Embodiment and Elves

Video Games and Embodiment was a wonderful article about how a player's consciousness can travel into the virtual world while playing a game. My favorite part was actually the Note at the end that  explained some examples of microcontrol. Microcontrol is when a person gains a small degree of control over an external object, and that person's consciousness and awareness extend out to encompass that object. A couple examples used were how a blind man gains awareness of his cane to, after using it for so long, and becoming accustomed to having it and how a person watering plants with a machine through a computer screen adapts and gains more awareness of the external objects.

Microcontrol in video games is a concept not thought about that often. If you think back to a game that you were frustrated with because the controls were too 'clunky' or a game that you loved because of how smoothly you could move through the game world, these are good or bad examples of microcontrol. Ideally, in a game like Half-Life 2, the player is allowed to move around without constantly getting caught on corners and ledges. Kinesthetics can make or break a game. If the game does not have solid movement, the rest of the game may not even be experienced by the player. One example that comes to mind immediately is Two Worlds for the Xbox 360. Two Worlds didn't have the best story line, but it did have a good amount of random dungeons, and a revolutionary magic system. Most of these things weren't experienced before the players set down the controller in disgust and wrote terrible reviews about the game. This happened because the lack of polish on the movement controls, and combat in general. You could dual-wield, but that would just make your character swing the two weapons very close to his body, and be nearly useless. Players can distinguish between good and bad kinesthetics in games because they are used to having a level of microcontrol.

Another interesting concept about embodiment was brought up in the article Digital Elves as a Racial Other in Video Games: Acknowledgment and Avoidance by Nathaniel Poor. Nathaniel talks about how elves always seem to get the short end of the stick, when it comes to racial interactions. Elves have been treated as every minority haunted by a bad history, including African Americans, Native Americans, and Jews. While this is rather unfortunate if you happen to be an elf, it is actually a helpful mechanic. By using elves as a metaphor, we humans are allowed to look at issues of racism in games without having the games be boycotted for racism. For example, it's alright to have an elf as a slave, but if one were to portray an African American as a slave in game, that wouldn't exactly help people to look at it from an objective view.

I'd never noticed this before, but elves don't really seem to exist in the Eastern cultures. This is because elves first came about in legends and tales originated in Western culture. Stories of High Elves and Dark Elves go all the way back to pre-Christian Western cultures and have been adapted over time into three generally accepted types of elves. The Elder Scrolls series has the three types: The arrogant, magic-wielding High Elves, the sneaky, destructive Dark Elves, and the arrow-shooting Wood Elves of the forest. There are slight differentiations on these types, but all of them can be directly linked back to old Western stories.