The main focal areas will be character and story patterns chronotopic mappings onto developmental trajectories the treatment of mastery, mentorship and choice (Fraiman, 1993) and the spiritual and metacognitive alignment of extra and intradiegetic education. The main part of this study is dedicated to a comparative analysis of three indie games that address the life formation theme through allegories of space-in-time. We argue that Joseph Campbell's monomyth is an oversimplified and ultimately unsuitable lens through which to analyze character development in games, which restrains rather than stimulates the kind of complexities, diversity and fluidity of character psychology needed in contemporary videogame ecology. It revisits key tenets of life formation theory insofar as they can be applied to a small but growing corpus of games that emphasize spiritual and philosophical maturation and advancement.
This article examines the transmedial theme and narrative genre of bildung (life formation) in relation to videogames. By demonstrating the extent to which a strong empathic link between player and perpetrator is possible, the videogame medium has the potential to radically alter our relationship with controversial memories of perpetration, working against the troubling, albeit understandable, tendency of memory studies to universalise the innocent’s perspective in the wake of violent conflict (Crownshaw). Fascinatingly, by doing this the game essentially punishes the player for playing it, yet it remains compelling (indeed, it received near-universal critical acclaim among games journalism outlets) in spite of, or perhaps because of its attitude towards videogame violence. Due to the interactivity which makes the game work as a game, the player must put their hands on the trigger with the protagonist, Captain Martin Walker, in order to proceed through the game, a fact which Spec Ops then holds up to the player as an example of their complicity in the game’s violence. I read Yager Development’s Spec Ops: The Line (2012) as a prime example of a videogame that manages to involve the player in the perpetration of atrocities through a slow process of coming to empathise with the character who commits them.
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This paper proposes a further solution to the question of how to encourage the audience to identify with the perpetrator’s perspective: making the audience complicit in the deeds perpetrated by the protagonist, through the use of interactivity in the videogame medium. The solution, for Rose, is to withhold information from the audience regarding the true character of the protagonist, thereby allowing empathy to build for the character until the point when their villainy is revealed (as in Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, after which Rose’s piece is named). At the same time, however, Rose also questions whether such empathy with an SS man is even possible, given that the audience would be aware of the identity of the protagonist from the start, and would therefore (in Robert Eaglestone’s words) be “unable to want what this evil man wants” (13). In “Beginnings of the Day – Fascism and Representation,” Gillian Rose proposes the creation of a film “which follows the life story of a member of the SS in all its pathos, so that we empathise with him, identify with his hopes and fears, disappointment and rage, so that when it comes to killing, we put our hands on the trigger with him, wanting him to get what he wants” (50).
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