Bob Rehak, "Playing at Being: Psychoanalysis and The Avatar"

(In The Video Game Theory Reader)

- Avatars in games both simplify and complicate conventional psychoanalytical approaches to technological mediations of identity (such as cinema)
- "Sites of continuous identification in a diegesis"
- Rehak is drawing on 1970s psychoanalytic film theory (so-called "Screen theory")
- Spectatorship/participation
- Player-avatar is the key relationship (a heterogeneous, not 1:1 relationship, similar to hand-glove)
- "games as powerful interpellative systems"
- Avatar as both self and other
- Significance of avatar death and "rebirth" (as well as pausing, saving, quitting)
- Technological staging of ego-confirmation cycle
- Graphical realism, first-person perspective, etc. indicate an obsession with the avatar as a stand-in for a real person
- Avatars map/reflect (bodily) control, if not necessarily actual appearance
- Avatar as acted on object vs acting subject (puppet vs costume?)
- Play with identity, presence, subjectivity
- Violent destruction of avatars = aggressive response to our reflection, as per mirror stage (what about avatars that cannot die?)
- Wolfenstein 3D as the "moment" of avatarial maturity... Rehak sees an evolution towards more human(oid)/embodied forms of avatars, but this is hardly universal. (Presumed teleology towards more life-like avatars.) Other forms of avatars (not to mention games without avatars) remain prevalent if not dominant
- Avatars have been shaped by our psychological needs and by technological possibility
- Avatars become more "lively" over time
- Importance of repetition/cycles in both games and psychoanalysis
- Immediately responsive graphical interface as a reflection of the player/user's agency
- Effacement of the self in order to transfer (a reduced, diluted) agency to the avatar
- Shift from mechanical (Space Invaders) to anthropomorphic avatars (Pac-Man)
- Pac-Man's oral incorporation versus the anal expulsion of Space Invaders (Seriously?)
- Implied body in first-person perspective (this implied body can sometimes only be fully seen by other players)
- "Tourist mouse" aesthetic of Myst and similar games
- Correlation between the lack of a visible/implied avatar in Myst and the absence of player death (this seems dodgy, considering in otherwise very similar games the player can die)
- Rehak claims Quake is centred on the preservation of bodily integrity, but what about when the game elements overtake the fictional/representational aspects of the game, when it becomes simply about gaining points and winning?
- Avatars see and are seen
- Avatarial reflection as a source of pleasure in games, among other sources
- The avatarial relation as a structure of seeing
- Point-of-view camera/first-person perspective as subjective narration
- Games achieve a sense of literal presence where film cannot
- Ideological positioning and suture occurs in games as much as in other media
- Interfaces are ideological and discursive (transparently so), hailing and interpellating the user, who misrecognizes themselves as a whole, unified subject
- Not totally deterministic (more like TV than cinema, many distractions and fragmentations - but these are not universal forms of viewer experience)
- The relation between player and avatar is always already a contested space of potential resistance
- Avatars don't have to have a semblance of physicality, but when they do we are fascinated by them
- We take our bodies with us into the game
- Ambivalence and fragmentation of our selves extends to our media/art and imaginary worlds creating endless cycles of identification and rejection that mirror our real-world psychological existence