My article Player Character Engagement in Computer Games came out. Here is the abstract:
This article argues how players can control a player character influence interpretation and facilitate engagement within a game. Engagement with player characters can be goal-related or empathic, where goal-related engagement depends on affects elicited by goal-status evaluations whereas characters facilitate empathic engagement. The concepts of recognition, alignment, and allegiance are used to describe how engagement is structured in games. Recognition describes aspects of character interpretation. Alignment describes what kind of access players have to a character’s actions, knowledge, and affects. Allegiance describes how characters elicit sympathy or antipathy through positive or negative evaluation of the character.
Keywords: game characters, player character, engagement, empathy, goals
Games and Culture July 2011 vol. 6 no. 4 291-311, doi: 10.1177/1555412010391088
Petri Lankoski 