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version seven. http://demongin.org |
Rise from your Grave! (III)
Part three of my exegesis of Altered Beast.
Sunday, 2004-09-12 | Classic Gin, Language, Philosophy, Videogames
At the end of the first installment in this three part series, I wrote:
...that in the resurrection and transfiguration of the Roman centurion at the hands of Zeus, one sees the breadth of human experience laid out before him...Now, before we get to the conclusion of the series, I'd like to briefly connect the arguments in the second installment with the precis from the first installment that has been reprinted above.
The resurrection and transfiguration of the Roman centurion and the Player are shared. In the act of playing the game, the player assumes the agency of the centurion and, as he has assumed this agency, he shares in the experience of the centurion. Hence, as the centurion rises from his grave at the command of Zeus, so too does the player. In this action that takes place before the player is allowed to influence the movements of the centurion, we see the deigners of the game making the point implicitly: the player, who is now also the centurion, has no control of whether or not he's going to rise from his grave. The command of Zeus is inexorable.
Furthermore, as the centurion becomes the altered beast, so too does the player (that's the transfiguration bit). As he as changed, the player is forced to compensate for his transfiguration just as he would if he were actually the centurion. Such are the consequences of shared agency--pressing different buttons to execute superior attacks, allowing different amounts of time as he plans to move about the screen and expecting to mete out justice with increasing swiftness are all things that the player must now do as a sharer of agency. All of these things continue to make the argument implicitly: the experience is shared in the sort of empathic instance that only video games are truly able to bring into existence.
So, as we have seen that shared agency can allow one to take part in things he could have only previously imagined (cf. my remarks in RFYGII on the difference between readers and players), we also see that the medium allows for this sort of thing on a massive scale--all it takes is the right language--the right prompts--and the player is literally granted physical access (by way of the metaphors I've been describing for three days) to a unique phenomenal world that is entirely separate from his own. Quite literally, the breadth of human experience is laid out before him; the breadth of human experience and then some.
That having been said, I feel that this exegetical engagement is nearing completion.
In the first installment I asserted, hopefully satisfactorily, that the hypothetical situation that the game poses did indeed make sense--that is, I showed the narrative preceding the game to be without contradiction or inconsistency--and that the mythological grounds for it were sound.
In the second installment, I delved into the concept of transferred agency in earnest, explaining the implications of the game and the text as a unified narrative device. I hope I demonstrated that, by putting the right metaphors ('You once were a Roman Centurion...') and analogies (as you are altered, your experience changes fundamentally) in place before the game begins, Altered Beast accomplishes the remarkable task of transferring agency.
Here, in the third installment, I hope I have made the larger point concerning the manner in which this agency is transferred succinctly. That is to say that I hope I've convinced at least a few of the fact that, given the right circumstances, it's entirely possible to
Rise from your Grave!
