Home » Reading & Literature » Interactive Fiction » Madness and the Eternal Player-Character

Madness and the Eternal Player-Character

© Mark Silcox

Anyone who had ever played a computer game is familiar with him: the Eternal Player Character. Plucky, resourceful, mildly humorous, firm of limb and sound of mind, courageous and always read for a challenge; almost always male and inevitably - inevitably - white. And anyone over the age of eighteen who has played more than half a dozen computer games must by now have learned to hate this individual's guts. But while some of his characteristics (the maleness, the whiteness) are simply the products of crude target-marketing, others (his resourcefulness, his bravery) are a lot harder to shake. Indeed they seems almost to be forced upon one by the medium itself. How could the player of such a game, or indeed the reader of a piece of IF, identify with a character and perform the required actions needed to carry the story along unless these traits were in evidence?

Deconstructing the familiar face of the Eternal PC is a task worthy of any IF writer or game designer. Indeed it may represent the first step to be climbed on the ladder from mere gaming to art. It has very rarely been pulled off in recent commercial games, though Revolution Software's two classic works BENEATH A STEEL SKY and BROKEN SWORD: THE SHADOW OF THE TEMPLARS make some inroads by allowing their PC's to be the butt of a number of harmless (and occasionally very funny) little in-jokes. Recently, two gifted writers of IF - Stephen Grenade and Cameron Wilkin - have tried to take things a step further by making use of the familiar fictional device of the unreliable narrator. In Wilkins' work, BLISS, a conventional, Dungeons-and-Dragons flavored story of escape turns into a nightmarish family drama of retribution when we discover that the PC is actually a madman who only imagines that his world is populated by Orcs and Imps. In Grenade's LOSING YOUR GRIP, the PC spends most of the game confined to an operating table while his mind journeys through a surreal series of "fits" - tests of character aimed toward a mysterious goal of self-knowledge that only gradually becomes apparent.

Both of these works are first-rate pieces of interactive storytelling that are well worth the time it takes to download and play them. Nonetheless I have certain reservations about the device of madness as it is used by both of these authors. Is making one's PC utterly bonkers, or else caught in a drug-induced frenzy, the only effective way of undermining the stereotypes associated with the eternal PC? There is nothing in itself objectionable to using madness as a literary device - this strategy has, in fact, been used to great effect in Western literature by authors as diverse as Homer, Nabokov, Thomas Mann and the authors of the Christian gospels. The fact remains, however, that the accounts of madness usually given in literary fiction rarely have much to do with clinical fact. This should perhaps bother one just a little; more disturbing, to me, is the apparent implication that the only way to make a PC unreliable is by making him (or, occasionally her) into a raving loon. Yet surely there are other ways one might engage the IF reader's interest without bringing all of the usual stereotypes into force. One's PC could be merely eccentric - he/she could have a tendency, perhaps, to behave with inexplicable hostility toward the game's other characters, or a mildly Quixotic flair for devoting his energies to trivial and pointless tasks. The devices of humor, mystery and evocative description could still be used to draw the player in without it being necessary to immerse oneself unreflectively in the character's search for whatever weird version of the Holy Grail they might be chasing after.

The copyright of the article Madness and the Eternal Player-Character in Interactive Fiction is owned by . Permission to republish Madness and the Eternal Player-Character in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.