?An engaging game makes the player care for her characters. She does not want to do anything to hurt her allies, and she has more of a reason for wanting to defeat the villain than just because the game said to. I experienced this when playing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic I and II. I, like many others, found myself unable to even start down the dark side path of the game, simply because I liked the characters too much. No matter how many times I told myself I wanted to see the other end of the game, I could not bring myself to do it. This might seem a little odd, as I never felt bad watching the Star Wars prequels, which are the story of Anakin Skywalker’s fall to the dark side, and I watch him do terrible things. So what is this disconnect? I think it is because what we usually think of as identification in reference to films is, in fact, a weaker form of what identification truly can be. Barys Gaut’s account of identification is a good jumping-off point, but movie characters are simply not personal enough to be identified with as strongly as one might identify with a game character.
Gaut begins his article with explaining identification. Some say identification is being numerically identical to a character, which is impossible. Others argue that it is simply to say that one cares for a specific character. Gaut makes the argument that that, through a “suspension of disbelief,” the viewer can react as if she believes she is the character depicted, though she is clearly aware that she is not, in fact, that character (202). Another way to express it is to suggest that the viewer imagines herself to be the character, though not identically. Rather than imagining she possessed every property of a given character, she would imagine having a relevant set of the character's properties. Clearly, having all of the character's properties, which range into the infinite, is a logical impossibility. For instance, were I to imagine that I was, in fact, Princess Leia Organa, to possess all of her properties would be to allow the possibility of her running into me. The claim that this is possible weakens somewhat, due to the nature of the story. Someone who lives “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” is probably not going to see me walking down the streets of Alderaan. However, were hyperspace travel possible, it is possible, however unlikely, that I, acting as her, may take a ship to Earth and meet myself. By only imagining having a relevant set of Princess Leia's properties (having brown hair, being short, being a Senator from Alderaan and a leader of the Rebellion, for example), I can also imagine the property of not running into myself, which is not that difficult to imagine in this context (203-204).
Gaut goes on to clarify the differences between sympathy and empathy in identification. All of these concepts are tied, though not all need be present at once. Empathy requires the viewer to actually feel what the character is feeling. An example of empathy would be when it is first revealed in The Empire Strikes Back that Darth Vader, the ultimate villain, is Luke Skywalker's father. Like Luke, the audience believed that Darth Vader killed Luke's father. Consequently, when it is revealed to Luke and the audience simultaneously, the audience reaction is very similar to Luke's own reaction. Empathy is actually tied to identification very closely, as one who identifies with a character is very likely to share her emotions. Sympathy, on the other hand, is simply to care about what happens to the character. For instance, I can be worried about Han Solo being tortured on Bespin without actually sharing his pain. These distinctions allow us to more specifically define how we identify with characters. He divides them into the seperate classes of imaginative identification, in which the viewer imaginarily puts herself into the character's situation, and empathetic identification, in which the viewer shares the emotions of the character while imagining herself in the character's situation (206-208).
From here Gaut lists some film techniques used to encourage identification, focusing on the point-of-view short and the reaction shot. In the point-of-view shot, the viewer sees the world of the film through the eyes of the character- this is thought by many theorists to be the heart of cinematic identification. The reaction shot is simply what it says it is- a shot that captures the reaction of a character to a situation. Gaut argues that the point-of-view shot, while it can encourage identification, is not as central to it as some would have one think. The reaction shot, in contrast, can be much more evocative of the character's emotion, and give a better way to identify with the character. This is an assertion that I very much agree with. One of the most dramatic scenes in the entire Star Wars Original Trilogy is the moment Darth Vader declares to Luke Skywalker, “No, I am your father.” The scene would lose so much of its dramatic impact were we not to see the look of denial and betrayal on Luke's face, in contrast to the cold, unchanging, angular mask of Vader. The few point-of-view shots in the film do not really encourage identification of the characters, at least not nearly on the same level as the reaction shots. When I watch A New Hope, and I see a point-of-view shot with a Tusken Raider standing over me, I certainly am startled. But that is the least of the reasons why I would be said to empathize or identify with Luke (208-210).
Another technique mentioned is the limitation of knowledge- when the audience knows no more and no less than a character, it encourages us to identify much more closely with that specific character. Witness again the scene in Empire Strikes Back. The audience is just as shocked as Luke is. And when, in Return of the Jedi, Obi-Wan's ghost explains the situation to Luke, the audience is just as annoyed at his truth “from a certain point of view” as Luke is, because they feel betrayed as well (213).
Finally, Gaut closes with thoughts of what the audience can learn from identifying with a character. For instance, encouraging identification with a character who has obvious flaws can cause the audience to examine themselves, and think more carefully about their decisions and actions. The audience cannot simply sit back and write off the problems to those of the character, since they shared in his emotions and experience. The audience can see how Luke was foolish to rush into battle with Darth Vader before he was ready, though they were likely anticipating the battle as much as he was. The young hero, after all, must charge off to defeat the great villain. By making us see that running headlong into danger was, in the end, a fairly fruitless effort, and not the best way to go about things, the audience is forced to take a look at their motivations, and perhaps how they exercise caution (214-215).
This theory works for a film. Can identification be taken to a greater scale, though? I would argue that it can, and has been. Star Wars always has been, and always will be a story about young heroes, the fall to darkness, and redemption. There are many arenas in which this story can take place. Obviously, the films came first. However, since their creation, the story has spread to other areas. There are now a number of comics, novels, and computer games as well. Their most recent series of games, a Computer Role Playing Game (CRPG) called Knights of the Old Republic, takes identification with the main character to an entirely new level.
First, I should explain how a CRPG works. The first thing the player does when starting a new game is to create the character. This involves choosing gender, character class, a portrait, attributes, skills, feats, and a name (see Sample Character Creation). For the purposes of this paper, I will refer to the Knights of the Old Republic (K1) character as Leiraya Moran, and the Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords (K2) character as Arden Moore. From there, the game starts. There is usually some sort of setup, in the case of K1 waking up as Leiraya's ship falls under attack. After things are at least somewhat explained, the action begins. All the combat is turn-based, so the player will have menus that include what different attacks she has, grenades she can throw, Force powers she can use, medical items that can be applied, etc. The player can also equip her character in various forms of armour and clothing, as well as different weapons she can pick up at various points in the game. There is a distinct linear storyline, but there is a lot of freedom in how the player moves herself from the beginning to the end. In the case of a Star Wars CRPG, there is always the choice between the light side path and the dark side path, and this will have considerable effect on gameplay. For one thing, the ending is entirely different in K1. If the character is light side, it ends with an awards ceremony declaring Leiraya and her party members heroes of the Republic. The dark side ending, however, involves everyone swearing loyalty to her, and the Infinite Sith Fleet setting out to destroy the Republic. Additionally, a dark side player will probably kill half her party members by the end of the game. There are also several sidequests, and how the player handles these determines whether she is on the light path or the dark. For instance, a sidequest where the character is sent to “cleanse the taint from the grove” can end in one of two ways. First is the light side option. In this option Leiraya finds a fallen Jedi student named Juhani and convinces her to come back to the Jedi. The dark side option, however, is to simply kill Juhani and report that the grove has been “cleansed.” Many such choices happen throughout the game, and everything the player does has an impact on her alignment. It also greatly impacts how the other characters react to her. This is magnified in K2, as the game uses an influence system where the player can gain or lose influence with other party members thorugh conversation. The higher the influence the player has with another character, the more strongly she affects the other character's alignment. There is a marked difference in how some of the characters behave depending on whether the game is played light or dark. The neutral characters can be either good-hearted scoundrels, or cold-blooded killers depending on how the player decides to run the story.
Now that we have at least a basic outline of how this works, perhaps one can see why identification would come more easily in a setting such as this. By constructing a character from scratch, and choosing the portrait and name of the character, the game encourages the player to think of the character as her own. At least in the first game, I definitely imagined the character to be myself, if I happened to live in the Star Wars galaxy and had a real lightsaber, as opposed to my lightsaber spoon. This ownership of the character is further encouraged through dialogue. For almost every dialogue, there are a number of options. Some are more akin to the dark side, some lend towards the light side, some are neutral, and some are just silly. For example, when talking to a mercenary on Dantooine in K2, he tells you about how he can get past the kinrath spiders because he has a scent gland. The options go something like this:
1.[Force Persuade] Give me the gland. Now.
2.[Persuade] I want to hold your gland.
3.Do you have any extra glands I could use?
4.Never mind, I'll be going now.
As you can see, option 1 is rather thuggish and would lead to dark side points. Option 2 is really just silly. If the persuade succeeds, then Arden can either keep it for a dark side shift, or she can give it back. Option 3 is what a good Jedi would probably say, and it also gains her nothing, because he doesn't have an extra. Option 4 just dumps her out of the conversation. Conversations in both K1 and K2 work exactly the same way, so this gives an idea of how one would talk to the characters.
As a side note concerning the point-of-view shot versus the reaction shot, I would like to submit that, since neither K1 nor K2 have prominent first-person modes, the reaction shot is much more relied upon. In fact, I did not discover there was a first person mode at all until halfway through the second game, accidentally. And it is fairly useless, unless the character the player uses has Force Sight, which allows the character to see other characters’ alignments. This is also not very useful, just a nifty feature. Consequently, I would suggest that the point-of-view shot is far from being the heart of identification, as the player can do much more with Leiraya and Arden in third-person mode.
The ownership of the character makes the plot twist work particularly well. In spite of the fact that I am fully aware that, when playing K1, I am sitting in front of my computer in South Hall, I have no trouble imagining that Leiraya Moran is simply the Star Wars version of myself. She says what I tell her to say, she sometimes has a short fuse with other characters much as I would, and I made sure she had a purple lightsaber, seeing as I have wanted one for years. Every level-up, I chose her new skills, feats, and Force powers. I put in the effort to attempt to gain the trust of various characters, and I admit I thought it one of my monumental victories to gain the trust of Carth Onasi, the single most distrustful character in the game. I convinced him Leiraya was trustworthy, and made him fall in love with her. Up until right after my third planet of the game, I felt I owned my character, and that was just the way it was. Then the game had to go and pull the carpet out from under my feet, and tell me the real story. From the beginning of the game, Leiraya knows that a Jedi strike team led by Bastila Shan was sent to capture Darth Revan, one of the two brutal Sith Lords wreaking havoc on the galaxy. Everyone seems to think Revan died in this encounter. What they do not tell you is that the strike team was, in fact successful. And Leiraya is not really Leiraya, she is Darth Revan. They show this through a montage of quotes from the game, and each one comes back from its original context to whack the player over the head. In fact, every single portion of the montage, up until the unmasking of the Dark Lord, can be found in previous sections of the game, so it is just as effective as having a sequence of mental flashbacks. This is an effective employment of the technique of limitation of knowledge- by having the player know only as much the character did, it never occurs to the player that she might actually be an evil Sith Lord. It seems glaringly obvious the second time through the game, but without the context, the clues are meaningless.
It is not too difficult to adjust to being an ex-Sith Lord, however. Operating on the premise that Leiraya really cannot remember anything she did, it is difficult to absorb, but once the player does, it is not difficult to still identify with Leiraya. She is the character you make her, and even the distrustful Carth does not take too long to come around and decide that he cannot hate her for what she once was. Unless, of course, Leiraya is playing Dark Side, in which case she would be perfectly happy being the most powerful Sith Lord to ever roam the galaxy, and Carth's opinion of her would not matter. In fact, she would probably kill him later on, anyway.
This strong identification with the Leiraya/Revan character plays an interesting role in K2, since a new character is the main player. Even though I went through the exact same process of character creation as I did in K1, I still very much saw the galaxy through the eyes of Leiraya. The opening shot of K2 involves Leiraya's ship from K1, heavily damaged and plummeting towards Peragus. The only character the player recognizes on her ship is T3-M4, one of Leiraya's earliest party members, and he is badly damaged. This is a very engaging beginning, much more so than it would have been had I not played K1 first. The game goes on, and I find out that Arden has some sort of troubled history with the Jedi Order, but it is not clear exactly what until a good bit later. In fact, I really did not own Arden in the same way as I owned Leiraya, and the game counts on this. So many of the shots they use have little significance if the player has not played through K1 yet. The first visit to the Jedi Enclave on Dantooine, where Leiraya trained to be a Jedi, was very emotional. It showed the Enclave in ruins, as the player knew it had to be, since Darth Malak's fleet destroyed it in K1.To see it for the first time since K1, burned and blasted away, is quite a blow to the player. Arden probably shares this emotion, since she trained on Dantooine as well, but it is definitely more empathy than identification at this point. Also, meeting Carth Onasi, now an Admiral, is very exciting, since I, as Leiraya, really like Carth a lot. It is also the single most heartbreaking part of the game, because Arden discovers that Revan left to fight some nebulous threat in the Unknown Regions, asking Carth to stay behind and keep the Republic strong. And since he loves her, he has been waiting for her return for four years. Arden may have been touched by this show of loyalty. I, on the other hand, wanted to give Carth a hug and apologize, and I vowed that I, as Arden, needed to go find myself, as Revan, and make everyone happy. As is becoming evident, identification in K2 tends to be erratic due to the familiarity with the galaxy in a different context.
This is not to say I never identified with Arden. In fact, there are times when I share her emotions very strongly. The best example of this is Arden's meeting with the last surviving Jedi Masters. Arden had already met them all individually, on their separate planets. Two of the three I rather liked, and one of them even seemed sympathetic to Arden's cause (the rest of them kept yelling at her for going to fight in the Mandalorian Wars). So when Arden finally meets with all of them on Dantooine, the last thing she expected them to do was turn on her. They told her she was a danger to all life around her, leeching the Force from them and bending them to her will. Now, up until this point, I had felt a little guilty for thinking they had been responsible for Arden's Force connection loss at the beginning of the game. It became evident that it was not, in fact, their doing. However, they quickly turned on Arden, said she was too dangerous to leave with Force powers, and they tried to strip them from her. Arden looked rather panicked on my computer screen when they put her in stasis, and I must say I definitely shared that emotion, until one of my party members came in and rescued me. Now, I had not been a fan of the Jedi Council since I found out they were responsible for the whole Leiraya/Revan incident. This, however, made it more personal than any identity crisis ever could have. If I did not own Arden as a character before that point, I did then. I had played the entire game with Arden as a good person, and the Jedi Council still declared her a menace. In this sense, CRPGs are more personal than a movie could ever hope to be.
As a result of playing these games, I hesitate to say that I identify with movie characters, as I really do not feel for Luke Skywalker or Princess Leia as I do for Leiraya or Arden. Certainly I may feel sympathy for them and I might empathize with any one of them. But Luke Skywalker did not destroy the Death Star because I chose for him to walk the light path. I did not have to put any effort into making Han and Leia fall in love. I do not own the characters or the story as I do in the Knights of the Old Republic games. Consequently, the definition of identification that many film theorists and philosophers use seems watered down for usage in films. Granted, movies were being made long before even the earliest CRPGs were produced. They have, however, taken identification with characters and pushed it to an entirely new level, one that the current definition does not yet encompass. The film model is a good one to start with, but with the advent of such games, the definition needs to be updated to reflect this new level of identification.
Gaut, Barys. “Identification and Emotion in Narrative Film” Passionate Views (1999): 200-216
LucasArts. Knights of the Old Republic. BioWare Corp, 2003.
LucasArts. Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords. Obsidian Entertainment, 2004
LucasArts. “Knights of the Old Republic: Galactic Database” 2003
Lucas, George. Star Wars: Episode IV- A New Hope. 1977
Lucas, George. Star Wars: Episode V- The Empire Strikes Back. 1980
Lucas, George. Star Wars: Episode VI- Return of the Jedi. 1983
For more information, visit the official Knights of the Old Republic and Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords sites at http://www.swkotor.com and http://www.lucasarts.com/games/swkotor_sithlords/. These sites contain detailed information about characters, worlds, Force powers, and general gameplay.
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