Player Character Engagement in Computer Games

Abstract

This article argues how players can control a player character influence interpretation and facilitate engagement within a game. Engagement with player characters can be goal-related or empathic, where goal-related engagement depends on affects elicited by goal-status evaluations whereas characters facilitate empathic engagement. The concepts of recognition, alignment, and allegiance are used to describe how engagement is structured in games. Recognition describes aspects of character interpretation. Alignment describes what kind of access players have to a character’s actions, knowledge, and affects. Allegiance describes how characters elicit sympathy or antipathy through positive or negative evaluation of the character.

Gaming the Performance: Massively Multiplayer Online Games and Performance Outcomes in English and Business Courses

“…In the context of commercial video games, cognitive engagement takes the user experiences beyond the realm of immersion, through features such as control over character customization that allow players to relate to their own worldviews and personal choices. Lankoski (2011) contends that the ability to personalize and customize makes users react to game characters in a manner that is like the way that they react to real people. Customization also allows players to be more engaged, with an increased amount of gameplay over time (Turkay & Adinolf, 2015).…”

The Effort of Being in a Fictional World: Upkeyings and Laminated Frames in MMORPGs

“…Researchers who are interested in how to accomplish immersion have made a number of suggestions about what features create the feeling of being in a fictional world such as the nature of visual design including 2D versus 3D perspective and realism (Grimshaw, Charlton, and Jagger ; Thabet ), the nature of sound and music (Whalen ; Grimshaw, Charlton, and Jagger ), what degree of agency and control the player has (Brown and Cairns ; Lankoski ; Jennett et al ), usability, and how easy the game controls are to master (Brown and Cairns ; Grimshaw, Charlton, and Jagger ). The interest in immersion here boils down to a number of very concrete design suggestions that are in line with the classical view of immersion as a psychological sensation that is tied to properties of the technology.…”

“…The players participate in the digital environment like actors in improvisational theater, they co‐author and expand the game's back‐story and, as Murray stated, they actively create belief . Since Murray () the literature on immersion (Grimshaw, Charlton, and Jagger ; Thabet ; Whalen ; Brown and Cairns ; Lankoski ; Jennett et al ) has approached this sensation as a psychological state, mainly arising from specific properties of the technology. In the public debate and in the more normative oriented discourse about positive vis‐à‐vis negative effects, immersion is taken to be the default game experience.…”

Models for Story Consistency and Interestingness in Single-Player RPGs

“…Lankoski [13] proposes that empathy and sympathy with the player-character shape the story comprehension of a game. Waern [8] presents a study looking at how romances in games can create strong playing experiences and have great impact on the story of the game.…”