a way. Consider the 1983 arcade hit Q*Bert. The playing field is a single black screen on which sits a ziggurat of colored, isometric cubes. There are six characters: Q*Bert, an orange ball with no characteristics but feet, eyes, and a long snout; Coily, a purple snake coiled up into a spring; Ugg and Wrong-Way, two hairy and piglike demons; and Slick and Sam, a pair of green droplets. The objective of the game is to control Q*Bert, whose only maneuver is to jump on top of the cubes, in an attempt to jump on top of every cube in the pyramid. Jumping on top of a cube changes its color, and only when all of the cubes have been converted to the new color does the level end, taking you to the next pyramid with new challenges.
The rest of the characters are Q*Bert’s antagonists. Coily will chase Q*Bert all around the pyramid and will kill Q*Bert with a single touch. Ugg and Wrong-Way are also lethal foes, but follow a slightly different movement pattern: instead of pursuing Q*Bert, they simply hop at random over the perpendicular surfaces of the cubes in the pyramid. Finally, Slick and Sam are nonthreatening characters who none the less present a source of irritation for Q*Bert as they change whichever cubes they hop onto back to the previous color, undoing Q*Bert’s hard work.
Nothing in Q*Bert makes the slightest degree of rational sense. Q*Bert has no personality, no stated reason for his quest around the pyramids, and nothing in common with the human player: he does not even produce readable utterances when defeated by Coily, instead opting for a death rattle of “@!#?@!” There is no context for the pyramids, existing suspended in blank, black space; and gravity seems to be particularly whimsical, pulling Q*Bert and Wrong-Way in directions orthogonal to each other. Nevertheless, by slipping a quarter into the machine and taking the controls, the player instantly identifies with Q*Bert’s completely alien form and mission; he has no choice not to, if he wants to complete the game. As soon as the player puts a hand on the joystick, Q*Bert’s mission becomes the player’s mission; Q*Bert’s moves are the player’s moves; Q*Bert’s weaknesses are the player’s weaknesses. Death at the hands of Q*Bert’s enemies will even elicit a little bit of sympathy for the orange blob as it falls over on its side, even though for all the player knows, Q*Bert may be some sort of interstellar criminal fleeing justice at the hands of the “enemy” characters.
The tremendous identification power that games hold is amplified even further when the onscreen representative is something the player might be able to identify with even in other circumstances. As stated in definition of art used earlier, art is communicative and changes the audience somehow, bestowing a new perspective. Traditional art attempts to communicate an unfamiliar perspective by asking the audience to understand it; videogames communicate this new perspective by asking the audience to embrace it. Unless the player can grasp the mindset of the avatar character, and behave accordingly within the game, the player cannot win.
When misused, this sort of communicative method could have a negative effect, though the anti-videogame lobby perhaps overstates the case when they argue that such identification can actually corrode the mind, as several studies have already shown otherwise. When used well, however, it provides for an artistic and narrative experience unlike anything available in any other medium.