A lot has been said about this topic. Here are just some additional thoughts:
We have an idea of the existence of something called "immersion", when the player tries to rid himself of meta-level thinking, and tries to "become" the character he's playing — to adopt his persona as naturally as possible.
And we also have an experience of the total annihilation of the character as character — of the character becoming nothing but an empty vehicle for the player's quest for phat lewt or some other kind of problem-solving.
Placed between these two extremes, the annihilation of the persona and the "annihilation" of the person, we have a continuum in which the person and the persona exist in tandem, parallel to each other, "alongside" each other, and where the person makes decisions about the actions of the persona from his own standpoint as someone different from the persona.
According to the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, in order for a fictional character to be properly aesthetic, he has to be viewed "in the mode of the other"; that is to say, as if he were another person than the one doing the viewing. Bakhtin argues that the activities and life of a person can only be invested with artistic value from the point of view of another person, because artistic values are such values as tragedy, justice, hubris etc, and from your own point of view, you can never experience your own life as tragic, just etc — you can be depressed but to really be able to see a life as properly tragic, it has to be the life of another.
Of course, the consequence would be that Bakhtin would not consider the kind of game, where one term in the dyad player-character is eliminated, as properly artistic or aesthetic.
In the intermediate spectrum, a possible field of investigation opens up. How do players view their characters? Can this be influenced by mechanics or other means? And even if the third-person view of the character opens up the possibility of an aesthetic sight, in Bakhtin's sense — to what extent is this possibility realized by players in actual games?
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"Placed between these two extremes, the annihilation of the persona and the "annihilation" of the person, we have a continuum in which the person and the persona exist in tandem, parallel to each other, "alongside" each other, and where the person makes decisions about the actions of the persona from his own standpoint as someone different from the persona."
That isn't really true.
Why is the person generating a persona to begin with? Because they have some problem solving to do - rather than phat loot, it might be solving their inner turmoil, but it's for some problem solving reason just as much.
The persona is an extension of the person like their arm or fingers are an extension of him, for this reason. If something is part of your own problem solving desires, then it's just an extension of you.
When you talk about the person deciding the actions of the persona, he's not deciding the actions of something other than him - the persona is as much an extension of him as his own hands. It's not deciding the actions of another to flex your fingers. The persona is just an extension, like a finger.
What your talking about is rather like poking an anaethetised limb and experiencing it as if it wasn't part of you, since you can't feel it being touched by you and you can only feel yourself touching it. It's still you, though.
Hi! Thanks for your comment!
Well, to begin with, I think it's strange to talk about role-playing (or literature for that matter) as a "problem solving" activity. It's a game! (Or art).
And even were we to grant that role-playing is, in some vague sense, a matter of problem solving, then I still don't see why this requires us to view the character as distinct from the player. Hammers are tools made to solve the problem of driving in nails, but we don't talk of hammers as being extensions of our own persons.
The border between the person and his greater context is not natural. It is a matter of attitude, and of communication. Our physical bodies have the benefit of being distinctly limited in space, and it is thus easy to draw the border of physical personhood at the surface of a person's skin, but even so, there will be border cases. And if we turn from the physical person to the social, symbolic person, the matter becomes much more obnoxious. Is a person's ideas part of him, or something 'external'? Are the institutions he has helped create part of him? Is the office of presidency part of George W Bush? The answers to these question will depend on a socially negotiated notion of personhood.
In the present case, we are talking about a third, sort of intermediary perspective -- psychological or "phenomenological" personhood. Here the subjective experiences of a certain person become important. These experiences are, once again, mediated by social and cultural practices, but those factors can be bracketed as we consider only how the person in question relates to his character in the moment of play. Here, a deeper analysis is required than simply to claim that "If something is part of your own problem solving desires, then it's just an extension of you." What we are interested in is not whether the persona is an extension of the person in some objective, arbitrarily defined way (and even if it were, the issue would not be straightforward, as I hope I have shown above), but how he experiences the persona — as self or as other?
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