MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

This study examines notions of player agency, a tenant of digital games’ position as an interactive medium. Ultimately, for many media scholars both inside the field of games studies and out, ‘interactivity’ differentiates digital games from other media. How then do films, a far more passive medium, remediate these notions of player agency in their cinematic representation? Scholars have looked at player-agency control in digital games, measuring its effect on education (Gee, 2003), motivation (Deterding, 2012), gaming practices (De Paoli & Kerr, 2010), and social meanings (Parsler, 2010; Wang & Sun, 2011). Much of this scholarship fails to account for the ludic, a problem Behrenshauser (2012) argues results from a “player-centric game studies” contributing to Juul’s (2008) pronouncement of a new games studies divide “between those who study players and those who study games” (p. 873).

Cinematically, player agency control becomes a central point of conflict within the film’s narrative. This paper seeks answers within the rule-bound system these films explore, specifically films that take place in the “virtual world” through an examination of the Tron series (1982, 2010), Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over (2003), and Wreck-It Ralph (2012), as well as a number of films taking place within virtual worlds with gaming elements including The Lawnmowerman series (1992, 1996) and The Matrix Trilogy (1999, 2003, 2003).

There are three elements essential to this representation: 1) there is a separation between the virtual and the real; 2) the virtual world is written in code, and this code is impossible for player-agents to rewrite, though they can manipulate it; 3) the relative position of the player to the player-agent, is one of subservience or conflict. I argue that not only is the notion of player-agency control representative, it is essential to the cinematic representation of digital games’ virtual worlds.