Ea Christina Willumsen

Therefore it seems only natural that research in digital games is a quickly growing field. Yet, while we have well-established theories for non-ergodic media like literature and cinema, many aspects of digital, interactive media are still to be uncovered. The goal of this project is to develop a new theory which will contribute to an ontology for the study of digital games. I will suggest an innovative formal approach to the player’s representation in the gameworld (commonly termed ‘avatar’) which emphasises the relationship between gameworld and avatar. An exploration of the relationships between avatars and gameworlds will be valuable for both ontological and player-centric approaches to video games, as well as for other fields building on world-concepts and avatarial interaction, such as virtual reality and media studies, where new ways of interacting with digital worlds require concepts for accounting for the formal components and ontological nature of such worlds. The practice of game design will benefit from a structuralist approach to avatars and gameworlds and the proposed research project will unpack how various ways of designing avatars translate into the experience of the world they inhabit. Since the avatar is the player’s tool for interacting with the video game, a full understanding of it will be of use for the design of play experiences.
              This study will for the first time approach the multiplicity and diversity of player-avatar-gameworld relationships through formal analysis to arrive at a typology which will illustrate and emphasise how avatars and gameworlds are inseparable. Because of this inseparability I will argue that a full theoretical understanding of avatar and gameworld can only be derived at from an investigation of both. Arriving at precise definitions of both terms is therefore a key goal in this research project.
              As I will propose a typology of avatars, I must also engage with a large body of games. These games will be representatives of the paradigm of avatar-based games, and the goal is to include as diverse a selection of avatar-based games as possible. To suggest a typology of this sort, this research project must have a large corpus of examples, and the goal is therefore to analyse approximately 100 games. These will be studied by a formal content analysis through which I will explore the various specific elements which constitute avatar-based games and provide various player-avatar-gameworld models, based on the relationships and functions of the three. The traditional content analysis is used for interpreting meaning from text data, but as the conventional use of the method allows for inductive category development and is well-suited for
studies where literature on theory on the subject matter is limited, I believe that it can also be used for categorisation of visual- and technical information.
              The formal content analysis will guide the development of the previously discussed typology of various avatar-types, which will build on additional in-depth analyses of selected games from the corpus. Only after structurally approaching various avatar types, I can discuss their functionality in relation to the gameworld. This theoretical discussion will have its roots in theories of possible- and fictional worlds in order to uncover how the avatar-based video game is ontologically different from non-ergodic literature, where gap-filling and processes of make-believe occur primarily in the mind of the reader. The goal is not to determine whether games are fiction or not, but rather how gameworlds can be understood as similar to other world-concepts, while being inherently different partly due to the avatarial interaction facilitated by the avatar-based game. Thus my method will ultimately allow me to discuss how avatar and gameworld may be defined in relation to each other.