A few years ago, I discovered the burgeoning Interactive Fiction^[1] community that has made a cozy home for itself on the Internet. Interactive Fiction is the oldest genre of videogame—“Adventure”, accepted as the first computer game, was originally played on mainframe computers that printed out the game as it was played, owing to the fact that it didn’t have a monitor. Even though we all have fancy computers with flashy graphics, the community is devoted to the medium. Tons of amateur games are being produced, and no wonder—it’s easy to program Several different dedicated programming languages are available, and a single person can write and program a quality game in a matter of a few months.

When any artist pursues his or her craft free of monetary interests—the games are almost exclusively distributed for free—the artist is free to experiment with the medium. Interactive Fiction is no different—in the past few years, I’ve seen some wildly avant-garde works. Some attempt to eliminate puzzles, some put character to the forefront, some do wild things with the language used, some use gimmicks. However, even some of the most experimental works have something in common. Most works of Interactive Fiction are written in the second person point-of-view, in the present tense (“You are in a cave. You pick up a torch…”)^[2].

To understand why the use of the uncommon second-person—I can only think of one book offhand in which it appears extensively--is the standard, we need to examine the differences between the forms of prose and of interactive fiction. See, every time I read Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, the same exact things happen in the same order every single time. I as a reader have no ability or opportunity to alter anything. In an interactive fiction game, theoretically, I am controlling the game. Everything is pre-written beforehand, of course—there is nothing I can do that the programmer hasn’t thought of—but in order to propel the story forward, I need to participate and act. In other words, all I have to do with a novel is sit down and read. In the interactive fiction version of The Grapes of Wrath, the Joad family won’t get to California unless I type >DRIVE CAR^[3].

The use of the second person, then, creates and obvious and instantaneous, if somewhat forced if you’re not used to it, intimacy between the player and the main character. In other words: When reading The Grapes Of Wrath, I am a 20-year-old guy sitting on my couch reading about the Joad family. When playing “The Grapes of Wrath: An Interactive Exodus”, ideally, I am Tom Joad. It’s similar to The Blair Witch Project in that, because we are seeing exactly what each character is seeing, we are, in a way, becoming that character^[4].

See, .hack is the first console game I can think of in which the player is taking on the role of a character that’s off-screen at all times. The character we’re controlling on the screen is an MMORPGer’s avatar, not a “flesh and blood” character. In a sense, when I’m playing .hack, I am playing the guy. The characters that populate .hack are completely aware that they are playing a videogame. Most games attempt to suspend some disbelief—that’s not a collection of polygons, it’s a person—but .hack doesn’t—yes, that is indeed a collection of polygons controlled by another person. We are, ultimately, seeing and experiencing the same exact thing that the fictional player is—as stated before, we are that fictional player. Except for one or two brief cutscenes in which the player narrates a crucial outside situation—his friend’s coma, for example—the entire game takes place between the game and the player’s desktop.

The Player is not even given a default name. His avatar has one—Kite, and that’s generally how he’s referred to—but he does not. That’s an important distinction, given that an online persona can and generally is very different from a real-world one. For example, in an early scene, the Player is chastised for calling a friend’s character by his real name. He also expresses amazement that his friend’s personality is completely different than his personality in real-life—the character is a tall, muscular knight-type character who speaks with a deep voice; we can assume from context that in real life he’s your average 14-year-old male gamer. Later, when replying to an e-mail in which a friend of his mentions that she’s a high-school sophomore, he states that he’d only seen her online and had never thought about her real age. Disparity between character identity and player identity, then, is one of the major motifs in the game.

The developers of .hack have done a masterful job at creating that intimacy between player and player character. In any work—whether a movie, book, or videogame—one must suspend some measure of disbelief. A game like Final Fantasy VII requires a great deal of that suspension—first we have to pretend that we’re a 21-year-old mercenary, then we must pretend that there’s a militant corporation that runs EVERYTHING, then we must pretend that we use the souls of the dead to provide our power, and so on. The suspension in .hack is minimal—we merely have to assume that there’s something very, very wrong with our favorite MMORPG. The genre is becoming more popular than ever; only a passing familiarity with it^[4] is necessary to get a handle on the world.

.hack//infection could easily be judged as merely a gimmick game, given that it is indeed heavily dependent on the “offline online-rpg” schtick. However, it is saved from that distinction by focusing on the storyline rather than its own gimmickry. It’s one of the more experimental games out there if you think about it, and its interesting take on the player/character dynamic helps it to come close to achieving that level of integration between story and gameplay that is necessary if videogames are to be considered works of art.

Footnotes

1) The newfangled, PC term for what were formerly called “text adventures.” Abbreviated as IF. Return

2) Of course, there are exceptions. I’ve seen works written in the third and first person (and one written in the first-person plural [We are. We pick up…]). Some are written in the past tense. However, there aren’t terribly many examples of exceptions, and generally the audience finds the change unpleasantly discomforting—the flouting of the convention in this case harms the work. Return

3) In-joke for those who have read the book: I can just imagine what the last command of the game would be. Return

4) BWP’s sequel was filmed in the third person. BWP’s sequel wasn’t considered nearly as frightening. BWP’s sequel was not nearly so successful as the first. I don’t think these events are unrelated. Return