Abstract
Video games are a suitable territory to experiment and play with identity, thanks to the use of avatars, which let players put themselves in someone else’s shoes, project values on blank slates or bond with virtual characters upon which they have a partial agency. Through the case study of Hotline Miami, this paper aims to examine how games can push players to actively question their identity, agency and role in the game’s systems and narrative. The end point of the paper is defining a new category of avatar, the meta-avatar, which elicits a sense of identity instability in the players, leading them to have a more conscious approach to the gameplay experience.
Parts of this paper are an abridged, updated and translated reworking of excerpts from a previous publication by the authors [1].
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Notes
- 1.
The majority of characters in the game have no name, and this also applies to the protagonist, who is referred to as Jacket in online discussions and academic papers [23].
- 2.
Every mask has a name, in strong opposition to actual characters who, as said above, are usually anonymous. The masks could be interpreted as a visual representation of a multiple personality disorder suffered by the protagonist [23].
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Papale, L., Fazio, L. (2018). Player Identity and Avatars in Meta-narrative Video Games: A Reading of Hotline Miami. In: Rouse, R., Koenitz, H., Haahr, M. (eds) Interactive Storytelling. ICIDS 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11318. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04028-4_28
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