Abstract
The issue of identity formation when playing an avatar in a video game has recently become perceived as both increasingly complex and contentious. Game critics argue both for and against the apparent seamlessness in the identity formation in video games. However, while the case against seamlessness builds up with respect to other gaming genres, first-person shooters (FPS) are often still singled out as best representing this first-person identification whereby players were supposed to be totally immersed in their avatars while they played the game. In the light of recent research, this chapter builds on earlier research to reveal further problems in assuming a seamless merging of identity even in the FPS. It argues that the very conception of subjectivity has always been problematized through the FPS, and that the genre itself self-consciously keeps pointing this out. As an example of the latter, the chapter focuses on the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. video games to show how FPS games prompt players to question their in-game identity(ies) because the playing subject, instead of being a fixed entity, is hard-wired into the process of exploration that constitutes gameplay.
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Notes
- 1.
I choose to refer to the protagonist in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. video games and other human non-player characters (NPCs) belonging to the different factions (except the army and the bandit faction) as ‘stalkers’ so that the link with the protagonists in the game’s pre-texts is better illustrated.
- 2.
Here, it is necessary to distinguish Deleuzian ideas from any actual virtual duality that might relate it to Aristotelian views on ontology. As DeLanda clarifies in Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (DeLanda 2006, 41), Deleuzian analysis avoids the typological problems that Aristotelian analysis involve, and eschewing thinking in terms of essences, he understands individuation as the result of an intensive process.
- 3.
Boundas mentions this in his introduction to Empiricism and Subjectivity (Deleuze 1991, 4).
- 4.
I am grateful to Dr. Mark Butler (2007) for bringing this to my attention.
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S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky. (2009). GSC Gameworld (Dev.); Deep Silver (Pub.).
Filmography
Stalker. (1979). A. Tarkovsky (Dir.). UDSSR: Mosfilms.
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Mukherjee, S. (2012). Egoshooting in Chernobyl: Identity and Subject(s) in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Games. In: Fromme, J., Unger, A. (eds) Computer Games and New Media Cultures. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2777-9_14
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