G A M E S A N D P L AY

Joleen BlomVideo Game Characters
and Transmedia Storytelling
The Dynamic Game Character

Video Game Characters and Transmedia StorytellingGames and Play
Games and Play in Contemporary Culture and Society is a new international andinterdisciplinary book series dedicated to game and play research. Its primary
focus is on the aesthetic, cultural and communicative aspects of games and playin our contemporary society. The series provides scholars with a peer-reviewed
forum for their theoretical, analytical as well as historical contributions to
the ongoing discussions on games and play. The series is not limited to digital
games; it includes play phenomena, both digital as well as non-digital; and it
covers social-scientific, humanities, as well as industry and design approaches.
The proposed books should help readers understand the ‘ludic’ aspect of games
and play−the ‘gameness’ of games and the ‘playfulness’ of play−without reducing
games and play to mere applications or illustrations of other ideas or issues.
Series editors
Clara Fernández-Vara, New York University, USA
Jeroen Jansz, Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands
Joost Raessens, Utrecht University, the NetherlandsVideo Game Characters andTransmedia Storytelling
The Dynamic Game Character

Joleen Blom

Amsterdam University Press

The publication of this book is made possible by a grant from the Academy of Finland’s Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies project (CoE-GameCult, [312395]), and a grant fromthe European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 researchand innovation programme (Grant Agreement No. [695528] – Making Sense of Games).

Cover image: ANO Studio | ano-studio.nl
Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden
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isbn
e-isbndoi
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978 94 6372 295 7
978 90 4855 349 5
10.5117/9789463722957
670

Creative Commons License CC BY NC ND(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0)
J. Blom / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2023
Some rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, any part ofthis book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted,
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Table of Contents
A brief note on Japanese names and words

7

1. Introducing the dynamic game character
9Characters in contemporary transmedia practices
9
The imbalance of transmedia storytelling
15
Transmedia, games, and participatory culture
19
A few notes on method
25
Structure of the book
28
Acknowledgments 30
Bibliography 32
2. Characters in contemporary media
41
Game characters in transmedia storytelling
41
The ideal of narrative continuity across works
45
Characters in the Japanese media mix49
Changing approaches
57
Conclusion 59
Bibliography 60
3. How the dynamic game character develops
69
Dynamic game characters
69
The possibility space of games
72
The development structure of dynamic game characters
75
The requirements for dynamic game characters
76
The three types of dynamic game characters
80
Conclusion 93
Bibliography 94
4. Strategies to control a character’s transtextual identities
97
The challenge to character identities
97
How (not) to control a dynamic game character’s identity
107
Conclusion 118
Bibliography 119
5. Parasocial relationships with non-playable characters
Parasocial relationships with game characters
A brief overview of the System of Affection

125
125
128

6

Video Game Char acters and Tr ansmedia Story telling

Dating in Persona 5 133
Queer and polyamorous dating in Hades 139
Conclusion 144
Bibliography 145
6. The construction of transmedia game characters
151
The presentation of characters across media platforms
151
Transmedia characters in fighting games
155
Conclusion 166
Bibliography 167
7. The future of dynamic game characters
171
Charting a vision
171
Bibliography 176
Glossary: A brief typology of characters
179
Bibliography 181
General bibliography
Complete ludology

183
201

Index 205

A brief note on Japanese names andwords
Japanese names in this book appear according to the Western European
and North American convention, with the given names first and the familynames second. For example, Ōtsuka Eiji (Japanese convention) will appear
as Eiji Ōtsuka.
Likewise, Japanese and other non-English words that appear in thisbook are written in italics. The exceptions are words commonly used in
Anglophone popular culture, such as “manga” and “anime”.
Finally, the Japanese language does not explicitly distinguish between
plural and singular nouns. Japanese words in this book are therefore sometimes used in their singular form and sometimes in their plural form, only
distinguishable through the English grammar of the sentence. I.e., thesentences “a kyara is a visual icon,” or “kyara are visual icons,” are bothcorrect.

1.

Introducing the dynamic gamecharacter
Abstract: Fictional characters are everywhere in current popular culture.
In this introduction chapter, I provide a brief explanation on the state of
the art on characters in contemporary transmedia practices. I critique theideal of narrative continuity across different works in popular franchises
to create a single-story world, which also affects how we understandcharacters as human-like beings. Characters are often thought as having
the same identity across works, but, in practice, they are often different
persons. Finally, I introduce the dynamic game character, whose identitychanges depending on how the player plays the game. I propose that thischaracter clashes with the ideal of narrative continuity because video
games promise player agency and transmedia practices cannot follow
through on this.
Keywords: characters, transmedia storytelling, video games, cross-media,
Japanese popular culture

Characters in contemporary transmedia practices
I still remember the moment I realised the consequences of my choicein Tales of Symphonia (Namco Tales Studio 2003). My decision led theswordsman Zelos to betray his friends and suffer an agonising death. This
Japanese role-playing game mostly leads players on a rigid path of predefinedoutcomes. However, it gives them one choice that changes the fate of two
major characters: will the player choose Kratos to join the player’s party ofgame characters, or will they choose Zelos? In my early teens, I had little
knowledge that a choice could decide the fate of these fictional beings. I
chose Kratos to join my party because he was the protagonist’s father, and I
hoped he would reunite the family. The one who suffered the consequences,
however, was Zelos; my choice sentenced him to death. After this emotionally

Blom, J., Video Game Characters and Transmedia Storytelling: The Dynamic Game Character.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023
doi 10.5117/9789463722957_ch01

10 Video Game Char acters and Tr ansmedia Story tellingdevastating event, I tried to figure out how to prevent his death. The only
way I could have saved him was to choose him to join my party instead of
Kratos—meaning that father and son would never reunite. This was thefirst time I had encountered game characters that I came to call dynamic
game characters—a type of character whose identity changes depending
on how the player plays the game.
We live in a character-driven culture. Characters have pulled us in toconsuming popular culture. Characters are why we were so invested in
Wanda’s grief of Vision in WandaVision (Schaeffer 2021) within the Marvel
Cinematic Universe franchise. They are the outcomes of famous fairy talecharacters becoming intellectual property owned by Disney, who in turnare reiterated in new adaptations and stories, such as Beauty and the Beast(Trousdale and Wise 1991; Condon 2017) or Mulan (Cook and Bancroft 1998;
Caro 2020). Characters are why the free-to-play game Genshin Impact(HoYoverse 2020), which mostly earns money by selling game charactersthrough gambling-like mechanics, made three billion dollars worldwide
in revenue through the App Store and Google Play within two years of its
release (Chapple 2022). Entire player market economies have arisen aroundcharacters, as seen in the trading of cute villagers in Animal Crossing: New
Horizons (Nintendo 2020). They explain the appeal of virtual YouTubers (alsoknown as “VTubers”) disguised as Japanese anime-inspired characters, andwhy we are invested in which actor will become the new James Bond after
No Time to Die (Fukunaga 2021). Characters are more than just figments of
the imagination, they are, in some sense, real. They are the mythologicalbeings we grew up with, the heroes we read about in comics, and thevirtual friends who keep us company. They also drive the business models
that popular media franchises nowadays use to attach audiences to theirproducts.
Fictional characters travel from one medium to another. They are part ofa global transmedia ecology that proliferates them across media, products,
and stories. Characters do not exclusively appear in novels or films; theymigrate between different media. They are independent from any one
medium, but still need representational material to exist. If we want toengage with a character, it first needs to manifest somewhere. There aremany media through which a character can potentially materialise, eachwith their own specific modalities and affordances. So it comes as no surprisethat characters too exist in different shapes, modalities, and sizes, which
affect how players may interact with them. New technologies have further
expanded the possibilities of interacting with them. Virtual realities, artificial intelligence, and voice assistants have become sophisticated enoughIntroducing the dynamic game char acter11

to give us the impression that characters have become so real we can evenmarry them (see Galbraith 2019; Lamerichs 2019).
Video games are just one way a character can come into existence, as
they have a plurality of functions (Schröter and Thon 2014). We can use
characters as virtual representations of ourselves to interact with others
in online environments such as Second Life (Linden Lab 2003) or online
multi-player role-playing games such as Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn(Square Enix 2013). We use them as game pieces to compete in games suchas Overwatch (Blizzard Entertainment 2016) or experience them as fictional
beings in story-driven games like in The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold SteelIII (Nihon Falcom 2017). More unusually, game characters have become
virtual companions with whom we create intimate connections. We rely onthem for friendship, such as in the pet simulator Tamagotchi (Bandai 1996)
or games such as Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu and Eevee! (Game Freak 2018),
or romance in dating simulator games like Dream Daddy (Game Grumps2017) and Persona 5 (P-Studio 2016). They are also collectibles that connote
status; players use the characters in Animal Crossing: New Horizons to tradeso that they can decorate their virtual islands with them, and Overwatch
offers character skins that players can use to customise their avatars.
Most of the Euro-American contemporary game culture (and popular
culture in general) derives from and is influenced by Japanese popular
culture. Historically, video games have contributed to the global successof major popular entertainment franchises, including those from Japan(Nakamura and Tosca 2021). As Japan dominates the global video gameindustry, Japanese video games carry ideologies, visual expressions andrepresentations, mechanics and consumer strategies into the world (see
Hutchinson 2019). Despite the globalisation of Japanese games, the Japanese
video game industry has developed differently than the Euro-Americanindustry. Just as the Euro-American game industry consists of different
submarkets and practices, so does the Japanese . As Martin Picard (2021)
explains, Japanese game culture consists of different subcultures tied todifferent markets (the arcade market, the console market, the PC market, andthe mobile market) with various cultural practices and fan activities within
the larger context of their cross-media market. For example, subcultures
include the bishōjo game culture, associated with erotic games aimed atstraight men (Taylor 2007), but also the otome game culture, that consistsof games typically associated with dating simulators for straight women(Ganzon 2018). Activities range from reading about games from specialised
gaming press or gaming guides, to participating on gaming websites, forums,
or video streaming services (like the video platform Nico Nico Dōga), to12 Video Game Char acters and Tr ansmedia Story telling

attending specific game-related events (Picard 2021, 16). The Japanese gameindustry is closely tied to the cross-media strategies of anime, manga, andother video game franchises (Picard and Pelletier-Gagnon 2015), in whichcharacters are the glue that unites different products (Steinberg 2012). The
role of the character in game company marketing strategies also carried overfrom Japanese culture to the global game market. Within these marketingstrategies, characters jump not only from comics to animation to games,
but also from game to game (Blom 2021).
As a result of the successful Cool Japan scheme, which deployed thenotion of “Japaneseness” to sell cultural products including games (seeNavarro-Remesal & Loriguillo-López 2015; Consalvo 2016a; 2016b),1 Japanesecharacters have become a foothold in the Westernised global game culture.
Cloud, Aerith, Link, Zelda, Mario, and Pikachu are all household charactersthat resonate with players worldwide. Even games that do not originate
from Japan use visual expressions, mechanics, or genres that derive fromJapanese roots. For example, Doki Doki Literature Club (Team Salvato 2017) isa parody of Japanese bishōjo games, in which players date cute girl characters.
Ghost of Tsushima (Sucker Punch Productions 2020) was made by a North
American developer, yet was praised by the Japanese government for spreading the history of Japan’s Tsushima island of the Genkō period (1331–1333
AD) (Lugris 2021). The globally successful Genshin Impact features typicalcute characters found in Japanese popular culture but was produced by
the Chinese developer HoYoverse. In other words, we cannot talk about acharacter-driven culture without talking about Japan’s influence.
Characters are so prevalent in our contemporary media culture that I haveoften found myself wondering why they are not emphasised in academic
fields that study popular culture, such as games, transmedia storytelling,
fandom, and literature. Surely, they are discussed, but those discussions are
fragmented over Euro-American-centric fields dominated by a concern withthe character’s relation to stories or world building. Stories and fictional
worlds can be interesting, but they still require agents to make events
unfold. Usually, those agents are characters. On the other hand, I argue that
1 Cool Japan is explained by Koichi Iwabuchi (2010) as a set of discourses which “euphorically refer to a passionate reception of Japanese media culture outside Japan, superficial andnationalistic observations that people outside Japan are rejoicing in Japanese media culture areautomatically made to testify to the rise of Japanese cool culture in the world” (89). It is part of thecountry’s increase in soft power, which, according to Marco Pellitteri (2020), can be understoodas “a set of strategies/policies by a nation-state’s government meant to enable international
interactions with other countries. Its objective is to encourage favorable policies to be madeby foreign governments, as well as sentiments of congeniality among foreign populations.”

Introducing the dynamic game char acter

13characters do not necessarily need worlds or stories. They are not bound toa specific world or a story, nor are they bound to a specific platform.
When we look at studies from and about Japan, characters are discussed
in terms of proliferation across media (Steinberg 2012) rather than in termsof their role in a franchise’s overall narrative or world. Theorists of Japanese
media have focused particularly on the affective and emotional investment
in characters. They have developed a shared language for consumers’ affection for them (Galbraith 2019), not in terms of how users engage withcharacters in a story, but they approach them as separate individual entities.
Such scholarly work provides a useful counter-perspective to the dominant
Euro-American-centric idea that characters are merely part of a story. Thereis a need to study characters as their own separate domain. The seeds are
there. That is why I started this project and why I wrote this book.
This book has three goals. First, it offers a concrete study of charactersin our contemporary media ecology. I argue for the importance of studying
characters on their own, instead of treating them as parts of another domain
or a story. While an official field of transmedia characters does not yet exist,
this book will contribute to the growing study of transmedia characters, on
which we increasingly see academic works being written, such as the recently
published Transmedia Character Studies by Tobias Kunz and Lukas Wilde(2023). As such, this book is highly interdisciplinary, because characters
cannot be confined to the constraints of a single field. Specifically, this bookpositions itself at the intersection of the fields of Game Studies, Transmedia
Storytelling, and Japan Studies. I apply theories on Japanese characters andJapanese scholarly work to explain the characters that we encounter in ourEuro-American-centric popular culture. I treat games as one of the ways thatcharacters come to be. Consumers engage with characters through games,
situated within a larger media ecology of popular culture. By looking atvideo games, we can understand how games shape characters and influence
our understanding of them, and why game characters have a powerful role
within contemporary media practices.
Second, this book critiques the ideal of narrative continuity across different works that is so dominant in the field of Transmedia Storytelling.
Nowadays, it is the rule rather than the exception for a character to betransmedial. Characters are a pinnacle of meaning-making. With their fluid
identities, they jump between media and stories, as audiences and authors
write and re-write them. A character in one work is not necessarily thesame in another, making their actual identity hard to unpack. I argue that
Euro-American-centric convergence culture has imposed a lens of narrative
continuity—an underlying tendency for explaining character identities

14 Video Game Char acters and Tr ansmedia Story tellingthrough an ideal of sameness. By contrast, my notion of a dynamic gamecharacter clashes with that ideal, as characters’ different identities, even
within a single product, depend on a player’s decisions.
Over the years I have been writing this book, the ideal of narrative
continuity has been noticed by several scholars (Bertetti 2014; Pearson
2019; Thon 2019). In scholarship on characters from and about Japan, they
are treated as entities that can exist beyond stories, and their multiplicity istaken as a given. Wilde (2019) explains that characters present contradictory
information across different versions. Rather than attempting to makesense of their different identities by uniting them, these works embrace
their multiplicity. In turn, Japan’s cross-media strategies have seized on
characters’ multiplicity to increase revenue. This book offers a framework
for understanding how a character’s complex identity emerges over different
works, while rejecting the ideal of narrative continuity.
Third, this book relocates the focus on avatars and player characterswithin Game Studies to a web of characters. Game Studies has focused almost exclusively on the characters that players can directly control. However,there is a striking lack of academic works about game characters that theplayer only partially controls or influences, with only a few exceptions (e.g.,
Jørgensen 2010; Christensen and Jørgensen 2022). The field’s interest has
mostly been directed towards the player’s relation to the player characteror avatar (e.g., Aarseth 1997; Klevjer 2006; Calleja 2011; Egenfeldt-Nielsen,
Smith, and Tosca 2008; Vella 2015), even when non-playable characters are
discussed (see for example Pinchbeck 2009). In other words, there has beena lack of interest in how the player’s agency can affect characters beyond
the one that the player directly controls. This book’s focus on dynamic gamecharacters whose development outcomes depend on the player shows thatthe figures over which players can have agency are not player characters,
per se. Rather, they show that there are different forms of agency possible
over a myriad of game characters.
These three goals come together in my discussion of the dynamic gamecharacter. It promises creative agency over the development of a characterin a video game and is a phenomenon of our character-driven culture.
Yet, this character is currently constrained, forced to operate according
to the ideal of narrative consistency of transmedia storytelling. It appears
as a consistent person-like entity throughout its multiple appearances,while promising players agency over their development. However, once it
becomes transmedial and starts appearing in different media, that promise
is shattered. The nature of the dynamic game character partially consists ofthe player, and this cannot be transferred to other non-cybermedia without

Introducing the dynamic game char acter15

the structure to support such a complex figure.2 Next, I will outline thebackground and my main argument about transmedia storytelling andthe pursuit of narrative continuity, the contradictory nature of transmedia
characters’ identities, video game’s connection to participatory culture, andfinally the role of dynamic game characters.

The imbalance of transmedia storytelling
We live in a time when media convergence lies at the heart of our media
practices. Henry Jenkins describes media convergence as “the flow of content
across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media
industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who will go
almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences theywant” (2006a, 2). In popular culture, our media practices involve the flowof content across multiple media; content does not stay within a single
medium but disperses over multiple media. It is the norm for a franchise
to not only include films or television series, but also video games, novels,and figurines. For example, the Marvel Universe franchise does not consist
solely of movies, but also television series and video games. The Pokémon
franchise includes video games on mobile phones and game consoles, andanimated movies, television series, play cards, toys, and figurines. Christy
Dena described transmedia practice as “the employment of multiple media
platforms for expressing a fictional world” (2009, i).
Within today’s media practices, Jens Eder (2015, 67–68) distinguishes
between four different academic discourses: 1) adaptation studies (e.g.,
Hutcheon 2006); 2) intermediality, transfictionality, and intertextuality/transtextuality (e.g., Ryan 2013); 3) the structures and the production oftransmedial multitexts; and, 4) communication studies and economics. All
these terms describe the different transmedia practices that we see today,
in which content flows across media platforms such as stories, worlds,
and indeed, characters. This book situates itself in an academic lineage of“transmedia storytelling” (Jenkins 2006a; 2007), “transmedia world-building,”and “transmedial worlds” (Klastrup and Tosca 2004; 2011; 2014; Tosca andKlastrup 2019; Wolf 2012). In these discourses, the most common term used
is “transmedia storytelling.” The term may have been coined by Jenkins,
2 I understand games as cybermedia, derived from the notion of a “cybertext,” in which users
must exert effort to traverse the text and construct meaning from it (Aarseth 1997). For a fulldescription, see this chapter’s section “A few notes on method.”16 Video Game Char acters and Tr ansmedia Story telling

but he borrowed it from Marsha Kinder’s transmedial intertextuality inher book Playing with Power in Movies, Television and Video Games (1991).
Jenkins deployed the term to refer to the aesthetic response to the media
convergence he saw emerge in the USA and North-Western Europe in thelate 1990s and early 2000s. He refers to transmedia storytelling as:
a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically
across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified
and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally, each medium makes
its own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story. (Jenkins 2007)

Jenkins emphasises two aspects of transmedia storytelling: stories andworlds. As his quote above shows, stories are the focal point of content
that is dispersed across multiple media channels. Related terms such as
world-building or transmedia worlds emphasise the creation of fictional
worlds (see Klastrup and Tosca 2004; Wolf 2012; Harvey 2015), in which stories
are considered the most important means of creation. Indeed, in his initialdescription, Jenkins states transmedia storytelling to be “the art of world
making” (2006a, 21)—the creation of worlds through stories. An emphasis
on stories and worlds generates the problem of narrative continuity as an
ideal towards which transmedia storytelling strives. Jenkins emphasises
the contribution of multiple media to the unfolding of a story as a unified,coordinated, and coherent experience. However, as I will explain morethoroughly in the next chapter, scholars have noted that both the industry
and academic analyses suffer from the ideal of a single-story world model.
Transmedia storytelling tends to weigh all texts equally (see Mittel 2015;
Thon 2015), whereas in reality, industry practices demand that the coretexts of a franchise are privileged over supporting, peripheral extensions(Mittel 2015, 294).
This ideal of a single-story world affects characters as well. Charactershave a particularly difficult status within transmedia storytelling due tothe term’s conceptualisation of stories and worlds as unified experiences.
First, a character’s history needs to be downsized to function in a story ora structure of the text (Heidbrink 2010). This tendency is perpetuated intransmedia storytelling. Nieves Rosendo (2016) notes that one of Jenkins’s
earliest publications on the topic of transmedia storytelling in 2003 wascalled “Transmedia Storytelling. Moving Characters from Books to Films toVideo Games Can Make Them Stronger and More Compelling.” She points outthat Jenkins prioritised worlds over characters, because worlds could sustain
more characters and therefore lead to a successful transmedia franchise,Introducing the dynamic game char acter

17

whereas characters would only lead to a successful movie franchise (2016, 22).
Unfortunately, the legacy of characters as mere parts of a story continued
uncritically from there. Early writings on characters tend to discuss themas “stock characters that re-occur” (Jenkins 2006a, 123), part of the world’s
mythos that presents the world’s background stories (Klastrup & Tosca 2004)
or inhabitants of the world (Wolf 2012). Since the beginning of transmedia
storytelling, characters have been underemphasised and underappreciated.
Second, the transmedia ideal affects characters and their identities. Whena franchise disperses its story across different media, the story becomestransmedial, meaning its characters become transmedial as well. Suchmigrations cause these types of characters to suffer from a problem ofidentity: if the character appears across a set of different texts, would it stillbe the same person? Mark J.P. Wolf states that the presence of a transnarrative character in multiple stories suggests they are set in the same world(2012, 382). However, this assumes that there are no inconsistencies in thecharacter’s manifestations, as if it were an actual person. Yet, for charactersin transmedia franchises, where consistency is an ideal, this is a question of,as Brian Richardson eloquently puts it, determining if there are “essential
criteria for establishing the persistence of an individual identity acrosstexts” (2010, 528). This question involves more than just a single franchise,as characters that are transmedial or transtextual do not appear only in asingle franchise. They might be completely different persons, albeit withsome overlapping aspects. As such, it can be said that the contradiction
between a character’s appearances has two layers: one in which franchises
are obsessed with narrative continuity between stories, worlds, and its
characters; and a second one in which transmedia characters appear outside
single franchises, either in individual works or in other franchises. Fuelled bya focus on stories and worlds, a Euro-American-centric focus on transmedia
characters still dominates discussions of convergence culture and media
practices.
As characters appear across different media, we repeatedly see figuresthat look like the “same” character while not being the same person. They
may have different contradictory identities. A famous example would be
Sherlock Holmes. He is not exclusively the protagonist of Sir Conan Doyle’s
books, despite originating there. Holmes also appears in other texts inwhich he takes on different names, genders, clothes, personalities, andnationalities. For example, BBC’s Sherlock (Gatiss & Moffat 2010) is set inmodern times, while in the 1980s animated series Sherlock Hound, Holmes
is an anthropomorphic dog (Miyazaki and Mikuriya 1984). In Miss Sherlock(Mori, Yusuke, and Matsuo 2018), the character is a modern Japanese woman

18 Video Game Char acters and Tr ansmedia Story tellingnamed Sara Shelly “Sherlock” Futaba. Surely these are not the same personwith the same identity as the Sherlock Holmes in Conan Doyle’s books.
So we may ask ourselves, how many established aspects does a famous
character like Holmes need to retain for us to still recognise the figure?
How important is the author in promoting that recognition?
Sherlock Holmes is a famous example of a transmedia character with acontradictory nature—a conflicting identity that sprawls across multiple
media and stories, but there are plenty of other examples. In our characterdriven culture, the contradictory nature of a character leads to conflicting
identities. Is Hermione Black or white? Is Spider-Man played by actor Tom
Holland more authentic than the one played by actor Andrew Garfield?
The contradictory nature of a character is a question that has puzzled
scholars for decades before Jenkins spoke of transmedia storytelling. In theearly 1970s, Umberto Eco (1972) saw Superman as paradoxical, because he
had to have an emblematic and fixed nature in order to be recognised by
the masses, yet had to be person-like to align with audiences’ expectations.
Eco’s work shows an underlying flaw of the logics of capitalism, to which alltransmedia characters as we know them are subjected; that is, the charactermust be consumed by an audience, and in order for that consumption to
be constant, the character cannot consume itself. It cannot develop as if itwere an actual human, but grows by appearing across different media andstories. Some twenty years later, William Uricchio and Roberta Pearson(1991) discussed another comic book character, Batman, whose identity
they defined by key components that set his appearance apart from othercharacters. These kinds of discussions are still ongoing, as scholars attempt toidentify the core identity of transmedia characters, which I will explain morethoroughly in chapter 2. It is only recently that scholars have lessened theiracademic commitment to explaining characters through a single identity.
They have discussed characters through semiotics (Bertetti 2014), as serial
characters (Denson 2011), or as part of a character network (Thon 2019). It
is becoming increasingly acceptable to embrace the multiple identities oftransmedia characters. And one only has to shift one’s focus to the cultureof Japan to notice a different way of thinking about characters.
Convergence culture in Japan has its own history, having been connectedto the rise of anime since the 1960s after its peak in the 1990s and 2000s(Steinberg 2012, viii). In the Japanese media mix, characters are used asa cross-media marketing strategy to sell media franchises and products.
Franchise companies use them to connect different media and attract
consumers to their products (Nakamura and Tosca 2021). The identity ofJapanese transmedia characters is less of an issue because their proliferation

Introducing the dynamic game char acter

19

is fuelled by the audiences’ desire for characters, also known as moe (Azuma[2001] 2009). Characters can be consumed without a story, and they areallowed to travel widely and develop desirable elements that audiences wantto consume. That said, according to Wilde (2019, 5–6), the lack of story in theJapanese media mix is not because there is a lack of narrative informationon the transmedia characters, but because there is an overabundance ofcompeting information on their different appearances. To make up forthese inconsistencies, the term kyara is commonly used, which refers to
the visual representation of a character, detached from a story world, thatcan be recontextualised as a different person-like being in a different story
world setting (Itō 2005; Wilde 2019).
Such different approaches to creating and developing characters showthat it is important to incorporate the Japanese media mix strategy into
our understanding of a character-driven culture. Japan has driven how wecurrently consume media culture, also because it provides an alternative
perspective, a counter-narrative to the singular Euro-American-centric
perspective of stories and world-building so dominant within convergenceculture. Drawing on Japanese transmedia theory throughout this book, mygoal is not to make characters’ identities narratively coherent. Rather, I
approach their identities as being driven by logics of capitalistic consumption. We consume franchises not only because we are interested in thestory or world, but also because we are interested in the characters. The
Japanese approach to characters helps us reflect on the media practices
and consumption we see in popular culture. Such an approach helps to
explain why characters in video games have become such important objects
to study within a transmedia context, which I will discuss in detail in thenext section.

Transmedia, games, and participatory culture
Video games are one of the means through which franchises expand. Whenvideo games become part of a larger franchise, we usually see one of two
trends: video games become a peripheral platform or the focal point of the
franchise. The former is relatively common in franchises of the late 1980s to
early 2000s, coinciding with the emergence of Game Studies and Transmedia
Storytelling as fields. Video games within larger franchises tended to beancillary to a film or television series. For example, Kinder reports that by theend of the 1980s, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle franchise had promoted a
successful movie-video game tie-in. The franchise’s transmedial malleability

20 Video Game Char acters and Tr ansmedia Story tellingdrew consumers familiar with the movie to the Nintendo home video game(1991, 132). The intertextual connections between movie and games thenprovided a sense of participation in the story, but did not necessarily expand
the story world, as it mostly drew on the audience’s intertextual knowledgeof the franchise. Such creative connections allowed the different platforms
to function as each other’s primers.
For example, Chris Kohler ([2005] 2016) recalls that when the crossplatform Pokémon franchise was distributed in the USA in the mid-1990s
after its success in Japan, it was f irst introduced through the televised
animated series (230), despite having initially been created in Japan as
two video games Pokémon Red and Pokémon Green (Game Freak 1996). The
animated series primed Euro-American audiences for the video games,
giving the impression it was the most important platform through whichto consume the Pokémon franchise. Whereas in Japan, the video games
primed the audience for the animated series, implying that video games
were the primary platforms to consume the franchise. Since then, there has
been a rise in video games driving distribution and consumption models of
convergence culture. Increasingly, they function as the mothership throughwhich the rest of the franchise expands. Pokémon is an early example ofsuch a franchise, as it has been growing since its beginning. But we see thesame tendency in game franchises such as the Assassin’s Creed series orTomb Raider as well. In other words, games have become a staple medium
for transmedia storytelling.
However, the swift move of games from franchise periphery to centre
has opened the door to new complications caused by the ideal of narrative
continuity of transmedia storytelling. Game characters, which have become
transmedial as they moved back and forth between different platforms, areafflicted by this ideal. I believe the cause is that video games, as cybermedia(Aarseth and Calleja 2015) which allow for different outcomes dependingon who plays, structurally differ from non-cybermedia like novels or films(see Aarseth 2006) because players participate in creating the game and its
characters. Such creative agency is sold to potential players, per strategy ofthe franchise, with the promise that players will experience their own uniqueadventure. However, the promise is simultaneously a beautiful falsehood
because the ideal of narrative continuity demands that the stories andcharacters in a video game remain logically consistent with their transmedia
counterparts—other games or non-cybermedia that do not support theplayer’s agency—even within the same franchise.
This friction between cybermedia video games and non-cybermedia often
has the effect of relegating games to peripheral and ancillary elements ofIntroducing the dynamic game char acter

21

a story world, as was common in the 1980s to early 2000s. However, since
the video games industry has started to boom, more games have become
the anchor on which a transmedia franchise expands, and as a result, thenarrative inconsistency they create cannot be concealed. This friction results
in practices in which players make a set of choices in a video game only to
see that when its characters, stories, and other content move transmediallyto other platforms, their choices are overridden by the developer or otherauthority figures.
The problem is ultimately that authority figures working at large franchises and corporations now control how, where, and when charactersproliferate across official games and media platforms. While audiences
may make derivative works such as fan fiction writings, art, or cosplay(Lamerichs 2018), these are usually not officially acknowledged by the authority figures. They may even conflict with the intellectual property rightsof the official works. The practice to keep striving for narrative continuity
between character appearances is quite at odds with Jenkins’s (1992) initialidea of participatory culture, a term he coined to refer to the involvement ofaudiences in creating culture and content. Participatory culture promisesaudiences a form of agency over the creation of content, promising that
their contribution matters. As Jenkins describes, the circulation of media“depends heavily on consumers’ active participation” (2006, 3). He later gave
the term a fuller definition, describing participatory culture as:a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic
engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, andsome type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the mostexperienced is passed along to novices. A participatory culture is also
one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel somedegree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what
other people think about what they have created). (Jenkins et al. 2009)

The way participatory culture is described above sketches a utopian sceneryin which media consumers feature as active participants interacting withauthority figures. It describes a picture that refutes the practice of mass
media associated with the twentieth century, when producers told consumers what to consume and how. Instead, participatory culture promises that
consumers can talk back and shape media and its content in collaboration
with producers. In this utopia, consumers are not passive recipients, but
become active creators of culture. Yet, this optimistic perspective has beenheavily scrutinised over the past years.

22 Video Game Char acters and Tr ansmedia Story telling

In his critique of participatory culture, Christian Fuchs (2017) points outthat scholars tend to highlight the positive aspects of Jenkins’s participatory culture, claiming that society has become more democratic because
participants can themselves create culture (53). Fuchs debunks these claims
by noting that creating media is not exactly democracy, and instead draws
attention to unpaid labour exploitation and Jenkins’s conflation of fandom
and political protest (66). This book draws from Fuchs’s argument of who
holds the ownership and governance within participatory culture’s logistics
of capitalism. He explains that Jenkins only has a cultural understanding of participation, rather than a political and economic one. Jenkins’s
participatory culture, Fuchs argues, “ignores questions about the ownershipof platforms/companies, collective decision-making, profit, class and the
distribution of material benefits” (55). All of which are connected to thepower of the authority f igures over the distribution and circulation ofcontent.
Fuchs is certainly not the only scholar who has criticised Jenkins’s lack of
critical engagement with audience participation. Scholars have been leery oflarge corporations that use fans’ creative labour for their own productions
in which participants may create content themselves, but end up being
exploited by receiving little to no earnings for their labour. Among thosescholars, Adrienne C. Massanari (2015) wonders if the end of participatory
culture is drawing near because there is now an understanding that suchactions “do not necessarily encourage greater engagement with the world
at large or are inherently more democratic or ensure a more peaceful andjust future” (168). It seems even Jenkins has been retreating from his earlier
enthusiasm:
people have more capacity—collectively and individually—to produce
and share media, but there are also important struggles being waged
around the terms of their participation, especially over how much control
participants have over governance, how much ownership they have overshared resources, and who profits from their activities. Such limitations
matter as we think about, for example, the ways fans are lobbying for amore diverse and inclusive model of popular culture. (Jenkins 2018, 24)

As one of the many platforms through which content circulates, video
games belong to the participatory culture of today’s transmedia practices.
While that seems obvious now, in the early stages of participatory culture,
participation was still a question of how players created culture games byinterpretating, reconfiguring, and constructing games (Raessens 2005, 383).

Introducing the dynamic game char acter

23

However, we are quite far removed from those early years of Game Studies.
It is no longer a question whether video games belong to participatory
culture. In comparison to twenty years ago, video games have become amainstream phenomenon. The game industry is a rapidly growing segmentof the creative industries in both Europe and the USA (ISFE 2020; ERA 2021;
ESA 2021). Joost Raessens’s article (2005) aimed to create space for video
games within participatory culture, but we can now say games are vital tothis culture. Video games are played, watched, shared, and created daily allover the globe by different people. We carry games on our smart phones,
and play them on the train, during lunch breaks, or before we go to bed.
The current way the game industry operates has major consequences
for how we engage with characters, make sense of them, invest in them,and control them. This meaning-making process starts at the onset of thedesign and marketing structure of the game product. We cannot understandcharacters independently from the design and marketing practices by authority figures, since those practices determine not only what the game and its
characters look like, but also where and how the characters are distributed.
Most contemporary games are constantly connected to the internet. Such
constant connection is part of a general trend where companies carefully
control and adjust their intellectual property (IP). Modifications may comein the form of remakes of old games, such as the Final Fantasy VII Remake(Square Enix 2020), or downloadable content, such as The Extended Cut (2012)or Citadel (2013) in Mass Effect 3 (Bioware 2012), or massive overhauls of
entire games like Overwatch becoming Overwatch 2 (Blizzard Entertainment2022). These strategies impact how players engage with and make sense ofa game’s characters. Whenever players become familiar with one version ofa character, companies can adjust the game directly to have characters andother content fit their perspective. They force players to adopt a different
mental understanding of and engagement with the figure, as was the casewith the overhaul of the healer Mercy in Overwatch (PlayOverwatch 2017).
The options that remain for players are to either accept the change or stop
playing. Which begs the question: if a product does not stay the same, what
does that say about the identity of the character?
How characters function and look, and how we interpret and engage withthem, is at the basis of who controls the meaning-making of a text. This issueof control has been at the heart of participatory culture ever since Jenkins
described it as utopian and democratic. While Fuchs criticises the politicaland economic aspects of participatory culture, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas(2019) further questions its textual aspects. In her book on participatory
culture in the digital age, Thomas argues that Jenkins does not adequately

24 Video Game Char acters and Tr ansmedia Story telling

address the discrepancy in equality between media conglomerates andconsumers, particularly how large conglomerates shape how we interpreta text. This power differential leads to a constant struggle for interpretative
authority over who get to decide what the ultimate meaning of a text is.
Thomas writes:[s]hifting cultural attitudes toward texts—and the contemporary struggle
for interpretive authority over them—characterize meaning-making.
While theorists from Roland Barthes to Michel Foucault would pointout the historical nature of this struggle (and the longtime absence of
the author), the question of the reader-author struggle must be revisited,
given that in this digital age, more people than ever before are writing forwork and during leisure, readers connect with one another in powerful
networks, lines between readers and writers blur, definitions of whatcounts as text are negotiated and reconfigured in hybrid multimodaland multilingual constellations, and texts and people circulate acrossasymmetrical trajectories. (2019, 154)

Thomas’s book mostly deals with non-cybermedia texts of large popular
franchises like television series, novels, or films, for which users do nothave to make non-trivial effort. The negotiation and tension between
producers and consumers over a character’s identity is a general struggle
within participatory culture. Video games amplify an existing tension,
because even if we do not have a developer’s capacity to modify existing
video games, they are designed to structurally capture a player’s agency totraverse the product, in which players can influence how a story plays out
or how a dynamic game character develops within a game.
Dynamic game characters become a problem when video games promise
players creative agency over the figure’s identity inside the game, whiledevelopers struggle to follow through on that promise, as the dynamic gamecharacters move to other media platforms and products. Jenkins noted
early on that game designers struggle with the balancing act of “trying todetermine how much plot will create a compelling framework and how much
freedom players can enjoy at a local level without totally derailing the larger
narrative trajectory” (Jenkins 2006b, 126). Game designers and developers
must make decisions that may not satisfy players. My own experience with
Zelos and Kratos in Tales of Symphonia became disappointing when Namco
released the official sequel Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World(Namco Tales Studio 2008). As the former game forced players to choose
between Kratos or Zelos, one of the decisions Namco had to make for theIntroducing the dynamic game char acter

25

sequel was how to support the player’s decision in the second game. Theiranswer was to ignore the player’s agency; in the sequel, Zelos is alive, having
supported the protagonist in their quest of saving the world, whereas Kratos
has left the protagonist’s party, only watching them from afar. Zelos’s survival
became the canonical choice recognised by the author-developer, which inturn retroactively annulled the players’ agency over the vital decision they
had to make over the fate of a character in Tales of Symphonia.
By adopting a transmedia perspective on characters, we can learn about
the structural mechanisms in a text that result in friction between themeaning-making of audiences and control of authority figures. Video games
promise creative agency in which players are allowed to create their own
characters and stories. At the same time, however, video games are subject
to the transmedia trend where content must expand across media platforms
and stories, which challenges the Euro-American-centric desire for narrative
continuity across works. These two ideals clash; a player’s creative agency
does not mingle well with the pursuit of narrative continuity when content
disperses over multiple media platforms.
Dynamic game characters are placed right in the middle of this clash,as they promise players control, participation, and ownership over thecharacter’s identity. Simultaneously, once the figure moves to anotherplatform—another game, novel, comic, or film—the authority figure has
to sacrifice that creative agency. What is ultimately at stake when dynamic
game characters move between media platforms is that the player’s creative
agency becomes of secondary value to the characters’ identities, which aremostly determined by an authority figure. This book therefore scrutinises
the promises of agency and the pursuit of narrative continuity across works
as two ideals of participatory culture merge and clash in the shape of the
dynamic game character.

A few notes on method
This book applies reader-response-aware close readings and close playings ofdifferent texts and their characters. I have selected texts that best illustrate
the core qualities of the dynamic game character and the clash of ideals inwhich it emerges. I draw methodological inspiration from reader-response
approaches that scholars have used to identify a reader to construct meaningfrom a ‘text’, which I understand in this book as any kind of interpreted
cultural product, ranging from bibles or databases to visual art pieces,comics, or video games. Historically, the reader-response approach belongs26 Video Game Char acters and Tr ansmedia Story tellingto a school of literary theory that favours the reader over the structure of the
text. It is an approach that emerged in the late 1960s from its predecessorof structuralism. The reader-response approach downplays the work as asingle product by favouring the process of meaning-making, as it focuses onreading and untangling the work in the larger context of the text (Freed-Thall
2018, 63). The recipient is so central to the reader-response approach that
one of the first researchers to use the approach, Louise Rosenblatt ([1938]
1995), initially used empirical readers for the textual analyses of literaturein the late 1930s.
A recipient model was formed by Wayne C. Booth’s (1961) “implied
reader”—the image an author makes of the recipient of the work for the mostsuccessful reading of their work (138). Booth’s concept of the implied reader
was then deepened by Wolfgang Iser (1978), who considers his impliziter Lesera structure in the text (Iser 1978, 60; Schmid 2013). The research in this bookfollows Iser’s implied reader and uses it as a model that “embodies all thosepredispositions necessary for a literary work to exercise its effect—predispositions laid down, not by an empirical outside reality, but by the text
itself” (Iser 1978, 34). The structure of the work itself anticipates a specificreader, but never explicitly defines it (1978, 34). In other words, in the close
readings throughout this book, I emphasise the role of the recipient—who
could be a reader of a text, a player of games, a user of media platforms, ora watcher of movies, or all of these at once—as an integral structure of atext. While this book does not research media consumers empirically, mymethodology enables close, detailed analyses of texts.
This book is not the first to apply a reader-response-aware model reader
in the field of Game Studies. This approach has been applied to video games
since the field’s early days (Aarseth 1997; Murray 1997; Mortensen 2003),
and is also known as ‘player response’ (Mortensen and Jørgensen 2020).
Within this approach, we can distinguish two strands: one strand considers
players as model players based on the implied reader, showing how a gametext is open to multiple readings by any number of individual players (seefor example Aarseth 2012; Farca 2018; Hutchinson 2021). The other strand
approaches players empirically, and employs a variety of methods to discoverdifferent game interpretations (Jørgensen 2012; Mortensen and Jørgensen
2020; Aarseth and Mortensen 2021). Both strands, as Torill Mortensen (inAarseth and Mortensen 2021) points out, use multiple methods to discoverwhat players experience. The most important thing is that “as researchers,
we are always aware that games are about a variety of experiences, which
is just not only the researcher’s understanding of a game. A game’s many
possible interpretations consist of many different experiences” (2021, 4,

Introducing the dynamic game char acter27

my own translation).3 In this book, I apply the former strand to video
games by using the recipient as a model to explore how video games areopen to multiple readings to create a variety of experiences. I realise thatmy conceptualisation of players as a structure of the text may encounter
resistance from those that favour the experiences of empirical players.
However, my approach will point out where, at the level of text structure,
the player’s agency over dynamic game characters supports the variety
of experiences different players will have—which inevitably affects therecipient’s understanding of a character in another medium or story. In
doing so, I discuss how the underlying mechanisms and sometimes archaic
forces encourage different ways of playing a game. These ways of playing
influence a recipient’s interpretation of a dynamic game character, its otherversions in other texts, and how they clash.
Since this book researches video games and non-cybermedia, like novels
and films, I apply a game analysis (Aarseth 2003) of the close playings ofgames that require a player’s effort to complete. The player’s agency withina video game, the medium of departure for this book, plays a vital role in myclose playings. Within the field of Game Studies, scholars have long debatedthe player’s creative agency as expressed in the designed play in a gamesystem versus players’ actual gameplay (e.g., Jenkins 2006b; Sicart 2014).
The player’s agency partly determines how a recipient interprets the textthat they are playing. The structure of video games leads different players
to experience events that other players do not even notice. Video games, ascybermedia objects, are thus similar to other media that demand that users
traverse and interpret them to end up with customised interpretations.
For example, interactive television series such as The Adventures of Pussin Boots (Langdale 2015) or Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (Slade 2018) differ
from video games in name only. According to Espen Aarseth and Gordon
Calleja, a “cybermedium” has a processual nature with a:potential for change in every engagement with the game and favours
a dynamic and recursive view of games. A processual perspective thus
presents games as ever evolving and socially contingent in a mannerconsistent with other domains of social experience. The processual natureof games also presupposes a ludic perspective from the part of the player
towards the game object. (2015)
3 Original text: “men det viktigste er at du som forsker hele tiden er oppmerksom på at spill
handler om en variasjon av opplevelser, ikke bare den ene – forskerens – forståelse av spillet. Spillets
mange mulige meninger blir skapt av manges opplevelser.” (Aarseth and Mortensen 2021, 4)

28 

Video Game Char acters and Tr ansmedia Story telling

In this book, I treat games as artefacts with the potential to change depending on who plays them. Their malleability is unlike non-cybermedia suchas a typical novel, which does not have the potential to change in responseto the reader. Games can have very different outcomes depending on how
a player plays them. As Astrid Ensslin describes:[d]ifferent playings of a game, conversely, tend to result in entirely different games, with outcomes as varied as winning or losing, gaining and/or losing lives, credits, and other countable units, radically different
navigation options, and as a result, a large diversity of the gameworld
per se. (2014, 28)

The changeability of video games means that two players will never play
the same game even if it is the same game product. Nor will the same player
play the same game product in the same manner multiple times. Multiple
playthroughs are similar to reading the same novel twice, as a reader will
likely not interpret it identically during a second reading. However, the maindifference between the two is that with novels, the difference in multiple
reads stems from interpretation, whereas games will vary in interpretationand structure, due to the player exerting agency in the game. Since thedifferent playings of a game expand the game world, as Ensslin states, it also
diversifies potential identities for dynamic game characters. The multitude
of possible outcomes depends on how players traverse the game and whatchoices they make. This book thus explains how video games manifest
dynamic game characters, and how the player’s agency over them leads toa clash with the character’s iteration in another text.

Structure of the book
This book is divided into two parts. The first part focuses on the theoreticaland historical backgrounds of characters in franchises and transmedia
landscapes, and how games and the idea of a dynamic game character relate
to these ecologies. Chapter 1, the chapter you are currently reading, hasprovided a brief state of the art on characters in contemporary transmedia
practices. I have critiqued the ideal of narrative continuity across different
works in popular franchises and introduced the dynamic game character
who clashes with this ideal.
Chapter 2 delves deeper into theory; it provides a theoretical backgroundon fictional characters. It gives a historical overview of game charactersIntroducing the dynamic game char acter29and how they are informed by our perception of characters across different
media. The chapter further provides a state of the art of game charactersand their role as transmedia characters in larger contemporary media
practices. It shows that theory on characters from Europe and North America
focuses predominantly on an ideal of narrative continuity between character
appearances across works, whereas Japanese theory on character focusesinstead on character proliferation as a solution to opposing information ona character across different works.
Chapter 3 explains how dynamic game characters structurally develop invideo games. It explains their development structure with multiple outcomes,
which players activate depending on how they play, and the requirements
to consider a game character dynamic. It also explains the three types of
agents in which dynamic game characters appear (as ludic, narrative, andperformative agents). Depending on the type, they predominantly develop
as game pieces, through the game’s story, or through the game’s pre-coded
scripts. The chapter will illustrate this through close analyses of the Mass
Effect trilogy (BioWare 2007–2012), The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
(Nintendo 2017), and Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
The second part of this book focuses on a variety of sample cases for
how dynamic game characters move across different works and what kindof issues they amplify. As industry practices and academic theories strive
for narrative continuity across different works, chapter 4 delves into how
dynamic game characters upset this ideal. It explains that authoritative
institutions use three top-down strategies of control to police the multiple
transtextual identities of a character: authorship, ownership, and canonisation. The chapter’s second part demonstrates how those authoritative
institutions attempt to maintain an illusion of continuity with regard to
the dynamic game character as it appears across different sets of works.
Chapters 5 and 6 provide sample cases for how dynamic game characters
appear and move across different works. In chapter 5, I relocate the focus
from Game Studies’ preference to discuss player characters and avatars toa focus on non-playable characters (NPCs). Certain games stimulate players
to create a parasocial relationship with NPCs that function as dynamic
game characters. The first section of the chapter presents the common
design elements that facilitate such relationships. The second performs
two close analyses of Persona 5 and Hades (Supergiant Games 2020) andrelated texts to demonstrate how these relationships are built, but also how
they challenge and perpetuate heteronormative frameworks of romance.
Since narrative continuity across works is such a dominant ideal even forgame characters, it is interesting to ask what a game franchise would look

30 Video Game Char acters and Tr ansmedia Story telling

like without such an ideal. To suggest an answer, chapter 6 looks at how
game characters are transmedially constructed when narrative continuity
is not dominant. It therefore presents close analyses of three fighting games,
Soulcalibur VI (Bandai Namco 2018), Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (Bandai
Namco Studios & Sora Ltd. 2018), and Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite (Capcom2017), which rely less on linear storytelling. The chapter will first discuss theambiguity of how media in general and video games in particular constructcharacters, before moving to the close analyses that will explain how theiruse of transmedia techniques to construct the characters across different
works is contingent on the players’ knowledge of these characters.
This book concludes with chapter 7 by briefly charting a vision of how
dynamic game characters will be depicted in future transmedia landscapes.
Since I foresee an increase in affective economics within transmedia
franchises that influence our purchasing decisions, the chapter suggests
three topics of which we will see more: first, I predict an increase in thediversity of romances between dynamic game characters that break withheteronormative standards, although this is not without its challenges
and hiccups. Second, dynamic game characters will become popular fuelto monetise free-to-play games, as game developers stimulate players’
desires for certain characters. Finally, dynamic game characters will appear
increasingly beyond video games, in the hybrid realities of fiction, real, andthe virtual. We will see these characters more in settings like social media
and online streaming platforms, but also in supporting technologies likevoice assistants where they interact and adapt to the users’ idiosyncrasies.

Acknowledgments
The writing process of this manuscript was not easy. In fact, it was rather
difficult. I wrote this book during the global Covid-19 pandemic. I moved
between several countries for longer and shorter periods, and experienced
several illnesses and losses of friends and close family members. It is withthis in mind that I wish to reflect on the support I received from thosearound me during the writing process.
I would first like to thank my colleagues at the Centre of Excellence forGame Culture Studies and at the Game Research Lab at Tampere University.
Not a day goes by that I am not happy to be there. They appear here in no
specific order: Emil Lundedal Hammar, Frans Mäyra, Elisa Wiik, Hanne
Grasmo, Heikki Tyni, Kati Alha, Leland Masek, Jaakko Stenros, Mikko
Meriläinen, Riikka Aurava, Taina Myöhänen, Ville Kankainen, Lobna Hassan,

Introducing the dynamic game char acter

31

Mattia Thibault, J. Tuomas Harviainen, David Matencio Durán, Mayara
Caetano, and Souvik Mukherjee. In particular I would like to thank Usva
Friman for her hospitality and help as I settled down in a very cold Finland. I
am pretty sure I would have turned into a depressed ice cubicle if not for her.
This book would not have been there without the support of the Academyof Finland’s Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies project (CoEGameCult, [312395]). This book has also received funding from the European
Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 researchand innovation programme (Grant Agreement No. [695528] – Making Sense
of Games).
In extension, I would like to thank my former colleagues at the Centerfor Computer Games Research (now the Center for Digital Play) at the IT
University of Copenhagen: Hanna Wirman, Hajo Backe, Mike Graham,
Miguel González Duque, Silvia Fornós, Djordje Grbic, Leon Xiao, MiguelSicart, Karin Ryding, Martin Pichlmair, and Torill Mortensen. And a special
thank you to my former colleagues from the Making Sense of Games project:
Mike Debus, Paweł Grabarczyk, Nina Patricia Houe, Miruna Vozaru, Ida
Katherine Hammeleff Jørgensen, and Rune Kristian Lundedal Nielsen. Mostof all, I would like to thank Espen Aarseth, and my former housemate Mads
Johansen who had to witness my antics more than most.
During the writing of this book, I was a visiting researcher several times
at the Ritsumeikan Center for Game Studies at the Ritsumeikan University
in Kyoto. I would like to extend my thanks to the people I met there andinteracted with: Akinori Nakamura, Hiroshi Yoshida, Akito Inoue, Martin
Roth, and Shunsuke Mukae. Also, my thanks to Etsuko Nakamura andAi Suwa for helping me set up after I arrived. And to my fellow visiting
researchers Fanny Barnabé, Leticia Andlauer, Chloé Paberz, Vincenzo Idone
Cassone, Keita Moore, Marc Llovet Ferrer, and Anh-Thu (Cathy) Nguyen.
I would like to show my gratitude to those who helped me with themanuscript drafts of this book: Susana Tosca, Rosemary Lee, Agata Waszkiewicz, Mattias van Ommen, Lukas Wilde, Olli Sotamaa, Tom Apperley,
Elina Koskinen, and my “academic little brother” Dom Ford. I could haveplaced them in one or more of the categories above, but they deserve to
be mentioned separately here. A special thanks to my editor Aure Schrock
for his help with the manuscript when I could not see the wood for thetrees anymore. He helped me to regain an overview of the manuscript.
Finally, I wish to thank the reviewers for their valuable input on the draft
manuscript.
This book would not have been here either without the invaluable supportof my friends, who showed me there is life beyond academia: Eva Trimp, Inès

32 Video Game Char acters and Tr ansmedia Story telling

Benyoucef, Silvia Almeida, Andreia Kroezen, Robbie Peeters, Martijn van
Veen, Stijn van Drongelen, Marianne Krist, Sofie Munk Hasselbom, Martin
Jaeger, Benjamin Dahlerup, Salina Axen Langgaard, Lonneke Verheul, TomOmes, Sonja Kwast, Saara Happo, Johnathan Harrington, Pieter Van Den
Heede, and Sarah Grossi. I would like to emphasise my thanks to Lars de
Wildt, whom I often forget to mention in the acknowledgments of my works.
Because he noticed, I cannot disappoint him again.
My final thanks goes to my family. To my parents, Hanneke Timmer andPeter Blom: I know you stopped asking about my book because I did notwant to talk about it, but I am ready to chat about it again. And thank you
to my little sister Madelein Blom, and my uncle Erik Blom. Who knows if
any of you will read this far, but at least I expressed my thanks. Finally, I
would like to thank my late grandmother, Rini Blom, whose enthusiasm
during this project I will never forget.

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Aarseth, Espen. 2012. “A Narrative Theory of Games.” In Proceedings of FDG ’12,
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2.

Characters in contemporary media
Abstract: This chapter provides an historical overview of game charactersand their role in larger contemporary media practices. Characters havebeen studied throughout several fields, ranging from Literary Studies toTransmedia Storytelling to Game Studies. Game Studies focuses almost
exclusively on the playable f igure, neglecting characters that are notavatars and/or player characters. This chapter offers an explanation on how
game characters are also transmedia characters, and examines the tension
between transmedia and medium-specific perspectives on characters.
Since transmedia storytelling highlights the ideal of narrative continuity
across works, the chapter offers various theoretical approaches from Japan
Studies and Media Studies to complement and counterpoint this ideal.
Keywords: Transmedia characters, transmedia storytelling, Japanese
media mix, game characters

Game characters in transmedia storytelling
Understanding game characters1
In our character-driven culture, multiple character versions across different
works exist that appear identical only on a superficial level. To name justone example: Pikachu. There are many different versions of Pikachu, asmall mouse-like character. Pikachu was first introduced to Euro-American
audiences in the late 1990s through the Japanese animated series (anime)
known as Pokémon Adventures (Yuyama 1997–present). It had a prominent
spot in this series as the cheerful mascot of Satoshi, also known as Ash
Ketchum, a young Pokémon trainer who dreams of becoming a Pokémon
master. In Japan, where the creature first originated, Japanese audiences
1 A prior version of this chapter has been partially published as an entry on “game character”
in The Encyclopedia of Ludic Terms (Blom 2022).

Blom, J., Video Game Characters and Transmedia Storytelling: The Dynamic Game Character.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023
doi 10.5117/9789463722957_ch02

42 Video Game Char acters and Tr ansmedia Story tellingcame to know Pikachu in the video games Pokémon Red and Pokémon Green(Game Freak 1996). The animated series was created after the games, andthen inspired another game, Pokémon Yellow (Game Freak 1998). It was thesame game as Pokémon Red, Green and Blue, but the Pikachu that replaced
the player’s starter Pokémon cried like Satoshi’s Pikachu in the anime.
Pikachu has since proliferated across so many different media andproducts that it has become impossible to give a complete overview. JanNoël Thon (2019) defines a transmedia character network as the relations
between various work-specific instances of a figure that together represent
a single transmedia character. Pikachu’s transmedia character network is
extensive. The little creature appears in all official Pokémon games, such as
Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu! and Let’s Go, Eevee! (Game Freak 2018), Pokémon
Sword and Shield (Game Freak 2019), and the most recent instalments,
Pokémon Scarlet and Violet (Game Freak 2022). We also see the charactervoiced by actor Ryan Reynolds in Detective Pikachu (Letterman 2019). This
Pikachu originally derives from the game Detective Pikachu (Creatures
2016), in which Pikachu helps Tim Goodman find his father. Pikachu also
appears as decoration, adorning mobile phone cases and keychains, and as
stuffed toys and figurines. I have even seen a live version walking acrossthe streets of Shibuya in Tokyo to meet a group of children shopping in the
Kiddyland toy store.
There is a tension between transmedial and medium-specific perspectives
on characters. These tensions can be traced back to Literary Studies, arguably
the field that has most contributed to how we understand characters now
as both pieces of writing and human-like figures that are part of a story
world. Because of this dual understanding of characters, I will use the term
quasi-person for characters throughout this book. I borrow the term fromJohn Frow (2014) who uses it to refer to characters as both pieces of writing
and person-like entities (2). That is, quasi-persons are simultaneously a figureof speech and a figural representation (8) to which we ascribe human-like
qualities and intention (see also this book’s glossary).
While it may seem obvious now, this dual understanding of characters is
the result of a long debate between two positions. The structuralist position
saw characters exclusively as signs or structures of the text (Propp 1928;
Greimas 1966; Barthes [1966] 1995; Cixous 1974; Genette [1979] 1980). The
humanistic position approached characters in terms of resembling a humanlike inner life (Forster 1927; Chatman 1978; Bal [1978] 1999; Rimmon-Kenan
1983; Frow 1986). Characters were seen as either signs embedded within atext or figures interpreted by audiences as human-like, but when the debate
was settled in the 1980s, they came to be understood as both. Scholarship

Char acters in contempor ary media

43

on characters nowadays focuses more on the historical development of how
we understand characters (Jannidis 2004; 2012; Heidbrink 2010; Reicher
2010), or on the different disciplinary perspectives from which characters
can be understood (Margolin 1986; Palmer 2004; Phelan 1989; 2005; Eder
2008; 2010; Smith 2011). Both the historical and the perspective schools ofthought implicitly assume that characters are entities inside a story world,
as exemplified by Fotis Jannidis’ description of characters as “participantsin story worlds created by various media” (2012).
Game Studies initially derived its understanding of game characters from
Literary Studies, but it has since mostly been concerned with a mediumspecific understanding of characters. Game Studies has been interested
mostly in the playable figure, an entity like the avatar and/or the player
character (see Aarseth 1997; Calleja 2011; Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Smith, andTosca 2008; Klevjer 2006; Vella 2015) that players directly control. The terms
avatar and character have distinct meanings that are often conflated invideo games. Game scholars were initially interested in whether the playable
figure was a tool for players to manipulate the game world, a puppet, arepresentation of the player, or perhaps a person-like being with its own
characteristics and traits (see Aarseth 1997; Bartle n.d.; Linderoth 2005;
Newman 2002; Salen and Zimmerman 2004). The tension was resolved byRune Klevjer’s book What is the Avatar (2006), in which he argues that theavatar mediates agency and control between the player and the world of
the game (62). He defines it as “an instrument or mechanism that defines
for the participant a fictional body and mediates fictional agency; it is anembodied incarnation of the acting subject” (87). In other words, the avatar
is the extension of the player in the game environment, which allows players
to interact with the world.
On the basis of Klevjer’s explanation, the avatar may be a vehicle, a mouse(arrow), or even a human-like figure. It differs from a character because heconsiders characters to be independent subjects, related to persons with
their own goals and intentions (16). However, Klevjer’s explanation did notentirely explain the dual nature of player characters—human-like figureswith their own goals and intentions but controlled by the player. Daniel Vella(2015) defined the playable figure as an entity that simultaneously consistsof the player and belongs to the game world. The playable figure becomes acharacter when players can deduce the figure’s attributes and traits basedon a game’s textual cues. In this way, although player characters are directly
controlled by the player, their personality is independent from them.
The almost exclusive focus in Game Studies on the playable figure neglected characters other than the avatar and the player character. Several

44 Video Game Char acters and Tr ansmedia Story telling

scholars have developed typologies to classify game characters (Isbister
2006; 2016; Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Smith, and Tosca 2008; Calleja 2011; Aarseth
2012; Schröter and Thon 2014; Schröter 2016). However, these typologies still
mostly set the playable character apart from other types of game characters.
The playable figure is considered such an essential part of game charactersthat Felix Schröter and Jan-Noël Thon (2014), in their analysis of video
game characters, identify three different dimensions of experiencing gamecharacters: as a fictional entity, as a game piece and as a representationof the player (49–50). The latter category defined the avatar as a means ofcommunication between different players.
Early works on game characters mostly approached them as computerbased agents different from literary characters, and borrowed notions ofcharacters from Theatre Studies (see Laurel 1991; Murray 1997). However,they paid little attention to understanding non-playable characters since
they were solely concerned with playable figures. Later works recognised
the meaningfulness of characters for the empathic and emotional responses
they solicited from players. But even these emphasise player characters(Morrison and Ziemke 2005; Perron 2009; Lankoski 2010; 2012). Pinchbeck(2009) acknowledges non-player characters as being significant in the worldof the game and its plot. But Kristine Jørgensen (2010) most notably draws
attention to the importance of supporting characters as narrative devices
that create a coherent narrative experience in the game. She argues thatcompanions carry the narrative progression through the activities performedby the player (328). In other words, what Jørgensen describes is a dynamic
game character, whose essential elements I will explain in more detail in
the following chapters.
Can game characters be transmedial?
At the time of writing this book, interest in the medium-specificity of gamecharacters has diminished because the boundaries between characters
across different media have become increasingly blurred. More than before,characters are part of a media ecology, in which popular entertainment
franchises try to generate as much prof it as possible by creating largetransmedia worlds and stories for consumers. It is the rule rather than the
exception for characters—including game characters—to have become
transmedial.
Characters were initially underemphasised in early academic discussions
on transmedia storytelling. These discussions mainly approached charactersas “stock characters that re-occur” (Jenkins 2006, 123), part of the world’s

Char acters in contempor ary media

45

mythos or background stories (Klastrup & Tosca 2004), or merely inhabitantsof the world (Wolf 2012). As mentioned in the first chapter of this book,this underemphasis of characters stems from Henry Jenkins’s bias towards
stories and worlds. He described transmedia storytelling as “the art of world
making” (2006, 21), in which worlds are created through stories, which meansthat characters exist only in service to the world.
Attention to stories and worlds in Transmedia Storytelling increased as
Game Studies became interested in the medium-specificity of the avatar
and the player character, which reflects the general attitude of the time
towards characters. The general idea was that game characters could nottransfer to other media. Narrative affinities and affordances shared bybooks and films were not shared by games, and so transfers between media
with strong structural differences were seen as complex at best (Aarseth
2006). Game characters inherited such problems. Characters failed to be
cross-medially adapted to movies from games (and vice versa) because
the player’s avatar required affordances the new medium did not have
(Pearce 2004). Player characters and avatars were the favoured focus ofGame Studies. Jessica Aldred (2012) states that game characters are forced
to be “digital doubles” of their filmic incarnations. To her, game characters
are bound to the expectations and constraints of their film versions in thesame way as an actor’s image is carried into the role they play (101). They
must simultaneously serve as the player’s avatar and as the fictional entity
advancing the story. As Aldred explains, due to the clash between a gamecharacter being its own individual and its role as the representative of theplayer in the game world, the character’s own personality must be carefully
managed in advertisement campaigns to manage player expectations (99).
However, Game Studies gradually shifted its attitude towards the acceptanceof game characters that transfer to other media platforms. For example,
only a few years after her initial statement, Aldred (2014) explained thatcharacters have become the symbols of larger game franchises which can
extend to other media.

The ideal of narrative continuity across works
As the reliance on medium-specificity decreased, game characters started
to be discussed as part of a global network of transmedia characters. Oneof the main challenges is cohesion of their various contradictory identities(Rosendo 2016), as they proliferate across different stories and media. The
tension arising from the imbalance between a character’s different identities

46 Video Game Char acters and Tr ansmedia Story telling

has prompted scholars to explain how various incarnations of a character
across multiple works relate to the character as if it were a single entity. Thistension is nothing new, as the different incarnations of American comicbook characters intrigued scholars even before Jenkins officially coined
the term “transmedia storytelling.” In the early 1970s, Umberto Eco (1972)
described the comic book hero Superman as a mythical character, because
so many contradictory versions of him already at that time existed that thecharacter became a fixed archetype. According to Eco, this meant that thecharacter would not extensively develop as is common for characters innovels to remain recognisable to broad groups of audiences. In the early
1990s, William Uricchio and Roberta Pearson (1991) discussed Batman,
another comic book character. They did not consider his contradictory
appearances from a perspective of continuity, defined by a primary workor text. Instead, they argued that Batman’s construction as a character isdefined by a set of patterned character traits across all the different works
in which the character appears.
After Jenkins’s description of transmedia storytelling as a unified andcoherent experience (2007) there has been a rise in the ideal of narrative
continuity that informed both academic and industry practices in North
America. In an attempt to successfully create coherent transmedia worlds,
producers use so-called bibles or world-databases (Harvey 2015; Rosendo2015). This practice is not exclusively limited to stories, as the bibles cancome in the shape of character profiles, art, sound, and references to improve
communication between different teams working on a franchise (Francis2019). However, the reality of this practice is a stark contrast with the ideal.
As I observed in chapter 1, according to Thon (2015), the reality is that theindustry mostly fails to realise this ideal. The results are felt in academic
studies of this practice. For example, Thon argues that academic analyses ofthe practices of transmedia storytelling suffer “from a largely unexaminedcommitment to what one could call the model of the ʽsingle world’” (2015,23–24).
Thon’s point highlights the contradictory nature of transmedia storytelling: narrative continuity is an ideal that is rarely attained. Jason Mittell(2015) has highlighted a useful distinction between the ideal of transmedia
storytelling and the actual practices Thon describes:[i]t is useful to distinguish between Jenkins’s proposed ideal of balanced
transmedia, with no one medium or text serving a primary role overothers, with the more commonplace model of unbalanced transmedia,
with a clearly identifiable core text and a number of peripheral transmedia

Char acters in contempor ary media

47

extensions that might be more or less integrated into the narrative whole,acknowledging that most examples fall somewhere on a spectrum between balanced and unbalanced. (294)

Addressing the imbalance and countering the approach of the ideal of asingle-story world, Thon (2015) distinguishes between a “local mediumspecific story world of single narrative worlds, the glocal but noncontradictory transmedial […] story worlds that may be contrasted out of local
work-specific story worlds, and the global and often quite contradictorytransmedial story world compounds that may, for the lack of a better term,
be called transmedial universes” (32). He proposes that this distinction
between types of converging content retains the notion of story worlds
without perpetuating the idea of a single-story world, and thus better reflects
the imbalanced and contradictory practices of the industry.
The ideal of narrative continuity applies to transmedia characters as
well. When a single-story world is imbalanced, that is, when it has a clearly
identifiable core text and a number of peripheral transmedia extensions (Mittel 2015, 294), so too are its characters. For example, Marvel’s Wandavision’s
finale shocked viewers when it revealed that the television series’ heroine,
Wanda, had been enslaving hundreds of people to physically play in a sitcom
fantasy (Robinson 2022). However, it was not until the movie Doctor Strange
in the Multiverse of Madness (Raimi 2022) that Wanda’s lack of remorse
was explained as coming from a place of despair when it portrayed Wanda
as its ultimate villain (Robinson 2022). The Marvel Cinematic Universe
uses films as its identifiable core text, with extensions like Wandavision
integrated in the narrative whole. Without this television series, Wanda’s
transition from heroine to villain in the movies would not have made any
narrative sense. One needs to be a dedicated consumer of the entire Marvel
franchise to understand her behaviour. In this sense, she is an imbalanced
character. This example complies with Mark J.P. Wolf’s (2012) understanding of characters as tools whose presence in multiple stories suggests theexistence of the same world (382). However, due to the reality of imbalanced
transmedia, characters like Lara Croft, Pikachu, or Batman that proliferate
across different media, cannot be understood as consistent entities within asingle-story world. They often have various contradictory identities, which
could be caused by different character versions across different franchises
but also by inconsistent writing within the same franchise, where a characteris supposed to be the same individual –as is the case for Wanda.
Scholars have discussed characters’ contradictory identities from a setof different perspectives. Shane Denson (2011), for example, distinguishes

48 Video Game Char acters and Tr ansmedia Story telling

between the “series character” and “serial figure” to describe the tension
arising from different types of seriality. The series character develops withina continuing narrative with increasing psychological depth and complex
social involvements (Denson 2011, 536). That is, they exist inside a series (546).
The serial character is a “flat” character, a stock character that appears in
different forms across adaptations, contexts, and media (536). They exist
as a series (546). Another perspective comes from Will Brooker (2012), who
presents Batman as an amalgam of three models. First, Batman is a myth or ametatext in the sense that the character is a summation of all texts in which
it appears, and belongs to everyone, that is, to the public, to popular memory,and to modern folk culture (152). Second, Batman is a brand, and exists as
a product carefully controlled by the intellectual property owner. Third,
Batman is canon, the “strict sense of what counts and what happened, what
is true and what is not, in the mainstream Batman comic book universe”(153). Batman is carefully controlled as a single entity, as only officiallyapproved stories enter the official canon (ibid.). That said, there exist various
Batman canons alongside each other, such as the Batman canon by film
producer Christopher Nolan, the canon by film producer Zack Snyder, or
the one by film producer Matt Reeves. In these canons, Batman is presented
as a character with a single and stable identity, while at the same time, theexistence of these multiple canons actually denotes the opposite: that hehas multiple identities that are far from stable. I will explain the processof canonisation in further detail in chapter 4.
Paolo Bertetti (2014) has presented one of the most elaborate typologies oftransmedia characters. Defining them as fictional heroes “whose adventures
are told across different media platforms, each one giving more details on
the life of that character” (2345), he breaks with the convention of mutual
correspondence between transmedia worlds and characters. That is, thesame figure may appear in a different world (2346). He distinguishes between
characters based on a single course of events (narrative continuity) andcharacters based on multiple courses of events (no narrative continuity). The
former refers to the character based on a temporal order of stories within
the same world. The latter refers to a figure with recurring properties, but
events happening to them may contradict each other.
Despite all these differences and an increasing focus on character proliferation outside narrative continuity, the question of canonicity and identity
remains an important focus of contemporary character theories. Many
scholars have also pointed out that, even within a single work, characters
are necessarily incomplete (Eder 2010, 11; Reicher 2010, 119; Vella 2014, 15;Wilde 2019b, 5). Their identities are hard to define even when making senseChar acters in contempor ary media

49of them based on the ideal of narrative continuity. Theoretical approaches
from the intersection of Japan Studies and Media Studies complement andoffer a counterpoint to this ideal. Japanese culture embraces the idea thatcharacters are not necessarily connected to stories and worlds. In the section
below, I will present an overview of theories from Japanese media cultures so
as to trouble the Euro-American-centric assumption of narrative continuity.

Characters in the Japanese media mix
What is the media mix?
In Japan, strategies similar to transmedia storytelling have been discussed,
for even longer, under the concept known as the media mix. It has its own
history and developed since the 1980s before it was discussed alongside theterm media convergence (since 2006) in North America and North-Western
Europe (Steinberg 2012, viii). In his well-known work Anime’s Media Mix(2012), Marc Steinberg explains that characters in the media mix are a“device that simultaneously allows audiovisual media and objects to connect and forces their proliferation” (83). Unlike transmedia storytellingor transmedia world-building, characters are how transmedia franchises
connect their entertainment media and objects. These media and objects
do not necessarily tell stories with characters with the same continuous
identity, as if they are the same character. Rather, a character functions asa kyara or “recognisable archetype” (Nakamura and Tosca 2019) that can beplaced within different series and media entertainment products without
requiring narrative continuity (see for example Odagiri 2010; Hirohito 2011).
Although the terminology and theory surrounding the media mix appeared in the 1980s, the practices of the media mix can be traced back to
World War II, having roots in fascism. The practices first arose as a set oftechniques for producing audience-participatory propaganda during WorldWar II by the Taisei Yokusankai (Imperial Rule Assistance Association), a
special governmental organisation established in 1940 to promote Japanesenationalism in order to create a monolithic nation (Ōtsuka 2018; 2019).
Although this was gruesome, Japan was far from the only country where theruling state used the circulation of media and characters to propagate its
ideologies. For example, comics have also been used to shape the societal,
political, and cultural development of the Nordic countries (e.g., Denmark,Sweden, and Finland) between the 1930s and 1950s (see Rikke Platz Cortsen
et al. 2014). The current shape of the media mix was created by Haruki

50 Video Game Char acters and Tr ansmedia Story telling

Kadokawa in 1976, who turned it into a cross-media strategy to stimulate
the consumption of mass media (Steinberg 2012, 150). Steinberg (2017) has
explained in a later piece that Kadokawa’s original ideas of the media mix
were inspired by Hitler’s media strategy. The goal of a successful media mix
is to advance total social mobilisation of words, images, and sounds so as
to drive the consumption (instead of production) of a particular productfamily (248).
It was not until Steinberg’s Anime’s Media Mix (2012) that the media mix
became widely known in English-speaking academic circles, primarily thefields of Media Studies and Japan Studies. The media mix was implicitly
discussed in the early 2000s by Japanologists whose works rarely appearedon the radar of scholars in Game Studies. They mostly discussed the media
mix by discussing anime franchises and not games. Such works include, forexample, Susan J. Napier’s Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke (2001),
Anne Allison’s Millennial Monsters (2006), and Thomas Lamarre’s The Anime
Machine (2009). Together they demonstrate that Japanese popular culture is
an important phenomenon to understand the circulation and interpretationof Japanese society and culture both in- and outside Japan. However, theirgeneral lack of interest in video games unfortunately prioritises anime andmanga as the fundamental texts to study–despite the fact that Japanese
video games are intertwined with the creation and circulation of thesetexts and have had a strong global presence since the late 1970s, with games
such as Space Invaders (Taito 1978), Pacman (Namco 1980) and Mario Bros.
(Nintendo 1983).
The field of Game Studies has shown a more explicit interest in the Japanese media mix since the 2010s. Martin Picard and Jérémie Pelletier-Gagnon(2015) have explained the lack of earlier interest by pointing to the field’s
Euro-American-centric understanding of games (1–2). They attribute thisgap of understanding of Japanese games to the language barrier and a lack ofknowledge of Japan Studies (1). As a result, the Euro-American-centric fieldof Game Studies created a tunnel vision. It positioned itself as the centre ofacademic research, focusing on phenomena game scholars identified using
theoretical knowledge that game scholars themselves created without theawareness of non-Western areas of the field. Thankfully, works on the role ofgames in Japanese contemporary transmedia practices are slowly becoming
available in English, produced by scholars who locate their work at the junction of Game Studies and Japan Studies (e.g., Steinberg 2015; Hutchinson 2019;
Roth, Yoshida, and Picard 2021). This recent interdisciplinary development
is also visible in academic conference themes in the field. For example, theDigital Games Research Association’s (DiGRA) 2019 conference in Kyoto hadChar acters in contempor ary media

51

the ludo/media mix as its theme, acknowledging the relevance of Japanese
media and the contribution of Japanese scholars (see Wirman 2021).
The Japanese game industry is tightly connected to the media mix. Picard
and Pelletier-Gagnon (2015, 3) explain that the Japanese video game industry is specifically characterised by the media mix. Unlike North-Western
Europe and North America, where we tend to think of the game industry as
a separate (albeit connected) industry of film or comics, the Japanese video
game industry works in tandem with other industries. This fusion is shapedon a local scale by marketing strategies, on a national scale by industrial
transformations, and by global creative and technological developments(3). Picard (2013) puts it thus:[t]he Japanese video game industry is at the intersection of local innovations in marketing strategies—in part in a context commonly called the
media mix, which is itself linked to a broader context of a consumption
culture that has risen from contemporary, and some would say postmodern (Azuma, 2007, 2009), Japan—national industrial transformations—whereas the Japanese video game industry is at the crossing ofelectronics, computer, amusement and content industries in Japan—andtechnological and artistic developments—from the hardware to thesoftware—in which some aspects were, subsequently or synchronously,
established globally and under an increasingly transnational mode, allforming a particular media ecology or system, that I name “geemu”. (ibid.)

Characters in the media mix
Steinberg (2012) provides a cross-media argument to understanding characters in a media mix. He considers characters as devices whose nature
is to travel across different media, and materialise in each medium in a
distinct way (85). They are abstract entities that cannot entirely be captured
within any one medium, although each medium foregrounds aspects of thecharacter according to the capabilities of that medium (85). The synergy
between media is actualised within the media mix through different
manifestations of the character, which have distinct properties within eachmedium (85). However, as each medium shares modalities with another tomediate any form of expression (Elleström 2010), some media materialisecharacters in ways that are similar to other media, while having theirown distinct properties and conventions for expression of these figures.
While each medium can express characters in their own way, charactersin one medium may still share similarities with their counterparts in other52 Video Game Char acters and Tr ansmedia Story telling

media, so that the boundaries between distinct types of characters are infact blurred.
Steinberg’s work has put the Japanese media mix on the Anglophone map
over the last decade, but characters have been playing a prominent role inJapanese scholarship on the media mix since the late 1980s. The Japanese
media theorist Eiji Ōtsuka in 1989 formulated the concept of “narrative
consumption” (Ōtsuka 1989; [1989] 2010), a marketing theory that explains
how the individual narratives of characters allow users to gradually learn
about the world in which a character lives. Ōtsuka assumes the ideal for
narrative continuity through a distribution strategy through non-narrative
media, from which Japanese theory on characters later deviated in Hiroki
Azuma’s work (more on that in the next section). To develop his theory ofnarrative consumption, Ōtsuka used Bikkuriman Chocolates, a chocolate
bar with stickers inside the wrap that became a hit among Japanese children
in 1988 and 1989. He linked the “grand narrative” to the term “world view”
commonly used in the field of anime (106). In every anime episode, animatorsshow a “small narrative” focusing on the central character of the series. Only
the accumulation of the series’ episodes allows for a complete “worldview”
so that the audience understands what is happening in the world. In otherwords, the theory of narrative consumption considers characters to be theelements through which we come to understand a fictional world.
With characters at its heart, the media mix pushes storytelling to thebackground, depending on it to a lesser degree (Condry 2013). A media mix
approach enables audiences to understand a world through charactersrather than the other way around. Ōtsuka’s theory of narrative consumption presents a larger world the reader can understand through different
characters and their individual stories. Douglas Schules (2015), for example,
summarises the relationship between characters, stories, and worlds within
narrative consumption: “narrative consumption […] focuses on the rolestories play in driving the consumption of discrete media. Motivating thisconsumption is the character-world relationship, where a grand narrative(or worldview) structures how smaller ones known as narrative fragments
fit together” (57).
Thomas Lamarre (2018) pushes stories and worlds to the background evenfurther. He understands characters in a media mix as platforms capableof simultaneously serving as sites of continuity and discontinuity (210–18).
The former happens through a character’s code switching. Within the same
medium, a character appears in a variety of segments with different codes.
He uses the example of an anime episode in which a character appears in
the fictional world of the episode, as well as in its opening sequence, endingChar acters in contempor ary media

53

sequence, and commercials (215). The character must meet different expectations within each of these segments and it unites these different segments.
Discontinuity occurs through media switching—when a character becomesa transmedia character that moves between different media platforms.
According to Lamarre, this is a switch between capabilities of the screen(217), which we may understand as a medium-specific switch between
different affordances and limitations of media platforms.
The kyara and kyarakutā distinction
The nature of characters has been extensively debated in Japanese theory,
even if only little of this discussion has yet reached the Anglophone academic
world. Ōtsuka’s perspective on characters has been critiqued. The deviationfrom narrative continuity came to be highly influential when the Japanesecultural critic Hiroki Azuma wrote a response translated as Otaku: Japan’s
Database Animals ([2001] 2009). According to Steinberg’s introduction to histranslation of Ōtsuka’s narrative consumption theory, Azuma could not havewritten his response without engaging with Ōtsuka’s work (Ōtsuka [1989]
2010, 102). Azuma argues that before postmodernity, i.e., the cultural world
since the 1970s (7), Ōtsuka’s narrative consumption was the way consumers
entered into a world. This kind of consumption collapsed during the riseof postmodernity. Rather than stories, characters have become the mostimportant objects for consumption in a work (31). The consumers Azuma
specifically refers to are otaku— (male) fans who consume the aggregatedelements of characters and settings, but not the grand narrative in whichthese elements appear (54).2 In contrast to Ōtsuka’s narrative consumption,
Azuma names the consumption behaviour of the otaku “database consumption”, which discards the grand narrative.
Azuma’s work ignited a debate on the nature of characters within the
cross-media settings of anime, manga, and other media. Lukas Wilde (2019b)
explains that Japanese scholars made a helpful conceptual distinction
between the kyarakutā (character) and the kyara: the character as a fictional
being in a story (kyarakutā) and the visual figuration that “can easily be
reproduced and consumed outside of its original narrative context” (kyara)(5). He points out that the term kyara has many contradictory meanings but
is used by cultural critic Gō Itō as a technical term to refer to the “protocharacter-state” of fictional entities (5). Kyara have a pre-narrative state,
2 An otaku can generally be described as a man between 18 and 40 years old who obsessively
consumes media such as anime, manga, games and other related Japanese products.

54 Video Game Char acters and Tr ansmedia Story tellingin that they circulate between character goods and products that do notnecessarily tell a story and lack diegetic context. The kyara’s pre-narrative
state is based on the overabundance of competing and incoherent information between the appearances of the figure (5–6).
With the term “proto-character-state”, Wilde refers to Itō’s book Tetsuka
izu Deddo [Tezuka is Dead] (Itō 2005; 2011).3 Itō distinguishes between thekyara and the kyarakutā based on famous manga artist Osamu Tezuka’s
understanding of characters. Tezuka, who is known as the “father of the(modern) manga”, considers a body made from simple lines a kigō shintai(“symbolic body”), only the visual representation of a body and not yet acharacter (Itō 2005, 116). Using Ōtsuka’s idea of the character as human-like(who can therefore die) (see Itō 2006), Itō regards a kyarakutā as a tōjō
jinbutsu, who convinces its readers that it is an “appealing dramatis persona”(Itō 2005, 120). The dramatis persona must: give a sense of seikatsukan (thefeeling of having a daily life of a person), ikigata (a way of life), hanashikata(a speaking style), and jinseikan (a certain stance in life). These aspects
combined give a being sonzaikan, a feeling of existence—the sense thatthe character is born, grows up, gets old, and dies (2005, 120). In otherwords, Itō explains the character as the representation of a body with apersonality (121). In contrast, the kyara is an easy icon that only looks likea character. It is a “proto-character” that precedes the kyarakutā before
readers perceive it as a character. It can therefore be considered to be avisual cliché.
Itō follows Ōtsuka’s idea that the tōjō jinbutsu (the character) must beakin to a “real” person. That is, it needs to have a corporeal element (2005,
131). This is not the case for the kyara. In his English piece on Itō’s andAzuma’s response on Ōtsuka, Zoltan Kascuk (2016, 279) points out that the
kyara is purely the semiotic aspect in Ōtsuka’s duality of the character’snature. That is, the kyara’s body functions as a sign but is not the kyarakutā.
The kyarakutā uses the body as a sign and employs the medium to evoke“human-like” behaviour, turning it into a quasi-person.
3 Unfortunately, the book is mostly untranslated; there is only an abridged translation of
the book’s foreword and its opening chapter: “Manga in Transformation and Its Dysfunctional
Discourse” by the translator Miri Nakamura (2011). In the introduction to the translation, Miri
Nakamura reveals that Itō’s goal is to come up with a theoretical tool to analyse manga as
a distinctive representational form, contrasting those that conflate manga with anime andf ilm. She states that Itō argues in the book that “realism of modern manga originated fromthe suppression and effacement of its postmodern elements – epitomised by what he defines
as kyara, a “proto-character” entity that turns into a complete kyarakutā (character) once thereader identifies it as human-like” (2011, 69).

Char acters in contempor ary media

55

Azuma, in turn, responds to the distinction between the kyara and the
kyarakutā in the still untranslated work Gēmuteki Riarizumu no Tanjō[The Birth of Game-like Realism] (2007). He uses Ōtsuka’s term “narrative
consumption” ([1989] 2010) and Itō’s distinction between the kyara and the
kyarakutā (2005) to explain the nature of the character. Azuma positions
himself in contrast to Ōtsuka, referring to the media form the latter favours.
He argues that Ōtsuka distinguishes between three different forms of “lightnovels,”4 which are common media in most media mixes. Some example oflight novels include pre-1970s jyubunairu shōsetsu (“‘juvenile novels”), 1970s
joshi shōsetsu (“girl novels”), and tēburutāku rōrupureingugēmu shōsetsu(“table-talk role-playing game novels” or TRPG novels) (2007, 111).5 Azuma
believes that Ōtsuka considers the TRPG novels inferior to the othernovel forms, because the TRPG novels do “not contain the inevitability ofdeath—due to the possibility of resets, replays, and alternative endings”(Kascuk 2016, 278; Azuma 2007, 118‒120). Ōtsuka’s concept of the character
relies on their mortality (Kascuk 2016, 278). From Ōtsuka’s perspective, acharacter cannot maintain multiple lives, because it needs to die to givethe impression of a person with a life.
On the other hand, Azuma argues that characters function like nodes
and enable the possibility of meta monogatariteki na sōzōryoku no kakusan(“the proliferation of the power of meta-narrative imagination”).6 This phrase
refers to the phenomenon when otaku read about a character in one story
and they can easily imagine it appearing in other distinct derivative works
or products (2007, 125). These characters have a meta-story-like quality inthe sense that they can be “freely extracted from stories and relocated, andnew story endings can be created, […] irrespective of whether the original
work from which the character comes is a game or not” (Kascuk 2016, 279).
Characters move from story to story, outside the author’s control (Azuma
2007, 125). Azuma’s argument is that characters that are used in anime,
manga, or light novels and that appear in game novels (such as the TRPG
4 Young adult novels usually aimed at middle and high school students.
5 In Japan, “tabletop role-playing games” are known as “tēburutōku RPGs”, that is, “table-talkrole-playing games”.
6 Kaskuck translates meta monogatariteki na sōzōryoku as “metafictional imagination”. This
term can be understood across disciplines as having the same meaning as Marie-Laure Ryan’s“transf ictionality” (2013), which refers to the migration of f ictional entities across different
texts that may belong to the same medium and usually in narrative fiction (365–366). Anotherway to translate meta monogatariteki is proposed by Wilde (2019b) who translates the termas “meta-narrative” to account for the different worlds and texts across which kyara live (5).
According to him, characters with meta-narrative qualities (kyara) must be transfictional bydefinition (ibid.).

56 Video Game Char acters and Tr ansmedia Story tellingnovels) have a gēmuteki na (“game-like”) existence (125). Their meta-story
quality enables them to migrate from story to story without requiring
narrative continuity.
Azuma uses Itō’s distinction between the kyara and the kyarakutā todemonstrate that the circulation of the kyara is inherent to its nature. Azuma
shifts Itō’s focus on the visual aspect of the kyara to its game-like existence
and its repetitive nature, which he believes are essential elements to modern
manga as drawn by Osamu Tezuka (2007, 138). The concept of a character’s
game-like existence was then picked up by Tamaki Saitō (2014) who uses it todifferentiate between characters and human beings. The former are persona
who lead many different lives and die many different deaths, unlike humanpersons (2014, 108–9). Saitō therefore concludes that the essential element of
the kyarakutā is its tensō kanō/fukusei fukanō—its ability to transfer to otherworks without reproducing itself (109). The term refers to characters being
able to move from one work to another but never being entirely the same
person, something we also see in Bertetti’s work (2014) as characters based on
multiple courses of events. The kyara’s essential element is the exact opposite:
fukusei kanō/tensō fukanō—the ability to consistently reproduce itself overdifferent works without transferring (Saitō 2014, 109). This statement refers
to the idea that kyara, as visual clichés, are not embedded in a diegetic story
world and so do not develop as persons. Kyara dwell in a network where they
constantly move between different works, circulating while reproducing
their own image, never growing as if they are quasi-persons (110).
The distinction between kyara and kyarakutā is not necessarily clear-cut.
Rather, the two concepts lie on a spectrum in which the person-like figure
can function more akin to a visual cliché or like a fully-fledged quasi-person.
Such a distinction can be hard to understand from a Euro-American perspective which is used to looking at characters as quasi-persons embedded in astory world. Whereas the Japanese perception of a kyarakutā might still fit
the Euro-American lens of characters, the proto-narrative state of the kyara
causes confusion. Wilde (2019b) gives the clearest explanation of when ahuman-like figure is a kyara or a kyarakutā. He explains that kyara requirerecontextualisation. Basically, a kyara can easily be placed in narrative
contexts where it turns into a kyarakutā, a quasi-person that develops, but
it can also appear in other aesthetic, medial, and social forms. The kyara
can appear in completely incompatible contexts, varying from a story inthe manga to cosplay and fan fiction, without necessarily being the samecharacter (kyarakutā). Even parameters such as race, gender, and ethnicity
can be contingently changed (7). From this perspective, the kyara consists
fundamentally of contradictory identities.

Char acters in contempor ary media

57

We can apply the distinction between the kyara and the kyarakutā to
Pikachu, for example. As a visual cliché, Pikachu is primarily characterisedby its yellow body, cute features, and a tail shaped like a lightning bolt. It appears in different contexts such as on mugs, cell phones, and colouring books.
It also appears in more narrative contexts, such as Ash Ketchum’s Pikachuin the animated series, the player’s pet in the games, or as a detective inDetective Pikachu. None of these appearances are exactly the same character,or the same quasi-person. Pikachu is thus constantly recontextualised,oscillating between functioning as a kyara and as a kyarakutā in a story
world.

Changing approaches
The idea of the kyara is very different from how most Euro-American theories
look at transmedia characters. The kyara does not imply the ideal of narrative continuity across works but instead focuses on the circulation of thecharacter. Yet, the kyara is not a concept unique to Japanese culture andthere are a few exceptions that defy the ideal. The most notable exception
would be Shane Denson and Ruth Mayer’s (2018) conceptualisation of theserial figure, a stock character of the popular-cultural imagination of thetwentieth and twenty-first centuries. Serial figures such as Sherlock Holmes,
Dracula or Batman have been shaped across a range of different media (65).
Uricchio and Pearson (1991) distinguish characters such as Bugs Bunny andMickey Mouse from Batman because they “function as actors/celebrities
rather than characters” (1991, 185). Wilde (2019b) mentions, for example, thatthey act as fictious actors that can take on any role (13). Susana Tosca (2003)
and Aldred (2014) both locate a game character’s ability to hop from one gameto the next (or from one medium to the next) in the characters’ iconicity.
The distinction between the serial figure and the serial character (Denson
and Mayer 2018) resembles the Japanese distinction between the kyara
and kyarakutā. Denson and Mayer’s understanding of serial charactersreflects the Euro-American ideal for characters to be part of an on-goingand consistent narrative set in a fictional world within a series (67), but theydescribe the stock character as independent from any set world:[t]he iterability of flat, serial f igures implies not only their episodic
existence (like that of cartoon figures), but also their ability to extract
themselves fully from the diegetic construct of a narrative world, fromits attendant demands for continuity, and even from the medium itself

58 Video Game Char acters and Tr ansmedia Story tellingthrough which a fictional world is otherwise invisibly constructed. (2018,
69)

There has been a small increase in scholars addressing characters from thenineteenth century in North America and Europe. Their work shows how older
forms of transmedia franchises were created based on the principle of charactersharing rather than on the logics of a story world (Scolari, Bertetti, and Freeman 2014; Freeman 2017; Meyer 2019; Wilde and Denson 2022). Throughout,narrative continuity across different works emerges as an assumption ofcontemporary media practices, not as an inherent trait of all characters.
We can also see an increase in academic works on contemporary transmedia practices that shed the ideal of narrative continuity. Instead, they
explain how different manifestations of a character relate. Pearson (2019), forexample, uses Denson’s concept of “traces between previous incarnations”(2011, 536) to capture cohesion between different character appearances. She
argues that the cohesion between appearances is invoked through “pointsof contact” that link different texts. As I briefly mentioned at the beginningof this chapter, Thon’s work (2019) on the theory and analysis of transmedia
characters uses the term global transmedia character network to avoid thegeneral assumption of what he calls the “model of the single character”(2019, 187). Inspired by Japanese theory mentioned above, Thon’s character
network is the sum of all contradictory character versions of a transmedia
character. His work stresses that recipients draw on their prior knowledge
or expectations of the characteristics of a transmedia character—suchas Sherlock Holmes, Batman, or Lara Croft—to understand the character
represented in front of them, which he calls the “transmedia character
template”.7 Recipients understand the transmedia character as the same
person, even if “the fact that two characters may share the same name isarguably not sufficient for assuming that they are the same character” (183,original emphasis). Returning to the Pikachu example, as recipients, wecome to understand Pikachu as a character based on our prior knowledgeof the creature’s distinguishing features across different works.
Based on their previous works, Pearson and Thon published a collaborative piece on the complexity of the normative discourses of character-likephenomena in different media, histories, and cultures. The identity of a
7 Thon explains that the term can understood as somewhat similar to Klastrup and Tosca’s(2004) concept of “worldness” to describe a number of distinguishing features of the universeof transmedia worlds. We may come to understand it here as the intersection of distinguishingfeatures of the transmedia character across different works.

Char acters in contempor ary media

59

transmedia character is constantly negotiated and re-established overtime, as distinct local instances of the character proliferate across a variety
of texts (Thon and Pearson 2022). Their call for more local and mediumspecific understandings of characters’ nature is shared by other scholars,particularly in the realm of semiotics. The dialogue between Paolo Bertettiand Mattia Thibault (2022) shows how semiotics can contribute to a theory
on transmedia characters. They argue that semiotics can provide a powerfultool to explain how different media produce characters, and deconstruct
the idea of “character” as a unique concept. An example of their suggestion
can be found in another work by Wilde (2019a), where he approaches thekyara as a semiotic object resulting from a series of texts. He applies Charles
S. Peirce’s semiotic grammar to explain the cultural functions and usesof the kyara. Specifically, he explains that kyara oscillate between thesemiotic modes of firstness, secondness, and thirdness, or potentiality,
factuality, and regularity, so that their identity is constantly negotiated byparticipatory cultural communities. Stephan Packard (2019) offers anothersemiotic approach that uses Peirce’s insight, discussing how readers copewith the varying and often conflicting identities of transmedia charactersby interpreting decontextualised characters, like kyara.
Finally, the topic of the reception and negotiation of characters by audiences has come to the forefront. Susana Tosca and Elizabeth Evans (2022)show how fan fiction writers recreate instances of transmedia characters,
understood as networks of recognisable traits and relations built acrossmedia incarnations. Nicolle Lamerichs and Nieves Rosendo (2022), on
the other hand, demonstrate how recipients’ affective responses lead tocontroversies surrounding a character’s perceived identity. They refer to thecase of Kassandra, a dynamic game character in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey(Ubisoft 2018). Initially players could choose to play Kassandra as a queer
character. Ubisoft’s downloadable sequel (DLC) forced players to engage
in a heterosexual relationship, retroactively annulling players’ agency tochoose the figure’s sexuality. Forced heteronormativity led to players feelingcheated and deceived—a consequence that has much to do with the promiseof players having the agency to decide the identity of their dynamic gamecharacter, which I will discuss in more detail in chapter 4.

Conclusion
With the increase of academic works on characters, assumptions about acharacter’s nature and its contradicting versions are gradually changing,60 Video Game Char acters and Tr ansmedia Story telling

and are no longer forced to conform to Jenkins’s ideal of narrative continuity
across different works. We may therefore expect that future academic works
will increasingly come to embrace character multiplicity, which allows
for closer inspection of actual industry practices rather than conform toan ideal that cannot be upheld. Another promise, however, that should
be scrutinised, is that of the player’s creative agency over dynamic gamecharacters in video games, since developers, who follow the ideal of narrative
continuity, often fail to follow through on the promise of creative agency
when the figure is transported to other media platforms and products. In
the following chapters, I will demonstrate how the dynamic game characterdraws from this ideal while at the same time, the promise of creative agency
cannot be upheld.

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3.

How the dynamic game character
develops
Abstract: This chapter explains how dynamic game characters structurally develop in video games. First, I explain that dynamic game charactershave a development structure with multiple outcomes that the player canactivate, because a game is a cybermedium, which has the potential tochange depending on how one plays. In the second part, I describe thedifferent requirements for a game character to be considered dynamic.
The final part focuses on the three types of dynamic game charactersover which players have creative agency: as ludic agents, as narrative
agents, and as performative agents. These agents develop predominantly
as game pieces, through the game’s story, or through pre-coded scripts
respectively.
Keywords: Ludic agents, narrative agents, performative agents, development structure, possibility space

Dynamic game characters
On a warm evening in April 2018, I started playing Mass Effect 2 (ME2)(BioWare 2010) on my laptop. I usually prefer to play on game consoles, but I
was on a research exchange in Japan and did not have the luxury of a console
in my temporary apartment at the time. ME2 had been recommended tome by a colleague a few months before. But when I initially started playing,
I struggled to stay interested, and put it away after a mere four hours ofgameplay. I was determined to figure out in Japan what was supposed tobe so interesting about this game. Before I knew it, it was the middle of thenight, and I had played for several hours straight—an exception for me,
since I rarely “binge” games.
ME2 is the second instalment in a series of three action role-playing
games also known as the Mass Effect series (BioWare 2007–2012). The

Blom, J., Video Game Characters and Transmedia Storytelling: The Dynamic Game Character.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023
doi 10.5117/9789463722957_ch03

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original trilogy started with Mass Effect (BioWare 2007), then Mass Effect
2 (BioWare 2010), and ended with Mass Effect 3 (BioWare 2012).1 The series
covers the adventures of Commander Shepard, an elite soldier who guides
a crew tasked with stopping enemies known as the Collectors in the Milky
Way galaxy of the twenty-second century. The series has the player choose
Shepard’s gender, appearance, background, fighting class, and first name at
the start of the game. It allows players to make meaningful choices during
the game, which not only impact how other characters perceive Shepard,
but also determine the story’s progression. The player’s choices determine
the fate of other characters and, eventually, the ending of the series. Decisions effectively turn Shepard, and the many characters whose fate is also
determined by the player, into dynamic game characters. Additionally,
players can transfer data from one game to another in the series so that
their choices affect the story and characters throughout the whole series.
This creates narrative continuity between different works, which is an
important ideal, as I discussed in the previous chapters.
Every night I played this game, making choices that impacted the futuresof my player character commander Shepard and their crew on the spaceshipthe Normandy. At one point in the story, I was confronted with a dilemma;
before the events of the game, the Turian species used a biological weapon
known as the “genophage” to kill off the Krogan species during a rebellion.
In the aftermath, female Krogans were unable to reproduce. Over the courseof the game, Shepard runs into one of the few doctors who could potentiallycure the Krogans’ infertility. The dilemma was presented to me as thefollowing choice: will Shepard destroy doctor Maelon’s data to cure thegenophage’s effect of infertility, or will they keep the data? In my naivety I
chose to destroy the data, because I convinced myself it was corrupted by
the doctor’s inhumane experiments on female test subjects of the Krogan
species. Little did I realise that this choice would have consequences for
Shepard and another character, Eve. In Mass Effect 3 (ME3) (BioWare 2012),
Shepard is tasked with retrieving the female test subjects from Maelon’s
project. During the mission, Shepard discovers that only one subject, Eve,
has survived. Eve is taken aboard Shepard’s ship, but she is weak and coughs.
The crew’s doctor, Mordin, explains that he needs Eve’s body to cure the
Krogan’s infertility, but he also warns that because of her ill health, Evemight not survive the procedures to create the cure. Despite these warnings,
1 The release of Mass Effect: Andromeda (BioWare 2017) marks the fourth entry in the Mass
Effect series, but contains different protagonists and is set in different worlds than the original
trilogy, and I am therefore omitting it from my analysis.

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Eve insists she will undergo the procedures, and, indeed, she dies due tocomplications not long after.
I wondered whether there was any way to save Eve? Was it possible forher to survive the procedures, or had the game set this event in stone? My
search for an alternative led me to discover that I had already determined
Eve’s future in ME2 by choosing to destroy Maelon’s data instead of keeping
it. Without it, Mordin’s knowledge was incomplete, and he had no way ofkeeping Eve alive. Had I chosen to retain Maleon’s data, Mordin could
have used the data to save Eve. My choice resulted in the weakening of the
Krogan faction’s support, which in turn meant that Shepard would have tobattle the final enemy without their help. Since I am not particularly good atfighting in games, my decision made fighting the final battle more difficult.
As the series allows players to determine the fate of many of its dynamic
game characters, Eve has a development structure that is undetermined until
players make decisions that affect future events. In turn, these decisions
steer a dynamic game character’s development structure in a certain paththat determines their identity. When I chose to destroy Maelon’s data in
ME2, I did not realise that this choice would affect Eve, as she did not makean appearance until ME3. The choice closed off the path to survival for her,and left open only the path to death. I was surprised by this. This outcome
was not what I wanted, but nor was I prepared to replay ME2 and ME3 justto change Eve’s fate. I had to live with the consequences of my actions; theversion of Eve I had created died.
Dynamic game characters exist because of the mechanical system ofcybermedia, a genre of media to which games belong. As explained briefly inchapter 1, games are ergodic cybermedia, that is, games require non-trivial
effort to traverse (Aarseth 1997, 1–2), which means they enable players tochange the state of the game by playing the product (see Aarseth and Calleja2015). By extension, players can also change the state of characters in thegame. Dynamic game characters are a special type of character, as players
change not only their state, but also the direction in which the character willdevelop. These characters’ development structures lead to different outcomes
depending on the player’s choices and actions throughout the game. The
dynamic game character functions as a quasi-person with a development
structure that branches into different outcomes that are activated by theplayer. A dynamic game character is inherently ergodic, because the player
has to exert non-trivial effort to affect the character’s development. The
actualisation of these possibilities has structural consequences for how
the player continues to traverse the game. The game will indicate that theplayer is placing the development of the character on a certain path, thereby

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closing another path. However, the outcome does not necessarily have to
be clear to the player until they have made their decision.

The possibility space of games
The mechanical system of a cybermedium creates a possibility space, which
Aarseth (1997) describes as the situation in which choices in a cybertext
make a part of it more accessible to its users. With each decision, players
actualise one possibility and close another (1997). A possibility space can beunderstood as the potential that the player can actualise, which structures
the processes within the game and allows the game to change from one
state to another. The scope of this space depends on the game; it could be
infinite for some and finite for others. Consider games with a procedurally
generated open world. In these games, players can traverse an endless gameworld because the procedural content generation (PCG) method automaticallygenerates new (and partially random) content. For example, open worldgames like Minecraft (Mojang 2009) and No Man’s Sky (Hello Games 2016)
have infinite possibility spaces, as new content is generated in a continuous
loop. Nevertheless, not every possibility has to be constantly available, nordo certain rules always have to be in effect. The game’s processual naturecauses the state of the game to change regularly so that players traverse
different segments, such as exploration, battle, or narrative development, oreven entirely different games. Kristine Jørgensen (2010), who has written oneof the few works about dynamic game characters, describes the growth anddevelopment of characters in ME2 and Dragon Age: Origins (DAO) (BioWare
2009) through segments such as personal quests and loyalty missions of thecompanion characters that accompany the player characters in both games.
Her description demonstrates how the procedures the player performs
are constrained within segments that allow the player to affect the final
outcome of the character.
To provide an example, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (BotW)(Nintendo 2017) is an open world game where players take on the role of theprotagonist Link to save the world Hyrule. The game allows the player toexplore and navigate its world and regularly generate new content (every“full blood moon”) so that defeated enemies will respawn. The game has amain story but is designed so that players can decide where they want to
go in that world, which is divided into different areas.
The most delineated area is called The Great Plateau, which functions as atutorial area that familiarises players with the game’s structure, mechanics,

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and rules. Players can only leave it once they have solved puzzles in fourshrines, scattered across the plateau. Yet, even this area is divided into
segments where different rules and mechanic apply. Players are required
to reach the Keh Namut shrine at the top of the mountain, so they have toclimb a mountain covered in snow. They discover that to reach the top,
they have to keep Link’s body warm or else he will die. The character canbe protected from the cold by finding warm clothes or by cooking spicy
dishes that warm him up. Once Link is inside the shrine, the player has tosolve puzzles to obtain the Cryonis ability, which allows players to create
pillars of ice from a water’s surface. As players move through the different
segments in the open world they are met with different challenges, rules,
and mechanics so that the possibilities of how players go through thesesegments differ as well. Simply put, different segments allow for different
possibilities.
Possibility spaces like BotW create potential for character development
in games that are actualised when players make choices and perform actions. The shape of the space can be described and visualised by Brenda
Laurel’s ([1991] 2014) flying wedge model of human-computer interaction(HCI). Laurel explains that in a dramatic play, the play’s potential opens
a set of possibilities as it progresses, and every enactment makes somepossibilities more or less probable ([1991] 2014, 84). At the climax of the play,
all possibilities are eliminated except for one—the final outcome. This iswhen probability turns into necessity (84) (Fig. 3.1).
Unlike scripted plays, however, gameplay is affected by the player’s role
within the game’s mechanical system. The shape of potential for computerhuman interaction is similar to the flying wedge for dramatic plays, but the
number of possibilities changes (it may increase or decrease dependingon the choice and game) as the player acts and makes choices ([1991] 2014,85). As a result, the flying wedge for computer-human interaction creates
multiple outcomes ([1991] 2014, 85) (Fig. 3.2). This means that each player
can have a different outcome depending on their choices and actions.
The possibility space facilitates the development structure of all gamecharacters. At a minimum, the character must have the potential to appear
in the game so that the player engages with it. When a character appears
in a game, it presents a development structure with a certain numberof possibilities for how it can develop, even if that potential is severely
limited. For instance, the role-playing game Octopath Traveler (Square
Enix 2018) allows the player to choose one main character from eight possible protagonists at the start of the game. The player can then choose toencounter the seven protagonists whom they did not pick as their player

74 Video Game Char acters and Tr ansmedia Story tellingFig. 3.1: Illustration of Brenda Laurel’s flying wedge ([1991] 2014). Illustration by Marianne Krist.

Fig. 3.2: Illustration of Brenda Laurel’s flying wedge for human-computer interaction ([1991] 2014).
Illustration by Marianne Krist.

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75

character while traversing the world, and recruit them into a party of two
or more protagonists. The player can also choose to completely ignore theprotagonists except for the one they choose at the beginning. That meansthat a player could decide not to recruit a protagonist such as the scholar
Cyrus, and so Cyrus’s potential development will never be actualised overthe course of the game. Another player might choose Cyrus at the start of
the game, creating an opportunity to develop the character of the scholar.
The player can choose to fully pursue the character’s range of narrative
development, advance its abilities, up its levels, and get it jobs, which helps
reach the end state of the game.
At their broadest, games give the player the impression that the character’sdevelopment structure contains a plurality of potentials and outcomes. For
example, the action role-playing game Nier: Automata (PlatinumGames2017) has twenty-six different endings. Each is an actualised possibility ofthe development structure of all the characters involved. The majority ofthe endings result from the player failing or fleeing a mandatory quest, after
which the player restarts the quest to continue the game. Four out of thetwenty-six endings provide alternative end states, which are influenced by
the decisions the player has made over the course of the game by completingthe main story quests. However, it is impossible for the player to achieve
all outcomes in a single play through. For some endings, the player needs
to obtain a certain combination of the other endings; in other endings, achange in decision near the end is enough to change the end state. The
dynamic game character lives in this broad possibility space.

The development structure of dynamic game characters
As I stated before, a dynamic game character’s development structure isshaped like Laurel’s flying wedge for human-computer interaction. The
player makes choices and performs actions that, in turn, make certain
outcomes of the development of the character more or less likely. The game’s
possibility space includes the development structure of all its dynamic gamecharacters. The development structure of a single dynamic game characteris assigned solely to that individual character and could potentially end
before the game reaches its end state.
The dynamic game character’s development progresses slowly throughout
the game. Changes of state in games cause characters to continuously switch
back and forth between different game segments. ME2 provides a good
example of how this back-and-forth movement between segments works. The

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loyalty missions in ME2 are separate, contained segments. The player needs
to complete each segment while playing as one of Shepard’s crew members,
such as Garrus, to become loyal to the commander and unlock their special
abilities. The completion of this mission also provides the opportunity toromance Garrus (on the condition that Shepard is female and not male),which highly improves Garrus’s chances to survive the game’s final mission.
The player cannot perform all of these procedures at the same time, nor
are all rules, mechanics, and affordances simultaneously available. Rather,
the player operates inside different segments, each of which contain its own
combination of mechanics and rules. By doing so, they advance the overall
development of the character, opening up certain possibilities in the process.
Sometimes, the player makes a choice that closes off another path; romancing Garrus means that they will not be able to romance other characters
later in the game. In short, a game’s possibility space gives dynamic gamecharacters the opportunity to develop as beings with an inner life, while
they also develop as a game piece. The development may be divided into
different segments, but these merge in the game’s possibility space as thecharacter’s development advances towards a specific outcome.
As such, the player has become a vital part of the dynamic game character’s development process. While the player always remains bound to the
choices and consequences that have been laid out for them by the game,it becomes impossible to think of the dynamic game character’s identity
without considering the player. The player does not just imagine the identityof the character, but effectively shapes the figure’s identity. This means that
digital games accelerate a dynamic game character’s identity within a single
work, unlike more “traditional” non-cybermedia, in which a character’s
identity is constructed over multiple works. Instead of having multiple
versions configured over multiple works, which determine the continuityof their identity within a transmedia ecology, the dynamic game character’s
possible different versions all gather within a single work. In other words,
the dynamic game character contains a plurality of identities of which only
one is manifested through the player.

The requirements for dynamic game characters
For a game character to be dynamic, player input is required. This does notnecessarily mean that the player needs to have an avatar-like relationshipwith the fictional person. Instead of talking about characters in terms of
their relationship to the player—through terms like avatar, player character,How the dynamic game char acter develops

77

protagonist, or cast characters—the term dynamic game character relocatesthe player’s agency from being confined to a single entity to a web of characters which do not exclusively have to be player characters, but may also
be supporting characters or even more minor characters like merchants. Itchanges the assumption that when the player controls a player character,their agency is limited to that figure. Rather, the dynamic game charactershows how the player affects different kinds of characters. An example ofa dynamic non-player character would be Eve, who was discussed at the
beginning of this chapter. Eve is just one of the many beings involved in
Shepard’s journey to save the galaxy. My decision to destroy Maelon’s data
was attributed by the game to Shepard (the player character) but resulted in
Eve’s death (not a player character), and consequently weakened the Krogan’s
support in the final battle. Eve’s death could have been avoided. She could
have lived and had children, and she could have gained the support of the
Krogan to help Shepard’s mission. But my choice to destroy Maelon’s data
set her on a path towards a different outcome.
Although player input can be very important for how a player perceivesa character, that does not mean a game structurally acknowledges theplayer’s input as actions that change the development of the figure. Vella’s(2014) distinction between character actions and player actions explains
the difference; character actions refer to actions the character performs
independently of player input, and player actions refer to actions that theplayer makes the player character do (Vella 2014, 12–13). Because I canchoose to have Arthur from Red Dead Redemption 2 (Rockstar Studios
2018) (RDR2) continuously eat steak, I could think of him as someone
who eats meat. However, whether or not he eats meat changes nothing on
the structural level of the game. Indeed, the steak keeps Arthur’s healthbar filled, but so do most other foods in the game. These actions do not
encourage the player to steer the character’s development in a structurally
different direction.
On the other hand, actions that do affect Arthur’s development andoutcomes include killing innocent persons on the street. Stealing, killing, or
refusing to help non-playable characters (NPCs) lower Arthur’s reputationbar, which makes NPCs flee if they see him. Killing innocents registers as
negative actions, causing people in that world to become afraid of Arthur.
Actions that the game registers as positive prompt NPCs to give him rewards—prices in stores are lowered and more outfits are unlocked. The
character’s dynamicity is measured by a reputation bar that affects how
Arthur dies (spoiler: he will die regardless of what the player does). If he has
a good reputation, Arthur dies in peace while looking at the sunset. With a78 Video Game Char acters and Tr ansmedia Story telling

bad reputation, he will be shot dead by his former gang mate. The reputation
bar is merely a visual measurement of Arthur’s characterisation process,the character’s development that shapes who they become. Characters
who flee at the sight of him and Arthur being shot dead rather than dying
peacefully—these are structural consequences, showing that the gameencourages the character to develop in a certain direction.
Despite the choices and actions that can affect a character, most games
only account for a certain set of outcomes. The ways a character can develop,
and the possible outcomes of the character’s development structure, arelimited. This means that it differs for every game what outcomes are possible and what actions or choices will lead to a different outcome. In otherwords, the element that dynamic game characters all share is that it isalways up to the player to realise what outcome they will experience. In
RDR2, Arthur does not survive his tuberculosis, and no medicine appears
regardless of what the player does. His death is unavoidable. However, theplayer can influence how he dies, although there are only four outcomes.
But Eve from ME2 can be saved by the player if they choose not to destroy
Maelon’s data.
A dynamic game character’s development structure can be pictured as atree with forking branches that differ per character and game. They containall the different outcomes the figure can experience. A caveat with regard
to the development structure is that it only works if the forking branches
have been placed in the game by the developer. It is not something that “justhappens”, but is designed specifically for a game. The player then simply
advances from the trunk of the tree to different branches through eachchoice and action facilitated by the game’s possibility space. Whenever theplayer makes a choice that pushes a character’s development in a certain
direction, the branch opens other branches that they can pursue. When theplayer makes a choice, they actualise a possibility that directs the development of one or more characters towards a certain outcome. In doing so,they can steer the development to alternatives with other outcomes, butalso close off possibilities.
This prompts me to list the requirements for characters to be defined as
dynamic game characters. Overall, for a character to be considered dynamic,
it must meet three conditions:––

The player directs the character’s development onto certain paths by
their choices and/or actions in the game.
The player’s choices and actions have at least one non-trivial consequence
for either the development of the character and/or the state of the game.

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Fig. 3.3: Diagram of Eve’s development structure. Illustration by Marianne Krist.

–

The outcome of the character’s development is undetermined until theplayer directs it towards a single possible outcome.

Returning to Eve, we can create a simplified tree diagram to visualise herdevelopment structure (Fig. 3.3). As can be seen, Eve’s death in ME3 is justone direction in which she could have developed. Fig. 3.3 also shows that
she could have survived if the player had saved Maelon’s data. Alternatively,
yet another direction is that she survives, but dies later in the game if
the player is unable to dismantle an enemy bomb. The player steers Eve’s
development structure in a certain direction by making choices andperforming actions that determine her eventual fate. Although Fig. 3.3
shows her overall development structure, Fig. 3.4 depicts her development
and fate when I played the game. Fig. 3.4 combines Eve’s development
structure with Laurel’s flying wedge for human-computer interaction.
It visualises how my choice to destroy Maelon’s data turned a possible
outcome into a probable outcome: Eve dies due to complications of the
genophage. Had I chosen to save the data, I would have stayed longer inthe realm of the probable, until I either failed or succeeded in disposing of
the bomb. Two out of three outcomes would have resulted in Eve’s death,albeit in different situations and due to different choices. Which outcome
eventually becomes necessary depends on the player. Before the choice80 Video Game Char acters and Tr ansmedia Story tellingFig. 3.4: Diagram of the path in which I influenced Eve’s fate with Laurel’s flying wedge for humancomputer interaction ([1991] 2014). Illustration by Marianne Krist.

is made, each outcome and path are just possible, written into the game’s
possibility space before the player takes up the task of influencing thecharacter’s characterisation process.

The three types of dynamic game characters
Dynamic game characters can be divided into three different types overwhich players have creative agency to develop the character’s identity:
ludic agents, narrative agents, and performative agents. According to Felix
Schröter and Jan-Noël Thon (2014), players experience game characters inthree different frames: as fictional beings with an inner life, as game pieces
that are part of game mechanics, and as avatars—the representations ofother players. I exclude the avatar as the representation of the player andmake the following distinction: dynamic game characters are ludic agentsif they are developed predominantly as game pieces, narrative agents if they
are developed mostly as fictional characters, and performative agents if they
are developed primarily based on scripts—encoded patterns that determine
their behaviour. Dynamic game characters may consist of all three agents at

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once within a single game. This differs per game. In the following sections I
will provide three examples of how each agent’s development process works.
Ludic agentsThe development of some dynamic game characters is dominated by theirfunction as ludic agents in a game. These agents operate primarily as gamepieces. Developing Schröter and Thon’s frames of experience in a later
article, Schröter (2016) explains that as game pieces, characters are experienced through gamer-related features and abilities, and character-related
goals and rules that serve the player during gameplay (42). Although thesecharacters are primarily experienced as game pieces, Schröter explainsthat they are not represented in simple abstract means. Rather, they arewhat he considers “f ictionalized”—represented as actions of f ictional
beings. For example, combative engagement against an enemy, exploring
labyrinths, or trading with NPCs are fictionalised capabilities (43). Thesefeatures, abilities, goals and aims include numerical ludic attributes (suchas the agent’s health and defence), or game mechanics (like moving, firinga weapon, or throwing a grenade) (2016, 43). So, rather than “game pieces”,
I call this type of dynamic game character “ludic agents” to acknowledge
that they are a quasi-person.
As ludic agents, game characters become dynamic through abilities
and features that let the player move around in the game space. Bychoosing specif ic features or abilities of their agents, the player will
create a specific version of that character. For example, at the beginningof Mass Effect, the player has the possibility to def ine the gender ofcommander Shepard as either male or female. This choice influences
what romantic options are successively available to Shepard during
gameplay. Other choices might include skills that the player chooses fortheir characters. For example, in Horizon Zero Dawn (Guerilla Games2017), the protagonist Aloy gathers more (numerical) experience withevery skill point. Skill points let the player choose which skills to unlock
for Aloy to grow as a traveller, forager, prowler, or combatant, thereby
changing the dynamic of specific parts of the gameplay. If Aloy grows as
a prowler—a category that develops her stealth skills—she will be able
to fall or jump without alerting enemies. If she grows as a combatant, acategory that focuses on combat, she can add additional arrows to herquiver. Thus, it is specifically as ludic agents that many game characters
are dynamic.

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Link in Breath of the Wild as a ludic agent
Dynamic game characters commonly appear as ludic agents in open-worldgames. BotW provides a good example of how players can choose different
paths in open game worlds. Unlike the previous games in The Legend of
Zelda (LoZ) game series, with the exception of the first instalment The
Legend of Zelda (Nintendo 1986), BotW belongs to the open-world gaming
genre. BotW iterates the topoi or “stock patterns” (see Eco 1979, 119) of the
LoZ series to repeatedly present Link, the LoZ series’ main protagonist, withthe same goal: to save Hyrule one more time. However, this time, players
can ignore the game’s overarching narrative, and instead explore the worldof Hyrule, moving freely wherever they want. Before the player sets out tosave Hyrule, they must complete a few tasks. First, the player must finish
the game’s tutorial segment, which rewards Link with objects and abilities
he needs to travel the rest of the world. Once the player manages to leave
the tutorial space, Link can save Hyrule by going to Ganon’s castle anddefeat him. Little else is necessary, but to defeat Ganon while Link is at his
weakest is extremely difficult and will likely provide little pleasure for theplayer interested in exploring the world of Hyrule.
BotW’s open landscape (Aarseth 2005) has a hierarchical structure that
contains one main goal, fifteen main quests (excluding the main goal), andseventy-six side quests. The main goal is to defeat Ganon to save Hyrule. Then
there are the main quests, which are important to move the game forward
and reach the game’s main goal. The most important main quests are theDivine Beast Quests; Link can free the deceased champions Daruk, Mipha,
Urbosa and Revali from the influence of Ganon, since their Divine Beasts(the machines they used prior to their death) now wreak havoc on Hyrule.
These four quests comprise the game’s cardinal functions (Barthes [1966]
1995); they constitute the skeletal framework of the quests of the game with
events set in stone and allow the player to change Link and Hyrule as they
complete the main goal. The side quests do not cause any structural changes
in Hyrule’s world, and mainly provide Link with additional items, such asprotective clothing, weapons, and food. Despite the hierarchical structure,
the player does not have to fulfil any particular quest. The open-world
structure of the game allows the player to ignore all quests, even the maingoal. However, every event and mechanic support the main goal and themain quests, so the game will constantly remind the player what they wantfrom the player: save Hyrule!
The most potent way to weaken Ganon in the final battle is to find andfree the Divine Beasts through the game’s Divine Beast Quests. Each Divine

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Beast has a former champion—a deceased owner who helped Link in theirfirst attempt to defeat the antagonist, but failed and paid for it with theirlife. As the player sets out to free these beasts, they gradually learn what
happened to the champions prior to the events of the game via cut scenes,
dialogue with characters, and items such as letters or diaries. The order inwhich the player takes on these quests does not matter, as the only requirement of the open landscape (Aarseth 2005) is that the player travels to thespecific places in the game world where the quests are located.
One Divine Beast Quest is found in Zora’s Domain, a kingdom of waterthat is home to the Zora species. Here, Divine Beast Vah Ruta causes chaos
amongst the Zora people, threatening to flood their home they depend on.
After Link frees the beast and its former champion Mipha’s spirit, Mipha
grants him a new power called Mipha’s Grace. For Link as a ludic agent,Mipha’s Grace adds dynamicity; the power is incredibly convenient, since
it allows Link’s health to refill when he runs out of hearts. For example, if
Link were to fall to his death or takes a critical hit, he would be immediately
revived so that the player could continue without having to start fromtheir previous save point. Abilities that Link receives in the game’s Divine
Beast Quests allow the player to play with more ease and take on greater
challenges. The hierarchy of the game’s quest structure in the game aligns
with the development of Link as a ludic agent: as the player chooses to
unfold the game’s secondary quests, they obtain greater rewards to develop
Link further.
The side quests can be considered “catalysers”—the fillers, so to speak(see Barthes [1966] 1995)—that enhance the development of Link as a ludic
agent. At the start of the game, Link’s health bar contains three hearts,and the stamina orb is only a single green circle. This circle depletes when
Link runs or climbs. With less stamina, Link might not be unable to outrun
an enemy like a Silver Lynel who could defeat him with a single hit. Morestamina and hearts make it much more likely that the player will evade or
defeat such a powerful enemy. The player mostly obtains hearts and stamina
by obtaining spirit orbs. These spirit orbs lie in shrines, spread across thegame world for the player to discover. Inside the shrines there are challenges
to complete. Upon completion, the player is rewarded with a single orb. At
the so-called Goddess Statues, the player can trade four spirit orbs for an
additional heart or additional stamina. By completing these challenges,
Link’s ludic agent evolves and becomes stronger so that challenges like theSilver Lynel or defeating Ganon become more likely. Furthermore, the player
can obtain clothing that grant Link extra abilities via other side quests.
Link’s clothing, in contrast to weapons, is permanently in Link’s possession

84 Video Game Char acters and Tr ansmedia Story tellingand cannot be destroyed. The Zora’s armour, for example, gives Link theability to swim up waterfalls. The feminine Gerudo clothing makes him
resistant to desert heat and grants him passage to Gerudo Town—a townthat only allows women inside.
Each power, spirit orb, and outfit expands what Link can do in the game.
When the player has completed all main quests, there is only the main goal
to undertake: defeat Ganon and save Hyrule. However, the irony is that the
final goal will never actually be reached. Once the player manages to defeat
Ganon, save Princess Zelda, and save Hyrule, the game returns Link to thefront of Ganon’s castle. A star on the player’s save file is the only indicationthat the player has managed to defeat Ganon, since the open landscape ofthe game never acknowledges the victory. The game world stays in a stateof openness, never reaching an end state. Link is doomed to roam a worldthat is never free of Ganon’s wrath.
Narrative agents
If a dynamic game character is dominated by its function in a narrative
structure as a fictional person, its development primarily unfolds in a game’sstory. The game presents its dynamic game characters primarily as narrative
agents and sets certain events in stone. These events must happen for astory’s narrative structure to exist, regardless of how the player performs.
They are the narrative structure’s cardinal functions (see Barthes 1966),
they constitute the skeletal framework of the story. In linear stories suchas scripted plays or most novels, cardinal functions only provide a single
outcome as presented in Laurel’s flying wedge (Fig. 3.1), but non-linear
stories have multiple paths, like those displayed in Laurel’s flying wedge
for human-computer interaction, where players have agency to influence
the outcome (Fig. 3.2). As Hans-Joachim Backe puts it in his article on nonlinearity in games:[i]n any text that is supposed to produce a coherent story, there has tobe the deep structure of Barthes’ cardinal functions. Even in a nonlinear
campaign, a skeletal structure of narrative exists in the form of predetermined key points of the story […]. Nonlinearity in games manifests itself,
structurally speaking, in allowing the player agency over the outcome of a
cardinal function, in determining one of several possible paths. (2012, 248)

As players determine the outcome of a cardinal function in the game’s story,
they gradually create an overarching narrative structure, a macrostructure

How the dynamic game char acter develops

85(see Backe 2012), that connects all these different events together to createa coherent story. In doing so, they develop the dynamic game character asa narrative agent in that story; by determining the narrative agent’s path in
the story, they create a particular identity for the dynamic game character.
Shepard in the Mass Effect series as a narrative agent
The Mass Effect series is an ambitious trilogy where many characters’ functions as narrative agents is more dominant than their function as ludic
agents. Earlier in this chapter, I explained how my choices within ME2 led
to the death of Eve, a support character in the series’ story. This section will
discuss the series’ player character, Commander Shepard, as a narrative
agent, whose development, as well as the outcome of the overarching narrative structure, are affected by the player’s choices in the story.
To repeat briefly the series’ story here, the Mass Effect series follows thejourney of Commander Shepard, who travels through the galaxy. Their crew
includes species such as the Drell, Hanar, Krogan, Salarian, and Turian.
Shepard is a soldier in the service of the Systems Alliance, the representationof humankind on Earth and its colonies on other planets. The character
initially works on the Alliance’s starship Normandy as an executive officer,
but after they become the first human to join the Spectres—an elite groupof agents—they become the Normandy’s captain. Over the course of theseries, Shepard discovers the goal of the Reapers, a secretive machine racethat is attempting to eliminate sentient life in the galaxy. This discovery
prompts Shepard’s mission to save humankind and the other races that
populate the galaxy.
The player creates parts of Shepard’s identity even before the start ofthe story. In the character-creation mode, the player chooses Shepard’s
non-ludic attributes: their gender (male/female), first name, physical appearance, background, psychological profile, and military specialisation.
These attributes will not change over the course of the game, but some ofthem influence available opportunities throughout the story. For example,
Shepard’s gender determines their romantic options. In ME2 and ME3, theplayer is offered an additional choice at the start of the character-creation
mode: they can choose to import data from the previous game instalments to the new game, or the player can choose not to use this data andinstead obtain choices from the previous game determined by the gamedeveloper. This data is primarily expressed in Shepard’s identity. When I
chose to import my Shepard from ME2 to ME3, the game transferred theirappearance, skills, level, reputation, and previous plot choices to ME3.

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Unbeknownst to me, by importing this data, the choices I made in ME2
had major consequences in ME3. Destroying Maelon’s data in ME2 resulted
in Eve’s death in ME3. Creating a romance between Shepard and Garrus
in ME2 and rekindling that romance in ME3 created a Shepard that hoped
to start a family with Garrus once the war against the Reapers was over.
As the choices I made affected Shepard’s development, Shepard’s identity
became gradually less ambiguous and more determined. As a result, as theplayer, I not only determined the game’s overall story, but also became astructural part of Shepard’s identity.
Shepard’s development as a ludic agent feeds their development as anarrative agent, the latter of which dominates the game. Players can affectShepard’s reputation in the overall story. In the ME series, Shepard’s reputation is measured along a “morality system” that measures Shepard’s paragon
reputation on one end, and the character’s renegade reputation on another.
Paragon tends to involve benevolent dialogue and actions, while renegade
dialogue choices and actions are ruthless and cold-blooded. Basically, a
Shepard with a paragon reputation is perceived as honourable and heroic
by other characters. In contrast, a Shepard with a renegade reputation isregarded as intimidating and fearsome.
The player accumulates reputation points primarily through the game’s
dialogue system in segments in which the player alternates between scripted
scenes and dialogue trees. A common dialogue tree usually consists ofthree replies: a paragon reply, a renegade reply, and an investigative reply.
The latter does not advance the scene but allows the player to obtain more
information about the topic of discussion. The replies decide Shepard’s
action within the scene, by giving them the reputation of either a paragon
or a renegade. If the player chooses a paragon reply, Shepard might deflecta crisis, while a renegade reply has Shepard intimidate another character.
Each reply adds to Shepard’s paragon or renegade points which affect theirreputation.
Shepard’s reputation also opens paths that do not involve paragon,
renegade, or investigative replies but that do advance the game. When
Shepard’s friend Aria asks in ME2 Shepard to protect her prisoner, called“the Patriarch,” Shepard can make the Patriarch go into hiding, much to
the latter’s dismay. If the player has accumulated enough reputation points(either paragon or renegade, it does not matter which in this case), the player
is given another possibility. Because my Shepard had enough paragon points,
I chose an alternative option where Shepard offers to defeat the assassinsthat threaten the Patriarch in his name so that the Patriarch retains hisfearsome reputation. Too few points on either scale does not mean that theHow the dynamic game char acter develops

87

player cannot progress in the game. Rather, the event might not play out inas beneficial a way to the player as it would otherwise have.
Despite the players’ agency over Shepard’s actions, the cardinal functions remain rigid. The player can only influence how the events unfold,but they might not have the result the player wants. According to Laurel([1991] 2014, 112), the authorship of interactions with the computer is typically constrained, because the designers of the game determine branchingpossibilities. In the case of the ME series, no event is arbitrary, and every
choice has a consequence. In some cases, the player’s choice has massive
consequences, as with Eve’s death. In other cases, certain events become
particularly hilarious because the player’s choice causes the game’s structure
to unfold in an unintended way. When I played ME3, I was set on having
my Shepard romance Garrus, but I almost failed to achieve my goal during an event between Shepard and the ship’s communication specialist
Samantha. When Shepard was in their own cabin, I chose to have them callover Samantha to play chess. In the dialogue tree I chose to have Shepard
offer Samantha a shower, but I did not understand what that offer implied.
During Samantha’s shower, Shepard asks if Samantha was planning on
going on a hot date with someone, to which Samantha responds that it
depends if she is interested, referring to my Shepard who was a woman. By
that point had I figured out that this scene could lead to Shepard romancing Samantha—far from what I had intended. Shepard can only have one
romantic partner in ME3 (see also chapter 5 for monogamy and polyamory
dating in games), and a romance with Samantha would therefore close off
the path to romancing Garrus. The dialogue tree showed up: does Shepard
join Samantha in the shower or decline the invitation? I chose to decline
the invitation. My Shepard gave Samantha a quick reply: “Good luck withthat date!” Samantha looked a bit disappointed, but at least my original
goal was still attainable.
Players make many individual choices throughout the series that
determine how Shepard develops, but it is a set of different factors that
determines Shepard’s (and other characters’) eventual fate. ME3 has fivedifferent core endings: 1) destroy the Reapers (Destroy); 2) bring the Reapers
under Shepard’s control (Control); 3) merge all organic and synthetic life in
the galaxy (Synthesis); 4) refuse to make a decision (Refuse); 5) destroy the
Reapers and ensure Shepard’s survival (Perfect Ending). The availability ofthese endings depends mostly on the number of Effective Military Strength(EMS) points that players have accumulated through ME3. The more points,
the better the outcome and the less the collateral damage that will occur.
When the EMS is low, players can only choose between the Destroy and88 

Video Game Char acters and Tr ansmedia Story telling

Control options. If players choose the destroy option, the choice to destroy
the Reapers will destroy most life—including that of Shepard and their crew.
One choice in ME2 is also relevant: had the player chosen to destroy theCollector base in ME2, only the Destroy option would have been available
with low EMS. While Shepard’s reputation is less significant for the ending,it still has some influence over this; when players choose the Control ending,
Shepard becomes an artificial intelligence (AI) system that watches overthe galaxy, but their reputation as either renegade or paragon determines
if they become a watchful protector or a tyrant.
Finally, Shepard dies in almost all endings of ME3, except in the PerfectEnding, an alternative to the Destroy ending. Having accumulated enough
EMS, players will be able to destroy the Reapers but have the crew and
Shepard survive with little collateral damage to the galaxy. If the player
has then romanced any of the characters, the love interest refuses to put
Shepard’s name on the Normandy Memorial Wall, as they are convinced that
Shepard is still alive somewhere in the galaxy. I only became aware of the
Perfect Ending after I had already completed ME3, having chosen to destroy
the Reapers but with the devastating death of my Shepard. Learning of thisoption, I replayed the entire game to accumulate enough EMS. Once I approached the ending, I chose Destroy again, but this time, Shepard survived
as Garrus watched over the memory wall refusing to put her name there.
Performative agentsThe final category of agents consists of performative agents. This kind of
agent is embedded in simulated game environments by a flexible structure.
Narrative environments rigidly enforce inescapable events, the cardinalfunctions, as we saw with the ME series. Characters perform as game pieces
in open-world environments like in BotW. By contrast, performative agents
operate through scripts, which we can understand here as “potential manifestations previously encoded in manifestations of doing” (Schechner 1988,
69). In other words, scripts are actions and behaviours that are possible,
because their potential has been carved out by previous behaviours andactions. Prior to our current understanding of scripts as written words onwhich film or television actors base their acting, scripts were generally seen
as patterns of doing. Richard Schechner considers them to be “something thatpre-exist any given enactment” (1988, 68), whereas drama is a specialised
form of scripting (1988, 69). Scripts guide not only theatre, but also play,games, sports, and ritual (Schechner 1988).

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89

Digital games always-already operate on a script because they have been
programmed to function in a certain way. Specifically, artificial intelligence(AI), the simulation of human intelligence in machines, scripts behaviour.
Some AIs are personified, modelled as figures in human form akin to characters. Personification is how AI assistants like Siri or Google Assistant givethe impression that they are human. They give the impression that the line
between humans and machines is blurring as they gradually take up social
roles occupied by humans, such as that of a therapist, a secretary or even ahousewife (see Turkle [2011] 2016; Strengers and Kennedy 2020). However,these technologies are also like characters, adapting to the template we haveinitially constructed for such quasi-persons. Some of these machines will
look more like characters and some may look more like software-in-action
with no human-likeness at all (Blom and Mikkonen 2022). The dynamic gamecharacter is such a technology that operates on the basis of its human-like
impression.
Scripts that give AI a human-like impression have existed since as early as
the 1960s. One of the first man-machine communication programs developed
to permit humans to understand the computer was Joseph Weizenbaum’s
ELIZA. This experimental computer program for natural language processing
was created in 1966. The persona of this computer program became Eliza,
a virtual therapist. Apparently, discussions that users held with Eliza wereso persuasive, that some users feared he was creating an actual person(Weizenbaum 1976, 189; Murray 1997, 70). In reality, ELIZA did not havea contextual framework to understand the world. Instead, the program
was supplied by what Weizenbaum called a “script”—“a set of rules which
permitted the actor (ELIZA) to improvise on whatever sources it provided”(1976, 188). According to Weizenbaum, ELIZA functioned as an “actress
who commanded a set of techniques but had nothing of her own to say”
(188). ELIZA mainly responded, but never acted on her own. She was neverprogrammed to do so; her script was only to reply to the user in a mannerthat corresponded to a woman therapist.
Weizenbaum’s script can be understood as a specialised form of “script”—
a pattern of action, as proposed by Schechner (1988). Unlike dramatic scripts,
AI scripts are not written words to be acted out by human actors. Instead,they function as pre-written rules that shape the behaviour and actions of
the computer-based agent they perform. When applied to dynamic gamecharacters, scripts function as a set of rules encoded in the game’s possibility
space. They provide a set of potential actions and behaviours for the dynamic
game character to use according to how they develop. The player has agency

90 Video Game Char acters and Tr ansmedia Story tellingto make the occurrence of these scripts possible or not and, in doing so,
influences the direction in which the dynamic game character develops.
We can distinguish between two kinds of structures in which performative agents exist: characters coded by a developer with a game structurethat the developer limits to account for the player’s agency, and charactersthat the player makes themselves in a much more flexible structure. The
following sections will show how Animal Crossing: New Horizons (Nintendo2020) engages with performative agents.
Performative agents in Animal Crossing: New Horizons
Performative agents with identities fully coded by a developer are less likely
to prominently appear as dynamic game characters. These agents must be
written so they can adapt to the flexibility required from them within asingle work, while simultaneously having to maintain an established identitythat evolves. This puts an incredible strain on game designers. Michael
Mateas and Andrew Stern, the designers of the “first-person, real-time, oneact, interactive drama” Façade (Procedural Arts 2005) state the following:[Agency is] the most challenging to implement, exactly because it requires
the system to dynamically assemble a story structure that incorporates
the unpredictable actions of the player. This suggests that stories withlooser, sparser event structures (plots) will be easier to implement in aninteractive medium (require less generativity). (2005)

To deal with the player’s unpredictable actions, designers take two routes
to manage loose event structures. Either they can create a short game
experience that contains a great deal of scripted dialogue for the agents,or they create an infinite game and restrict the unpredictable actions theplayer can take. The latter has been chosen in Animal Crossing: New Horizons(from here on: New Horizons), the latest instalment of Nintendo’s popular
game series Animal Crossing (AC). It was released at the beginning of theworldwide Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020. The game sold twenty million
units worldwide within only three months after its release (Nintendo Co.,
Ltd. 2020), exceeding the sales of its predecessor Animal Crossing: New Leaf
(hereafter: New Leaf) (Nintendo 2012). Nintendo’s delaying of New Horizonsfrom 2019 to March 2020 was, in hindsight, a master stroke; with so many of
us stuck at home having barely anything to do, New Horizons provided theperfect desert island escape to another world where players could socialise
with cute, anthropomorphised animal characters.

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91

New Horizons is perhaps the most popular instalment of the AC media
mix. This media mix series, with the games at its core, was first launched in2001 with the release of Dōbutsu no Mori (2001).2 In these games, the player
always inhabits an avatar in a furusato (old village),3 living an idealistic rustic
lifestyle. They can fish, catch bugs, shop on a small street, visit a museum,and celebrate events such as Halloween or Christmas together with thevillagers as if they were actually living in a small town. There is nothing thatthe player must do; they have the freedom to just roam around and do what
they want. The games simulate the idea of continuous real life, mimicking theplayer’s “real-time.” If it is eleven o’clock in the morning in the player’s world,
it is also eleven o’clock in the world of AC, so the world changes dependingon the month and season. This mirroring of time and season influences
when certain events happen, when bugs or fish appear, stores are open, andcertain characters are awake. For example, if the Nintendo Switch console
is set to 28 October 2020 at 10:00 a.m. in the Northern hemisphere, the game
will show autumn and celebrate Halloween the whole month. If the playerchanges the time and date on the console, the time and date in New Horizons
will change as well, allowing players to “time-travel” to obtain special items.
However, there is the risk that the player’s island becomes infested withweeds, the villagers become less friendly, or the player loses items.
The villagers belong to a series of topoi—recurrent textual stock situations (see Eco 1979, 119) that every AC instalment uses. Each new AC gamecreates versions of characters such as Tom Nook, Sable, Mable, and Pompom,
although the animals do not address the existence of their manifestationsin the other games. In every game it is as if the player has never met them
before. These characters are recognisable from previous instalments inthe series not only by their visual design and their names, but also because
the characters perform a similar function as before. For example, until
New Leaf, the tanuki (raccoon) Tom Nook was a shop owner in the town
the player lived in. Then he became a real estate agent in New Leaf, while
his nephews Timmy and Tommy ran the shop. In New Horizons, Tom Nook
became a travel agent and owner of Nook. Inc., letting the player travel toa deserted island to start a new life. On the island, he runs the Resident
Services for the player to upgrade the island, provided they have enoughin-game currency to pay for upgrades, while Timmy and Tommy are again
in charge of the island’s shop.
2 Dōbutsu no Mori is the official Japanese title of Animal Crossing.
3 Furusato is the idealistic notion of an old village where one lives a rustic lifestyle, completely
opposite to busy cosmopolitan cities, that summons feelings of nostalgia (Robertson 1988).

92 Video Game Char acters and Tr ansmedia Story telling

The player has no agency over Tom Nook, Timmy, Tommy, and several
other characters like Mabel and Redd, because they are not dynamic
game characters. The performative agents over which the player does
have some creative agency, however, include the island’s inhabitants, also
known as the villagers. Each town—or in this case, island—has villagers
that inhabit the area where the player’s avatar lives. At the moment ofwriting, there are 460 individual villagers accumulated over the different
instalments. Whereas there were 335 different villagers who could spawn
in the player’s town in New Leaf, Nintendo created an additional 125 newvillagers who live on the player’s island in New Horizons. Which villager
actually ends up living on the player’s island is entirely arbitrary; theplayer has no influence over who comes to live on their island. Becauseof this random selection, the player might end up with characters they
dislike. In my case, among the f irst villagers to inhabit my island wasRocket, a sisterly type of gorilla villager, who—to put it mildly—annoyedme from the beginning. She would constantly tell me to work out andgive me tips to relax. I did not much enjoy her advice during a pandemic.
While I might not have enjoyed my villagers, others became so popularthat they had become such valuable goods by the time New Horizon cameout that entire economies sprung up so players could obtain the villagersof their dreams. Players willing to pay the right price were able to have
popular villagers like Raymond, Flick, or Judy walk on their beach, andsome even risked being scammed by others to obtaining these characters(Blom 2022).
As pre-made performative agents, the villagers operate entirely according to scripts. Like all its predecessors, New Horizons’ open structure
does not have an ending nor does it let the characters develop. The script
according to which the villagers operate is embedded in them as a personality type that determines their behaviour. Personality types for malecharacters include cranky, lazy, jock, and smug. The personality types
for female characters include: snooty, normal, peppy, uchi (blunt andtomboyish) (Nintendo 2012). Together with the time-based mechanism of
the game, these personality types give the player the impression that thevillagers have a life independent of the player. For example, characterswith the uchi personality type are scripted to wake up at eleven o’clock.
Before that time, the player will not be able to engage with them, whereas,
surprisingly, a lazy personality type will wake up at nine. Villagers will
each have their preferred conversation topics, and will initiate conversations with the player or send them letters. Even when the player is notdirectly near them, these performative agents will act according to theirHow the dynamic game char acter develops

93

script when interacting with each other. Characters who have a snooty
personality type find it hard to get along with jock characters, due to thelatter’s indifference to fashion and love of physical activities. If the player
encounters two of these villagers talking to each other, they will most
likely see a quarrel. Each character only has one personality type, andthey will not deviate from their behaviour regardless of what the player
does. If the player does not like a villager, they must either wait until thevillager decides to leave (which is arbitrary) and encourage them to set
sail, or just ignore them.
Agency over performative agents is one of the hardest ways to accountfor the player’s unpredictable actions. New Horizons and its predecessors
show that although pre-made performative agents can operate in an open,
inf inite structure, giving the impression that they are independent of
the player, this independence sacrifices the player’s creative agency overthese dynamic game characters. That is, the player can only influence thecharacter’s development outcome in their scripted responses to the player
and each other, but other than that, they cannot offer much as dynamic
game characters.

Conclusion
Dynamic game characters come in different shapes; some dynamic gamecharacters offer players creative agency over them when the characters
function as ludic agents, whereas other characters function more as narrative
agents in a story or as performative agents in an open game structure. Not
all game characters offer players the same degree of agency as others; atthe time of writing, performative agents provide the least agency. They put
an incredible strain on the developers to account for all different types of
behaviour, so it is easier for a developer to limit the scripts on which thesecharacters operate than account for all the unpredictable actions of theplayer.
However, one of the most important aspects of dynamic game charactersis that during their development process, the player, by influencing theprocess, becomes part of the character’s identity. This is the part that challenges the ideal of narrative continuity most, because the player cannot
be included in any transmedia transfers to another media; such a transfer
clashes with how characters in our transmedia ecology are controlled andpoliced from the top down to create narrative continuity. I will explain how
this works in the next chapters.

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4.

Strategies to control a character’stranstextual identities
Abstract: A character’s transtextual identity clashes with the ideal ofnarrative continuity. This chapter argues that characters’ transtextual
identities are controlled through archaic strategies of control —authorship ownership, and canonisation—to create the impression that theiridentities are coherent across different works. These strategies serve noone but the institutions that employ them. By analysing the dynamic gamecharacter’s configuration in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, theMass Effect series, and Animal Crossing: New Horizon and their related
texts, this chapter argues that once dynamic game characters move acrossdifferent media, the player’s agency is sacrificed in favour of a dominantreading by authorititative institutions.
Keywords: Authorship, ownership, canonisation, transtextual identities

The challenge to character identities
Industry practices and academic theories that strive for narrative continuity
across different works attempt to “repair” the inconsistencies between the
different versions of a character. These theories fall back on the idea thatthe appearance of the character shares the same identity with its otherversions, which is caused by the problem that transmedia storytelling tends
to weigh all texts equally (Mittel 2015; Thon 2015). This perspective reinforces
the fallacy that characters ontologically adhere to personhood, whereas inpractice they are ontologically different from actual human beings (Frow2014). We assume that the identity of human beings is somehow continuousand consistent; when I show you my passport, you are likely to assume thatthe picture on the passport is of the same person as the one in front of you,because we share a name and appearance. Characters—simplified models
of human beings (Frow 2014)—share a similar mode of existence. Seeking

Blom, J., Video Game Characters and Transmedia Storytelling: The Dynamic Game Character.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023
doi 10.5117/9789463722957_ch04

98 Video Game Char acters and Tr ansmedia Story tellingconsistency is one of the main causes of the friction between characters’
different transtextual identities.
The fallacy of narrative continuity often considers a certain character
version to be truthful, while dismissing others as heresies. Recipients candiscern between different versions of a character even if these versions areto some degree the “same” character. However, even if recipients recognise
the link, they might reject the assumption that a certain version is as much
linked to the same character as another version, because it misaligns with
the image of the figure recipients have. Recognising and accepting distinct
versions of the same character are two different actions. Even when characters are adjusted, twisted, and changed in the process of reconstructing
them in another work, recipients are often able to recognise two different
character versions as the same character (although they do not share thesame identity), which overrides their resolve to accept one version as truthfuland the other as heresy.
The transtextual identity of a character is complex and does not include
core traits, because every version has unique traits. As I explained inchapter 2, academic works on characters tend to use narrative continuity
to explain a character’s transtextual identity. Narrative continuity is a way
for producers and institutions to manage the multiplicity of fictional worlds
across works (Johnson 2017). This point of view extends to characters as well;
the configuration of a character’s transtextual identity is an expression of
power: Who creates the discourse in which these character versions appear?
Who determines the configuration of these identities? These are inherently
questions of control over contemporary transmedia practices. Therefore, inorder to understand how different character versions relate to each other,and how recipients come to interpret certain versions as specific identities,
it is crucial to investigate the dynamics of power, that is, the process of how
character identities are controlled and policed.
In this chapter, I will explain how the effort to give the impression that acharacter’s transtextual identity is coherent across different work is causing
a struggle over control that unfolds across archaic, top-down strategies suchas authorship, ownership of intellectual property, and canonisation. These
strategies constantly negotiate to determine a supposedly fixed identityof the character. In the first part of this chapter, I will explain that thesestrategies operate on the Foucauldian idea of power and authorship, theMarxian idea of commodity capitalism, and a misleading understanding of
canon as a monolithic, static phenomenon. In doing so, I will argue that thesestrategies are not only outdated, but also create paradoxes in a character’stranstextual identity that serve no one but the authorities that employ them.

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The dynamic game character implies that it has no official identity, since
it promises players the possibility to influence the character’s developmentin the game. However, this promise clashes with the ideal of narrative
continuity, which wants characters to have a fixed identity, meaning thatdynamic game characters too are constantly negotiated by the three strategies of control across different works. In the second part of this chapter, I
will therefore offer three analyses of the games and related texts from theprior chapter, namely The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Nintendo2017), the Mass Effect series (BioWare 2007–2012), and Animal Crossing:
New Horizons (Nintendo 2020). The analyses will show how the strategies
of control negotiate the identity of a dynamic game character, since eachfranchise has its own tailored strategy and individual idiosyncrasies todeal with the player’s creative agency over the character on the one hand
and the movement of the character across works on the other hand. I will
do so by analysing how each type of dynamic game character introducedin the prior chapter (ludic, narrative, and performative) is configurated in
the larger franchise beyond the games in which they originally appeared.
I will argue that there is a hidden danger in the movement of transmedia
characters across works; that is, once the dynamic game character transfers
between different media, the player’s creative agency is sacrificed in favourof a dominant reading determined by authoritative institutions, whichhave the potential to contribute to harmful discourses simply to generate
additional revenue.
Authorship: The return of a God
Authorship is one of the most important strategies to control the identity ofa character; authorship tells audiences whose interpretation of a text andits characters they should follow and believe because of the author’s status
as the creator of the text. This idea may sound obsolete, because since therise of reader-response discourse in literary theory during the late 1960s and1970s, the reader has become the most important figure for the creation of
meaning from a text. Before that, the meaning of a text was distilled fromthe author who endowed their works with a single truth that a reader had todecipher (Barthes 1967). Deciphering the authorial intent of a work became
an out-dated practice, yet we may have to ask: is the author still obsolete?
The importance of the author may be considered an antiquated notion, but
to me, the author has reappeared as an essential figure in contemporarytransmedia practices, because of participatory culture in which readers are
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Elizabeth Thomas (2019) points out that in the current digital age, more
people than before are writing for their work and for leisure, so that themeanings of a text are constantly negotiated and reconfigured (2019, 154).
Thomas refers specifically to the writer J. K. Rowling’s tweet in which
she commented on the backlash to the announcement that the character
Hermione in the theatre play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (Thorne2016) would be played by a Black actress: “Canon: brown eyes, frizzy hairand very clever. White skin was never specified. Rowling loves black Hermione” (Rowling 2015). Rowling has a history of revealing details about theidentity of her characters outside of the original Harry Potter book series
in paratexts. She has stated that Dumbledore is gay, and expressed doubts
about having Ron and Hermione marry instead of Hermione and Harry.
According to Thomas (2019, 155), Rowling’s statements and the backlashfrom fans shows how much ownership fans felt they had over the Harry
Potter narrative landscape. However, Rowling’s statement also reveals theownership Rowling seems to grant herself over the reader’s interpretative
agency. While the tweet above shows that Rowling is happy with any kindof racial interpretation of Hermione by the reader, she assumes that she
determines the core of Hermione (“Canon: brown eyes, frizzy hair, and very
clever”). For Rowling, the reader only has the agency to interpret what theauthor does not claim to be canon.
To understand Rowling’s sense of ownership over the readers’ interpretative agency, it serves well to understand how the role of the author
was previously understood. During the rise of reader-response theory,the dynamics of power that the author holds were identified by Michel
Foucault (1969), who describes the author as a function that shapes a specificdiscourse in which a set of works are united, implying “homogeneity, filiation,
reciprocal explanation, authentication, or of common utilization” (19).
The author function serves to grant the author’s works the truth-value of“original,” which gives the author an almost holy status. However, at thesame time, it creates a fallacy, namely that of authorial intent as a way toderive meaning from the author’s work; because the author is seen as thecreator of the work, and therefore of the character, they are the character’s“author-god” (Barthes 1967). This means that the reader puts the author’s
claim above their own understanding of the character.
Although reader-response theory made the author obsolete in theory byrelocating meaning from the author to the reader, in practice, the author’s
status as a god has become prominent again in current transmedia practices.
The author is often used to create narrative continuity by unifying multiple
worlds to create a unified whole. This also extends to a company’s oeuvre

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instead of a single author (Pearson 2017). However, the effectiveness of
the author to create narrative continuity should be scrutinised, as it also
creates conflict; despite the fact that more than one person usually works
on producing big franchise products, many authors often go uncredited asthey have less power of authority (Hills 2013, 201).
Rowling’s sense of ownership of character interpretation to the detrimentof the recipient can be partially explained within this setting. In the strategy
of authorship as a form of control, the Foucauldian author function ascribes
authority to a single person or a company to create discourses in which
different versions of a character that span a series of works form a single
coherent identity. The author allows their versions of a character to bedifferentiated from those of other discourses created by different authors.
From this perspective, Rowling’s authorial intent serves to unify a Blackand white Hermione as the same character. But, despite the return of theauthor, the fallacy of authorial intent does no more than create a paradox
when an author tries to use their authoritative powers to unify a character’s
multiple identities. Rowling’s role as the author-God only works as long as
audiences assume she is the only one who can determine the identity ofcharacters in her works—even if multiple persons have worked on different
Harry Potter productions.1 Rowling’s status as the one and only author
grants both a Black and a white Hermione a sense of authenticity. That is,both versions receive a mythical “seal of approval” by the author. However,when the authenticity of a character’s identity depends on the author, andmore than one version bears this seal, the author fails to deliver a senseof truth to both discourses in which the character appears. As such, theauthor function might offer a comfortable means to interpret the truth
value of a text, but issues arise once authorial intent is assigned causal
significance (Hermione can be both Black and white because Rowling saysso). A character’s different identities across works can then, even when
they are unified as a single discourse by the same author, only exist in
multiplicity without one necessarily being “truer” than another. As such,using the fallacy of authorial intent to make sense of a character’s multiple
identities serves little purpose other than glorifying an author’s power overtheir own works.
1 There is currently strong opposition from the LGBTQIA+ communities and their respective
allies against consuming Rowling’s works due to her transphobic stance against transgenderwomen (Tamburro 2022). Many audiences have since boycotted her work, including the game
Hogwarts Legacy (Avalanche Software 2023). Her financial and social profiting from this gamedemonstrates that she is still seen as this work’s author despite having no involvement in its
production.

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Ownership: An institutional paradox
Ownership is another strategy through which authorities create and control
different character identities in which characters are treated as little morethan commodities to be passed around. The ownership of a work initiallybelonged to an author (Foucault 1969). However, the rise of a capitalisticmode of production in the nineteenth century created a commodity
capitalism, in which, from a Marxian perspective, commodities gained
an exchange value (Marx [1867] 2000). This form of capitalism enabledmass-produced consumption in both North America and Japan in the earlytwentieth century (Freeman 2017). A distinction arose between the author
and the owner of a work: the author might be the creator of the work but
the owner of the work as a commodity was another entity. This distinction
has continued into today’s transmedia practices. In larger entertainment
franchises, there is usually an author (or more authors), and distinct fromthem, a media company that holds ownership over their employees’ creations(Pearson 2017, 115).
When a company has ownership over a character, the character becomesintellectual property (IP) similarly to other media properties that are owned
by a copyright holder, such as film or television series (Wasko 2001, 40). Thisis important, because franchises rely on IP as the foundation for their rightto disperse their content and create large fictional worlds. In the case ofcharacters, this allows a company to license them to other companies togain income and create partnerships with different companies (Steinberg
2012, 41).
The problem with character licensing is that it creates an institutional
paradox that only serves the IP owner. By licensing characters, multiple
versions of a character arise, because its identity is coordinated by multiple
parties. Technically, the IP owner controls the identity of a character throughveto power, but by selling the rights to use the character to other parties sothat the character will appear in several comics, movies, television series,
and more, these other parties obtain a hand in how the character develops.
This may initially seem as if the IP owner loses control, but as I will show
below, IP owners can make use of multiple solutions to gain as much profit
from different character versions as possible.
We can very clearly see how this problem plays out when we consider
the ideal of narrative continuity. For a character to be recognisable acrossdifferent works and in the hands of different parties, it must have anemblematic and fixed nature (Eco 1972; 1979). However, media producers
must simultaneously give the impression that a character is a person that

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naturally develops like a human being; it must convey the impression that
it is developing across these media as if it were an actual person (Eco 1979,19). This causes the problem that as the character develops, it consumes itself
and comes closer to its own death. The character may fall in love, which may
produce good drama, but once the characters settle into their relationship,
the drama is over (I discuss the issue of romantic relationships in chapter 5
in more detail). Or the character may actually die in the story. Whatever
happens, the character cannot appear in other productions without violating
the ideal of narrative continuity, and therefore risks becoming useless tobe licensed to other parties.
One way for IP holders to solve this problem of narrative continuity is
to dispose of previous versions of the character and replace them withnewer versions (Brooker 2012, 154). This is the case for example with BBC’s
Doctor Who (Newman, Webber, and Wilson 1963–present). Each new version
provides a new discourse, implying a fixed and stable identity that develops
in a different way than previous ones. Once a particular character discourse
has been exhausted, IP holders will create a new discourse with a new versionof the character. The downside is that it becomes difficult for consumers
to keep track of all the different manifestations and their identities, so that
only a niche market is likely remain (Johnson 2013, 79)—and this might becompletely against the goals of the IP holder.
By erasing previous versions of a character, IP holders gain the holy
power to assign the status of “truthful” character to the newest version ofa character, in a similar way to the author. A current example that both uses
and overturns the exclusion of previous character versions is the newest
Spider-Man played by the actor Tom Holland. Holland’s Spider-Man is partof the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), a franchise that to date consistsof twenty-eight different movies, and is still growing. They are all set in thesame universe and rely on narrative continuity. Holland is far from the first
Spider-Man owned by Marvel Entertainment. Previous Spider-Men, suchas those played by the actors Toby Maguire and Andrew Garfield, were
not included in this universe until Spider-Man: No Way Home (Watts 2021).
In this movie, the narrative device of the multiverse, another solution tomaintain narrative continuity,2 allows the three different Spider-Men tomeet, thereby putting them into a unified discourse so that they all become“truthful.” These versions attract both old and new fans, which allows IP
2 A multiverse is another solution used by franchises that attempts to create narrative
continuity between different conflicting storylines. It operates on the idea that multiple universes
exist with slightly different versions of a character in other universes.

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holders to generate profit from both old and new versions without rendering
them useless. However, the multiverse is nothing but a cheap device tocreate continuity between different character versions. It has become an
overused trend to solve the problem of multiple identities as exemplified
by the parody Everything Everywhere All at Once (Kwan and Scheinert2022) that shows the absurdity of the multiverse’s infinite possibilities tocreate a unified concept. And so, solutions like these may work to combat
the multiplicity of a character’s identity, but they only work because theproblem has been created by the institutions themselves—who are clearly
profiting from the confusion they create.
Canonisation: A paradox in the digital age
The third strategy to control character identities is through canonisation.
We can understand canonisation as a process of creating a single official
discourse in which a character has a stable identity, in other words, a canon.
A canon is perhaps the most important strategy of control, because thepursuit of narrative continuity leads inevitably to a canon that determines
which events “actually” happened. A canon controls what a character’s
identity “actually” is within a complex of discourses (Brooker 2012), to givethe character a sense of a stable identity. However, so I will argue below, acanon is ultimately a struggle for control over the formation of a character’s
identity.
Canons tend to be treated in popular cultural media as a monolithic
phenomenon, but this is rather misleading, since canons are processes thatare constantly in flux. According to Hans-Joachim Backe, the term “canon”
historically has had several meanings, with the most influential definition
being a religious one: “the set of sacred texts a particular religious group
accepts as permanently recording truths revealed to it by God” (Gorak 1991
quoted in Backe 2015, 6). As a result, the modern idea of a canon “came tobe associated with unquestionable authority and the totality of knowledge
on a subject, outside which only heresy remains” (Backe 2015, 6). From thispoint, canon emerges as a monolithic, static phenomenon that authoritatively
determines which interpretation of a selected set of works is “official”.
The problem with the canonisation of a character’s identity is that it isnever entirely determined or finished. Rather, multiple parties—ranging
from individuals to larger institutions—usually attempt to create an official
version of a character for their own agenda. These actions together effectively
form invisible hands of control (Winko 2002). That is, uncoordinated actions,which make it difficult to distinguish how exactly a canon came to be. TheseStr ategies to control a char acter’s tr anstex tual identities

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different groups cause multiple canons to appear at the same time, andtherefore, multiple identities of a character. Each group defends its canon
as the normative, singular canon (Backe 2015), so that characters withinthat canon obtain the status of “true” versions.
Canons reflect the choices of a group and reinforce their identity (ibid.).
For characters of big transmedia franchises, this usually means the character
adapts to the company’s in-house style (Evans 2012), effectively becoming that group’s brand (Brooker 2012). Although non-canonical versionsof a character can become inspirations for a company’s content creation(Geraghty 2018), Nicolle Lamerichs (2018) points out that creative industries
tend to favour particular content loyal to their narrative while transformative expressions are ignored and further marginalised (29). The character
that represents the group also conforms to the ideals these groups wish to
express. For example, given Disney’s appeal to large audiences, the company
will likely not produce overly violent, pornographic or queer characters. If
it does, it could spark controversy among audiences, as demonstrated by
the kissing scene (which is really more of a brief peck) between a same-sex
couple in the recent movie Lightyear (Dodge 2022; Maclane 2022).
Because of the rigidness of these canons, fans often counter themthrough the creation of derivative works, such as fan fiction writings, artor cosplay, that subvert the source of the work to provide oppositional
readings (Lamerichs 2018, 17). Derivative works might include certain“ships,” that is, relationships between (often) non-heterosexual characters that fans would like to write into the canon, also known as “slash”(Jenkins 1992). The depiction of non-heterosexual relationships appears
not only in the works of f iction by fans in Europe or North America,
but also emerges in the dōjinshi (“fan magazines”) subculture in Japan,
where they are often drawn by female fans (Okabe and Ishida 2012).3
Such rewrites by fans counter the dominant heteronormative scripts inthe official canons and challenge how we think about gender, sexuality
and sex (Popova 2021). However, as non-canonical works, fan f ictions
are often not officially acknowledged by the franchise conglomerates intheir carefully constructed canons, or, at worst, companies may sue fansfor violating their IP rights.
3 Women in Japan who are fans of manga and anime that portray gay relationships (known as
yaoi or Boy’s Love) are known as fujoshi (“rotten women”). Okabe and Ishida (2012) explain that
because a stigma is attached to liking these genres, which are deviant with regard to mainstream
manga and anime content, fujoshi generally conceal their fan identities to outsiders to manage
their self-presentation as normal women, while still making their fan identity visible to otherfujoshi.

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Digital media has further strengthened the idea of a canon as a monolith
due to the influence that consumers have over these media. Countless digital
works, such as games, are constantly being re-written by recipients, bringing
author and reader closer together (Aarseth 1997; Backe 2015; Thomas 2019). In
response, IP owners, authors, and producers of these digital works enforce
their canons. One concept that is popular in the building of (transmedia)
worlds is that of a “Bible” used to preserve narrative consistency (Wolf 2012,201). It is used by major franchises to endorse a set of works to represent theofficial world of those franchises (Rosendo 2015, 60). Everything outside of
the franchise’s authority is dismissed as unofficial.
That said, the idea of a canon as monolithic is ultimately ironic andpotentially abusive, because it needs to be constantly updated and fixed tomaintain its power. Game producers may constantly tweak a game’s mythology and canon by including and excluding different works (Harvey, 2015, 114),even when the story world has already been established. This is especiallyprevalent in many newer games due to their constant connection to theinternet, which gives producers the God-like power to directly intervene in
the work itself instead of adding and removing works. This kind of power isproblematic because it allows game studios to meddle directly with players’ interpretative agency over the games they play. For example, Blizzard
Entertainment had already shown it is not afraid of completely redesigning
the background stories and skills of its characters, such as Mercy, in the game
Overwatch (2016) (Blom 2022; Välisalo and Ruotsalainen 2022). However,with the release of Overwatch 2 (2022), Blizzard Entertainment showed it
was even less afraid of abusing its power as the author-God further, as it
directly removed players’ ability to play the game’s predecessor Overwatch
by updating the latter with the former (Winslow 2022). As games with aninternet connection have become the norm rather than the exception,with free-to-play game monetisation models currently dominating thegame industry, 4 we can expect an influx in canonisation processes where
game studios directly intervene to adjust the work itself. In the end, what
occurs in this strategy of control for characters’ transtextual identities is

4 According to Alexander Bernevega and Alex Gekker (2021), in the early-to-mid 2000s, video
games were sold as stand-alone products. Game companies generated value by selling boxed
units, but nowadays the model dominating the industry is known as the games as a service(GaaS) model, where games are sold as assets that generate income without a sale. We see thisin “free-to-play” games. The games themselves can be played for free, but as Kati Alha (2020,79) explains, they are designed as never-ending experiences, constantly being updated withnew content and hampering progression for as long as they remain profitable.

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a paradox, because a canon creates what it promises to avoid: a character
identity without a core.

How (not) to control a dynamic game character’s identity
The strategies of control (authorship, ownership, and canonisation) in
different ways all come down to the question of how the identities ofdynamic game characters are policed, since their identities are hard tocontrol across different works due players’ creative agency over theirdevelopment within a game. The different types of agent (ludic, narrative,
and performative), over which players have creative agency to develop
the character’s identity (as explained in chapter 3), force companies andother invisible hands to employ different sets of strategies to control
the dynamic game characters’ development across transmedia works
to preserve the characters’ identities. These strategies of control givethe impression that there is a sense of continuity in the character acrossworks, as consumers approach them as if these figures were real persons,because in a transmedia ecology like ours, driven by the ideal of narrative
continuity across works, even dynamic game characters are subjectedto this ideal; that is, even they must give the impression that they are acoherent f igure with a single straightforward identity when they movetransmedially between different works.
Normally, companies organise a character’s identity over multiple works
which each manifests its own version of the character. Each version isthen structured in a specific discourse across different works based on thestrategies of control as discussed in the sections above, which thus promisesthat there is continuity between these different versions. This configuration
process usually happens across multiple non-cybermedia works, although
video games are also involved.
Additional friction arises once dynamic game characters come into play.
These figures trifle with the construction of a character’s transtextual
identity; multiple parties structurally create multiple identities within thegame and only give the player creative agency to actualise one of them.
As I explained in chapter 3, the identity of the dynamic game character
becomes infused with the player’s influence over the game. From thisperspective, the dynamic game character enters the transmedia ecology
with the promise of flexibility and creative agency for the player, but subject
to the “permission” of authoritative institutions as they have set out theactions and consequences of the players’ choices in the game.

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I would have preferred to be able to claim merely that dynamic gamecharacters can open our current transmedia ecology to more equal influences of authoritative institutions (such as game developers or large
conglomerates) and players. But my research shows otherwise—the player’s
agency over dynamic game characters suffers once dynamic game characters
become transmedial. Since the player produces a concrete manifestationof the dynamic game character, there is an idealistic implication that the
dynamic game character lacks a definitive version. They have no official
identity. After all, the work itself allows for multiple identities and grants
the player the agency to operate within the development process of thecharacter. However, as I will show in the following analyses in this chapter,
multiple parties tend to create and maintain the illusion of continuity in a
dynamic game character’s identity. They try to structure the configurationof the dynamic game character over the course of multiple cybermedia andnon-cybermedia works.
So, why does it matter? Is it such a bad thing that authoritative institutions
exclusively control the identity of their dynamic game characters? My answer
is: yes, it is; it matters because at best the archaic strategies of control are a
way for a franchise to continue under a capitalistic logic that retroactively
annuls players’ creative agency in favour of narrative continuity between
works. For example, as I have mentioned in prior chapters, the sequel Tales ofSymphonia: Dawn of a New World (Namco Tales Studio 2008) eliminates theplayer’s single main choice between Kratos and Zelos just to create a sequel.
For some this annulment might just be bothersome. But, at worst, we see theerasure of diversity and representation that groups of fans desire so much.
Lamerichs’s (Lamerichs and Rosendo 2022) description of the controversy
concerning the player character Kassandra in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey(Ubisoft 2018) demonstrates the control developers enforce over dynamic
game characters to create artificial continuity, sending a harmful message
by doing so. In Odyssey, players are able to choose between a male (Alexios)
or a female (Kassandra) player character, much like in the Mass Effect series.
Players also have the option to pursue romances, a popular mechanic fordynamic game characters, which I will explore in the next chapter. The
romance in Odyssey also includes the possibility of same-sex relationships.
Lamerichs reports that while the same-sex relationships were celebrated
much by queer players, the release of the downloadable sequel (DLC) Legacyof the First Blade (2018) disappointed many of them: the DLC forces players
into a heterosexual relationship, annulling their previous choices, so as toconceive a child. Developers imposed this narrative upon players to create
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the series, contributing to queer erasure and harmful discourses aroundsexual identities. As Lamerichs convincingly states: “homosexuality is now
presented as a choice that can be undone” (2022, 201).
Many attempts to control a dynamic game character’s identity acrossworks thankfully do not come close to the level of harmful discourse demonstrated by Odyssey. What they do show, however, is a struggle for how gamedevelopers engage with the players’ creative agency on the one hand, andthe capitalistic logic of transferring the character from its game to anothermedia platform while maintaining some sense of narrative continuity togenerate as much revenue as possible on the other. Each franchise has atailored strategy with its own individual idiosyncrasies to deal in top-down
fashion with the struggle between a players’ agency and the movement of
the character. The following three analyses show how developers juggle thethree types of dynamic game character (ludic, narrative, and performative)
between different works.
Ludic agents: Link from Breath of the Wild
Dynamic game characters that operate predominantly as ludic agentsdevelop mostly as game pieces. These agents are the most common formof dynamic game character, and they are almost impossible to adapt to
non-ludic media. They resist adaptation because non-ludic media lack themechanical system to support game pieces (Aldred 2012; Aarseth 2006;
Aarseth and Calleja 2015). Yet, the challenge does not stop developers fromattempting to create ludic agents across different media platforms, including
games of different genres. Nintendo especially has a tendency to proliferate
its dynamic game characters in and across many of its major franchises. This
also applies to Link from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Nintendo2017) (BotW) whose function as a ludic agent I explained in the previous
chapter. During the writing of this book, Nintendo expanded the story of
BotW with the release of Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity (Omega Force2020)5, a “hack-and-slash” style game that takes place a century before theevents of BotW, when the champions died to defeat Ganon.
This game was developed by Omega Force and published by Koei Tecmo
in Japan, known for its Dynasty Warrior game series, also of the “hack-andslash” genre. Years prior, Nintendo collaborated with Koei Tecmo to release
Hyrule Warriors (Omega Force and Team Ninja 2014), a spin-off game set
5 Nintendo released the sequel to BotW, titled The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom in
May 2023.

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Video Game Char acters and Tr ansmedia Story tellingin the world of Hyrule. Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity initially seems
like a prequel to BotW, but instead shows an alternate timeline in which
the champions of the Divine Beast do not die (they are dead in BotW). By
not giving Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity the The Legend of Zelda title,
Nintendo has cleverly avoided inconsistencies with the The Legend of Zelda(LoZ) series, thereby enforcing narrative continuity across works.
Nintendo has been enforcing narrative continuity across games within
the LoZ series for a while now. In the past couple of years, Nintendo, as theauthor-God, has attempted to order all previous LoZ instalments into a
canonical chronology, to construct Link’s identity in a coherent matter overtheir game series. They approached Link as a narrative agent by imposing
a linear form of narrative continuity on the character as it appears overmultiple game works. Before the twenty-fifth anniversary of the LoZ seriesin 2011, most LoZ games lacked a sequential connection. Nintendo relied ona formula and topoi that it established over the course of the series before it
imposed the chronology to create a sense of narrative continuity between
each game work. The formula of the series generally proceeded as follows:
Link functions as the player character who must save the world, usually byrescuing the games’ other main character Princess Zelda from the games’
antagonist Ganon (also known as Ganondorf). A common topos in the games
is that Link, Ganon, and Zelda are associated with the Triforce, an artefact
consisting of three distinct entities of power. The Triforce is considered
to be the most important divine artefact of the game and it has become
emblematic of any game in which Link manifests.
At some point, Nintendo created a paradox inside the main series andthe versions of Link in different games within the series. Usually, Link
was not portrayed to be a character with the same identity in each gameinstalment. The paradox was there but not bothersome if you assume
that Link functions as a kyara (as explained in chapter 2) inside a media
mix strategy. However, the chronology forces the player to consider different versions of Link to be connected, even if the continuity between
them is imbalanced. The Hyrule Historia (Miyamoto et al. 2013, 41)—thecompendium that introduces a chronology between the games released
up to 2011—suggests that in some games the relationship between one
Link manifestation and another is akin to that between the hero and an“incarnation.” In other games, Nintendo implies a constant singular identitythat connects versions of Link across works. The latter can be found, forexample, in The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages (Flagship 2001), and The
Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons (Flagship 2001), which use passwords
given to players once they have finished each game. The password allows

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players to connect the games to turn the narrative into a linear story sothat Link’s identity becomes singular.
As per the demand of fans (Custodio 2020, 18), Nintendo clarified thecontinuity between the works when it released Hyrule Historia. In this book,Nintendo explains how it controls Link’s identity as follows:[t]his chronology merely collects information that is believed to be trueat this time, and there are many obscured and unanswered secrets thatstill lie within the tale. As the stories and storytellers of Hyrule change,
so, too, does its history. Hyrule’s history is a continuously woven tapestryof events. Changes that seem inconsequential, disregarded without evena shrug could evolve at some point to hatch new legends and, perhaps,change this tapestry of history itself. (Miyamoto et al. 2013, 68)

The chronology introduced by Nintendo splits into three different timelines
after the events of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (Nintendo 1998),
based on whether or not Link defeats the evil Ganon. The chronology allows
Nintendo to avoid having to adhere to a single linear narrative. Instead,
it could choose from three different branches of linear continuity whencreating new games. When the chronology was created, The Legend of Zelda:
A Link between Worlds (Nintendo 2013) and The Legend of Zelda: Tri Force
Heroes (Nintendo and Grezzo 2015) were not yet released. In the Zelda
Wikipedia, however, fans keep track on where these games belong in thetimeline, based on interviews with the series’ producer Eiji Aonuma andother paratextual works. According to these pages, A Link between Worlds
belongs to the “fallen hero” branch, in which Ganon defeats the hero in The
Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (“The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds”
n.d.). Tri Force Heroes is said to take place after A Link between Worlds, thus
belonging to the same branch (“The Legend of Zelda: Tri Force Heroes” n.d.).
Nevertheless, this branching form of narrative continuity is incredibly
imbalanced, especially regarding BotW. In the Japanese video game magazine
Famitsu (Famitsu 2018; Wong 2018), the series’ producer Eiji Aonuma andthe game’s director Hidemaro Fujibayashi state that BotW takes place at theend of the chronology created by Hyrule Historia. The catch is that they did
not specify in which of the three timelines BotW took place. Instead, they
only mention that it is up to the player’s imagination to decide on whichtimeline the game takes place. It seems therefore that it is only when theauthorities are stuck in a paradox they have created that they let go of thereins and “grant” the player the agency to interpret the connection between
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Video Game Char acters and Tr ansmedia Story tellingenough to give its players the reins over the development of its characters,
making Link’s identity even more imbalanced than before.
Narrative agents: Shepard from the Mass Effect series
When a dynamic game character’s development is dominated by theirfunction as a narrative agent, they develop as fictional persons mostly
through a game’s story. As I explained in the previous chapter, the Mass
Effect (ME) series provides great narrative continuity between Mass Effect,
Mass Effect 2, and Mass Effect 3 due to the possibility to transfer game data
between different games so that players can carry their own protagonist,
named Shepard, with them across these games.
However, the series attempts to extend this continuity to non-cybermedia.
The ME franchise contains several novels and comics about the world
depicted in the game series. These non-cybermedia lack the mechanicalstructure that the game series has, and by consequence cannot incorporate
the player’s integral role in the development of Shepard’s identity. Instead,the comics take another route to avoid discontinuity between the player’s
version of Shepard and the version in the comics. The Mass Effect Omnibus
Volume 1 (Walters et al. 2016) and Mass Effect Omnibus Volume 2 (Walters
and Barlow 2017) convey the background stories of the games’ companion
characters. The stories occur either at the beginning of the events of the ME
series, or the events in between the different game instalments. Shepard
does not appear as the main character in these comics.6 Rather, Shepard’s
appearance in the comics is limited by two constraints: first, Shepard’s
body is never clearly depicted and, second, Shepard’s gender is never clearlystated. The volumes go to great lengths to avoid classifying Shepard’s gender.
There are no pronouns that reveal their gender, nor does the commander’s
proper name reveal it; Shepard is only addressed by other characters as
either “Shepard” or “Commander Shepard,” and occasionally as “my friend”
or “the commander.” Similarly, the comics avoid depicting Shepard’s physicalappearance. For example, Volume 1 shows how Liara T’Soni tries to obtain
Shepard’s body after Shepard disappears in the explosion on the ship The
Normandy. These events occur chronologically between the end of ME andbefore the start of ME2. When Liara finally discovers Shepard’s body, it is ina coffin. Although this might make sense in terms of the diegesis—since
the body is in a coffin to be transported—the same avoidance of visual
6 The exceptions are Mass Effect: Genesis (2011) and Mass Effect: Genesis 2 (2013), which arestated to be “interactive backstories” in Electronic Arts’ distribution platform Origin.

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depictions appears across the two omnibus volumes. Whenever Shepard’s
body is shown, it is either hidden or beyond recognition.
The developer BioWare’s omission of Shepard in the ME comics was a strategic choice. BioWare took a different approach with the comics of its other game
series Dragon Age (2009–2014). In Dragon Age: Origins (DA:O) (2009), the player
takes on the role of the Grey Warden, which refers to the character’s function
as a warrior. Like Shepard, the player can control the character’s appearance
and skills, which influences the character’s overall development throughout
the game. As a result, the player also controls the events and development of
the Grey Warden’s companion characters Alistair and Morrigan.
Dragon Age Omnibus (Gaider and Freed 2016) portrays a single outcomeof the events in DA:O and its sequel Dragon Age II (DAII) (2011). The Grey
Warden is completely absent in the outcome the omnibus depicts. Afterthe archdemon is killed in DA:O, one of the possible outcomes is for Alistair
to become king—but he can also become a drunk, stay a Grey Warden, orbe killed in battle. This outcome is carried over to the game’s sequel. On
the other hand, the comics portray the adventures of Alistair as King of
Ferelden, in which he tries to find his father. Alistair eventually does find
his father with the help of his companions Isabel and Varric, but due tothe evil wizard Aurelian Titus, his father unfortunately succumbs to his
wounds and dies. There is no hint to these events in DA:O, nor do they fillin events in between the series’ individual instalments.
At first glance, the ME comics appear to follow the rigid structure ofHenry Jenkins’s (2006) description of transmedia storytelling. The mediumof the comic depicts events that the game series only hinted at as happening
in the world of Mass Effect. However, these comics do not present new
information that the player did not already know from the game series.
Rather, they tell stories that the player already knows from the game but has
not experienced, to avoid breaking with the ME series’ established canon.
For example, the player knows that Thane’s wife Irikah was murdered inrevenge; the comics just show in detail how she was murdered. Even thisinformation is limited, because they only describe the aftermath, in which
Thane describes his wife’s death as: “what they did to her. Unspeakable acts”(Walters and Barlow 2017).
Although the ME comics flesh out the ME world and add detail, they
do not expand the world. In contrast, the DA Omnibus expands the worldof Dragon Age, because it contributes a new story to a selected outcomeof DA:O and DAII by BioWare. However, BioWare’s decision to depict one
specific outcome of the DA game series canonises the events of the series.
As an authority, BioWare implies that Alistair becoming king is the truthful

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and authentic outcome of that character’s characterisation process in thegame series—a proclamation BioWare avoids in the ME comics. BioWare
does not expand ME’s world, but neither does it force canonisation upon
the player of the games.
The comics indicate the existence of a version of Shepard, but a version
determined by the author never truly becomes manifest in them. Rather,by choosing to not expand on Shepard’s identity, BioWare keeps the player’s
agency over Shepard from the games open. Without the player, no concrete
identity of Shepard will emerge in the game series. This means that Shepard’s
appearance in the comics depends on the player to project their Shepard onto
the Shepard from the comics; that is, to substitute Shepard in the comics
with the Shepard they created in the game. The nature of Shepard’s identity
does not depend on the continuity of the character’s identity between
the game instalments and comics. It relies on the player’s influence over
Shepard’s identity.
While I am quite fond of this strategy because the comics are open to theplayer’s agency despite being in a non-cybermedium, I am also convincedthat the agency players have over Shepard in the comics is derivative at best
as long as the works are official works by the developer. The player’s involvement in Shepard’s development in the game establishes a concrete version
whose identity the player then projects onto the comics. This involvement
gives the false impression that the developer, like a benevolent author, grants
the player the agency to imagine Shepard in the comics in whatever way
they want. The author presents what Stuart Hall calls a “preferred reading”(Hall 1973)—a dominant reading in which the reader can only infer Shepard
as a character in the comics that they have helped construct in the game
series. At the same time, the developer is unable to expand the ME world
through the comics, because that would break the player’s involvement
which is so important for their canon. This is as far as BioWare can go tocater to a broad audience; while BioWare might try to accommodate as many
individual flavours of Shepard as possible, there is a limit to what it can doin the comics without negating the player’s version of the character. This inturn means that if players want more creative agency over the characterswith little or no influence from the developer, then derivative works like
fan fiction become an attractive option.
Performative agents: Animal Crossing: New Horizon’s kyara
Performative agents are the dynamic game characters whose function isdetermined by scripts in a flexible game structure. They are not only difficult

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to design because they must adapt to the players’ possible behaviour, but
for the exact same reason they are also difficult to transfer to other media
platforms.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons (Nintendo 2020) shows how Nintendo,
the game’s developer and IP owner, approaches the game’s characters askyara, a visual icon that looks like a character, as explained in chapter 2, tomove between different media and create a media mix. Kyara are mostly
treated as IP (Steinberg 2012) so that canonisation becomes less of a concern.
Nintendo is notorious for how it treats its IP; it keeps most of its charactersin its own family of products, and hardly ever provides any licences toother companies to use its IP. It also rarely uses characters from franchises
from other companies, with only few exceptions such as Super Smash Bros.
Ultimate (Nintendo 2018), which I will discuss in more detail in chapter 6.
At the time of writing this book, the performative agents from New Horizons have been transferred as kyara to different media platform throughtwo approaches: between different player games, and between New Horizons
and its advertisement comic. In the first approach, the characters move
between different games. This means in the case of New Horizons that the
kyara move between different game instalments in the overall media mixof Animal Crossing, and between New Horizon games of different players. I
will focus here on the movement of the kyara between games of different
players, since that shows how the kyara’s nature avoids the problem ofnarrative continuity.
New Horizons is a game that revolves around players personalising theirown island: when two players both own a copy of New Horizons, they do not
own the same game. Each player has their own island that they can adjust to
their own tastes, with their own avatar, decorated house, and set of villagers.
No island will be the same. For ease of understanding, we could say that eachplayer has a different player game. Because each player game is different,
the same applies to the villagers living on the islands. Since there are 460
individual villagers that can inhabit a player’s island, it is uncommon for
two players who know each other to have the same villager on their island,
although it can happen. In New Horizons it is quite easy to visit anotherplayer’s island. Players can either share a code over the internet with otherplayers to come and visit their island, or locally connect the game consoles.
As you visit your friends’ (or strangers’) islands, the chances increase that you
will come across a villager you have encountered before on another island.
During the many visits to my friends’ islands, as we all were in lockdown
during the Covid pandemic, I encountered the same villager on one friend’s
island as I did on another friend’s island. The villager was Goose, a jock-type

116 

Video Game Char acters and Tr ansmedia Story tellingchicken villager who both friends on separate occasions described as quiteannoying. When I met this chicken on the first friend’s island and we becameacquainted, he asked my name and asked me what island I came from.
After that brief encounter, I left (I did not like him either). When I visitedthe island of another friend, I met Goose again. This time he greeted me
as if we had never met before. Although the first friend reported that the
Goose on his island was still chatting about me, remembering our very
brief encounters together and asking where I was, the Goose on the second
island did not share these memories. The only possible way to explain thisis that the Goose on my first friend’s island and the Goose on my second
friend’s island are simply not the same version of the character. They might
be the same performative agent but they are also different quasi-persons.
The easiest way to explain the two versions is through the kyara. Gooseand all the other villagers function as kyara between the New Horizons player
games of different players. The image of Goose, and the script on which heoperates, are entirely the same as in any other copy of the game. But the factthat a player can meet the same villager on two different islands, without
them acknowledging the player or even knowing that they met before,
demonstrates that this villager is not the same in both games. Rather, asa kyara they reflect the quality that Saitō describes as fukusei kanō/tensō
fukanō (“potential to proliferate/impossible to transfer”) (Saitō 2014, 109);
they can proliferate across works as a kyara but not transfer as a character.
Goose’s and any other villager’s image icon and script are reproduced inevery game of New Horizons, but they cannot be transferred as the sameversion of the character to all these copies. Although both Gooses in myfriends’ games might now recognise me, if I ever meet Goose in anotherplayer’s game, I will have to re-introduce myself all over again.
The same quality is also reflected when a villager does move between
different player games. When New Horizons was just released, entire online
player market economies sprung up for players to exchange characters andother goods. The villagers proved to be one of the most lucrative trading
products for players to exchange (Blom 2022a). Villagers can move to anotherplayer’s island when they meet a player from another island. Both players(the one on whose island the villager lives and the player who wants thevillager) need to accept the villager’s request to move. Once they have doneso, the villager moves to the other player’s island. This villager will be thesame version of the character on the new player’s island as they were in theformer player’s island. They will remember their previous owner, reminiscing
about prior encounters with that player while also acknowledging thatthey live on a new island. So, in that sense, there can be a line of continuity

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between the villagers in different players games, but each villager will be aunique individual due to the different players they have met, even if anotherversion of them exists in another player game.
Nintendo’s second approach brings us to the proliferation of the New Horizon characters into non-cybermedia. Nintendo’s focus is predominantly on
games, but as many media mixes do, the company also adapts its charactersto manga, comics in Japan. The villagers from the Animal Crossing series
have appeared before in manga serialisations, such as Dōbutsu no Mori:
Hohinda Mura dayori [Animal Crossing: It’s Hohinda Village!] (Abesayori
2001–2015) during the time Animal Crossing: New Leaf (2012) was the newest
instalment in the series.
Nintendo has introduced its New Horizons characters in a yonkoma manga
online to function as advertisements for the game. Yonkoma manga are
four-panel comics meant to display comical situations. They often do not
require narrative continuity between each story since the focus is on thejokes. This makes them excellent means for performative agents to appear
in a different media platform, since they do not demand continuity between
game and manga and only rely on the agents’ script and iconicity that are
already provided in the games.
The yonkoma is called Tanuki Michi [The Tanuki Road], and features Tom
Nook and his nephews Timmy and Tommy, serial characters that appear
in (almost) every Animal Crossing game and are therefore familiar faces
to fans. These comics are part of Nintendo’s website Tanuki Kaihatsu that
presents Tom Nook’s travel agency almost as if it were an actual enterprise(Nintendo 2020). The premise of the stories is that Tom Nook, Timmy, andTommy are preparing for the player to arrive on their island, but end up
in comical situations, such as being unprepared for a blizzard in August(the hottest time of the year in Japan). It is specified that the comics on thewebsite are a special addition to the game released in March 2020. They
are meant as an introduction to the game, and have little function beyond
being marketing tools. These comics do not add anything new, nor do they
expand New Horizon’s world; they just encourage Japanese audiences toplay the game.
Only in the f irst of these approaches—in which the villagers move
between different player games—does the performative agent also moveacross works. This is logical, since all New Horizons copies contain similar
templates with the same kyara and scripts for the same villagers. Once
players start playing their game, a villager in one player’s game becomes adifferent version from the same villager in another player’s game. However,in the latter approach, the scripts that turn the villagers into dynamic game118 

Video Game Char acters and Tr ansmedia Story tellingcharacters do not translate the performative agent to non-cybermedia; noperformative agent appears in the yonkoma comics on the Tanuki Kaihatsu
website. For example, Tom Nook, Timmy, and Tommy in the Tanuki Kaihatsu
comics might seem to be the same characters in the New Horizons game,because there is somewhat of a logical sequential order between the comics and the game. However, their misadventures in the comics are nevermentioned in the game, making the sequential order a one-way street.
The Animal Crossing media mix does not rely on continuity in the senseof canonisation by making connections between dynamic game charactersand their versions across media platforms, but this does not mean either
that Nintendo has handed the reins to the players; as I explained in theprevious chapter, as pre-made performative agents, players also have very
little creative agency over the New Horizons’ villagers. The Animal Crossing
media mix emphasises proliferation of the kyara between different player
games and other non-cybermedia far more than the player’s creative agency
over these characters. This makes it very easy for Nintendo to control themas IP, since all they need to do is proliferate the kyara elsewhere and players
can easily make the connection between the icons without the need fornarrative continuity. This strategy works, as we have seen here, both forcybermedia and non-cybermedia.

Conclusion
In contemporary transmedia practices, the configuration of the character
constantly shifts, thereby affecting the identity of the character as if it werea continuous entity across different works. The idealistic effort to give theimpression that characters are coherent entities, instead of schemata thattransform both within a single work and over the course of multiple works,
triggers a constant fight for control. This battle unfolds across archaic venuesof control such as the authorship, ownership of intellectual property, andcanonisation. The different parties that meddle with the dynamic gamecharacter’s configuration across different works break the “permission”
granted to the player to be involved in those figures’ development processes.
This kind of meddling may even contribute to harmful discourses on minorities in terms of sexuality, gender, and race. While games with dynamic gamecharacters promise the player creative agency over their development,
the moment these characters are transferred to other works—even othergames—the player’s creative agency is sacrificed. Although it can be said
that this might be necessary because non-cybermedia cannot structurally

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support dynamic game characters, I stress that there are always multiple
choices involved in transferring dynamic game characters from one work
to another. These choices include decisions on how to portray dynamic
game characters, which character to portray, which events from the gameto feature, and which outcome of the character’s in-game development tostart a story from. Yet, the most important choice of all is whether to transfer
the dynamic game character from one media platform to another at all.
Transferring characters removes the promise of creative agency and forces
the player’s experience to comply with a dominant reading determined byan institutional authority for the sake of generating additional revenue.
That is, I argue, the danger of transmedia characters.

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Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe, and Izumi Tsuji, 207–24. New Haven and London:
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Pearson, Roberta. 2017. “World-Building Logics and Copyright: The Dark Knight and
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Popova, Milena. 2021. Dubcon: Fanfiction, Power, and Sexual Content. Cambridge:
MIT Press.
Rosendo, Nieves. 2015. “The Map Is Not the Territory: Bible and Canon in theTransmedial World of Halo.” Image, Special Issue Media Convergence andTransmedial Worlds (Part 3), no. 22 (July): 54–64. https://doi.org/10.25969/
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Rowling, J.K. 2015, 21 December 2015. https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/6788
88094339366914?lang=en.
Saitō, Tamaki. 2014. Kyarakutā Seishin Bunseki: Manga, Bungaku, Nihonjin. Tokyo:
Chikuma Sobo.
Snyder, Zack. 2017. Justice League. Warner Bros. Pictures.
Steinberg, Marc. 2012. Anime’s Media Mix: Francising Toys and Characters in Japan.
Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
Tamburro, Paul. 2022. “Harry Potter Author JK Rowling Responds to Hogwarts
Legacy Boycott.” PSLS. 18 December 2022. https://www.playstationlifestyle.
net/2022/12/18/harry-potter-jk-rowling-hogwarts-legacy-boycott/.
“The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds.” n.d. Gamepedia. Zelda Wiki: The
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“The Legend of Zelda: Tri Force Heroes.” n.d. Gamepedia. Zelda Wiki: The
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The_Legend_of_Zelda:_Tri_Force_Heroes#Timeline_Placement.
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5.

Parasocial relationships with nonplayable characters
Abstract: This chapter discusses the system of affection (SA), a bonding
system designed so that players can create parasocial relationships with
non-player characters (NPCs) acknowledged by the game. The first part ofthis chapter presents an overview of the common design elements of the
SA to facilitate these relationships. The second part of this chapter provides
two close readings to highlight how the SA works. I will show through ananalysis of Persona 5 how affectionate bonds between the player characterand NPCs are built and how this is reflected in the official transmedia
adaptations of the game. An investigation of Hades will demonstrate how
dynamic game characters can allow for a diversity of romantic queer andpolyamorous relationships.
Keywords: Parasocial relationships, romance, affect, non-player characters

Parasocial relationships with game characters
Affective connections with characters are an important reason for many
audiences to engage with stories across all different kinds of media. Scholars
from Fandom Studies often use the term “affect” to explain how audiences
engage emotionally with a text. In her work on affective reception, Nicolle
Lamerichs (2018) refers to affect as an “embodied response towards the text
and its characters” (18). She explains that “media texts generate affects with
their audiences,” which is not allocated within the text but generated by its
audiences (30). Elizabeth Evans (2020) refers to affect as a form of emotional
engagement with texts. She distinguishes between two kinds of emotional
engagement with content by fans: first, affect in which narrative events evoke
particular emotions in their audiences. Second, audiences develop affection
for the content, which refers to the parasocial connections audiences makewith characters over a prolonged period of time (100).

Blom, J., Video Game Characters and Transmedia Storytelling: The Dynamic Game Character.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023
doi 10.5117/9789463722957_ch05

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Such affection for characters is discussed by scholars under the denominator of parasocial relationships. The term was coined by Donald Horton and
R. Richard Wohl (1956) who discussed the face-to-face relationships between
audiences and mass media performers (like television personalities) as
interactions that share similarities with social relationships but are onesided and controlled by the performer (215). Parasocial relationships are notexclusively a modern phenomenon; they include the relationships between
citizens and major political figures, individuals and gods/spirits, and also
relationships between audiences and f ictional characters (Giles 2002).
Nicole Liebers and Holger Schramm (2019) distinguish between parasocial
interactions (PSI) and parasocial relationships (PSR): the former is limited
to the interactions between the audience and a media character that only
take place during media reception by the audience. The latter type exceeds
such limits and “leads to or encompasses cross-situational relationships
between audience and media characters” (4).
We are currently seeing an increase of PSR with fictional characters inour contemporary media ecology (Karhulahti and Välisalo 2021). As gamecharacters are becoming more nuanced, there is a growth in the design of
PSR in games (Elvery 2021). Subsequently, we see an increase in scholarlyinterest in love and romance with characters in video games (see Ntelia
2021; Ganzon 2022; Bruno 2023; Välisalo 2023). Digital games progressively
facilitate romantic relationships between game characters and players(Kelly 2015; Waern 2015) and are particularly good at generating affective
responses in players towards characters, since they give players the agency
to make meaningful choices over the relationships (Tosca and Klastrup 2019;
Galbraith 2021; Lamerichs and Rosendo 2022). Different forms of attachment
to game characters have been identified, emphasising the multiple functionaland emotional values characters can have for players (Bopp et al. 2019),
but research on emotional attachment to non-playable characters showsthat players particularly appreciate characters with whom they can formromantic relationships (Burgess and Jones 2020). This chapter’s focus is on
the games and related works that generate affection with dynamic gamecharacters, in particular with characters that are often labelled “non-player
characters” (NPCs).
Many games nowadays let the player create relationships with dynamic
game characters, mostly of a romantic nature. For instance, Mystic Messenger (Cheritz 2016) is a mobile phone game that simulates a romance
between the player and five different characters through real-time messages.
The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel (Nihon Falcom 2015) features theadventures of a military school class amid an international political crisis.

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Between quests, the player can manage the connections between the player
character Rean and his classmates. Even games of a genre that are notnecessarily about relationships nowadays offer opportunities for bonding.
The roguelike action game Hades (Supergiant Games 2020) allows players
to create bonds of different natures between Zagreus and other mythicalfigures, like Thanatos or his father Hades.
Not all the relationships that games permit their players to create may
be parasocial, as the term “parasocial” specifically refers to the connectionthat someone may feel towards a character. However, I use the term to referto the relationships players create between the player character and NPCs
(or sometimes exclusively between NPCs) as structured by the game and its
related texts, since in this way, the game actively stimulates affect for the
text and its characters, and acknowledges the relationships players create,
which is something non-cybermedia cannot do. I call the cybermedia process(see the section on “method” in chapter 1) that allows players to create PSRs
with and between dynamic game characters the system of affection.
The system of affection (SA) is a procedural ludic process that allows theplayer to create and shape relationships between and with dynamic gamecharacters. A system of affection is specifically designed to create affect fromplayers for NPCs. These relationships are embedded in the game’s possibility
space, and the player influences these relationships by executing specificsets of actions that differ per game. Romance is the most common form of
PSR, but the SA can create other types of relationships, such as friendships orrivalries. Some relationships can also be specifically designed to be toxic andunsustainable as exemplified by the relationship between Flowey and theplayer in Undertale (Toby Fox 2015) (Elvery 2022), although these examples
are rare. The reason I call this process a system is because I perceive it asa process that is quantified and logical and designed purposefully so thateach game element stimulates players to form an emotional attachment to
an NPC over time. This aligns with my view that affect is not exclusively
generated by audiences, but also partially stimulated by the design of thetext, in this case, a game.
This system plays an important role in the dynamic game characters’
development in-game, especially for those that we consider NPCs (i.e., notthe player character). As I mentioned in chapter 1 and 2, Game Studies tends
to focus predominantly on player characters and the avatar. In this chapter,
I will relocate that focus by showing how certain games are designed tostimulate players to develop PSRs with NPCs that function as dynamic
game characters. I will focus particularly on romantic PSRs, as they are
the most common type of PSR we see in video games. In the next section I

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will briefly discuss the common design elements that the SA usually has.
In the following sections I will provide two close readings to highlight
how this system works. Persona 5 (P-Studio 2016) shows how affectionate
bonds between the player character and NPCs are built and how this isreflected in the official transmedia adaptations of the game. The second
close reading, Hades, shows how dynamic game characters can allow fora diversity of romantic queer and polyamorous relationships, subverting
the heteronormative standard of relationships. However, I will also cautionthat this subversion is still set within the heteronormative framework of
relationships.

A brief overview of the System of Affection
We can distinguish between two types of SA: one in which the SA is theprimary mechanic in the game’s overall narrative and another in which
the SA functions as the game’s secondary mechanics, easing the player’s
progression in the game (Sicart 2008). The former refers to games in which a
relationship with a character is the desired end state. These kinds of games
include dating simulators such as Dream Daddy (Game Grumps 2017) or
Hakuoki: Memories of the Shinsengumi (Idea Factory 2013), but it also exists
in the puzzle-oriented game Catherine: Full Body (Studio Zero [2011] 2019).
Secondary SAs can be found in games such as The Legend of Heroes: Trailsof Cold Steel, Mass Effect 2 (BioWare 2010), Stardew Valley (ConcernedApe
2016), and Fire Emblem: Awakening (Intelligent Systems and Nintendo 2012).
The player does not have to develop relationships in these games, but it will
improve their gameplay performance if they do. In these games, we could
understand the SA as a game in a game; that is, it is not the main aspectof the game, but occupies a part of it that has a different set of rules andmechanics.
Types of character relationships
Overall, the SA lets the player influence three kinds of dyadic relationships:
the player character with an NPC; the actual player themselves with an
NPC; and between two (or more) NPCs. First, the most common kind of
relationship is between the player character and an NPC. In this relationship there exists a continuous tension between the different entities thatstems from the double nature of the player character. A player characteris simultaneously a fictional person and the partial diegetic embodimentPar asocial rel ationships with non-pl ayable char acters

129of the player (Vella 2015). Persona 5 is such a game (which I will discuss indetail below) where NPCs form a bond with Joker, the player character.
The relationship between the player character and NPC is therefore both aconnection between the player and another fictional person, and between
two fictional persons.
Second, sometimes games encourage the player to create a PSR as themselves, as an external entity with the NPC. This means that the player does
not embody an avatar inside the world of the game, but their existenceoutside the game is acknowledged instead. In Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu!
and Pokémon: Let’s Go, Eevee! (Game Freak 2018), the player normally controls
an avatar who we see from a third-person perspective. The player can entera segment called “Partner Play” in which they can bond with either their
Pikachu or Eevee Pokémon. The third-person perspective then turns into afirst-person perspective; the player character disappears and the Pikachu or
Eevee gaze directly at the player, addressing the player instead of the player
character. The segment allows the player to pet the Pokémon by touching
the screen of the Nintendo Switch console, giving the impression that theplayer touches the creature directly rather than through the player character.
And finally, in rare cases, the player creates a relationship between two or
more NPCs. Within this relationship, the player’s creative agency is limited
to the role of a facilitator (and they may therefore not create a PSR per se);they orchestrate the connection from outside of the relationship. They can
influence the direction of the relationship, but unlike the player character,they do not share their existence with these characters. In Fire Emblem: ThreeHouses (Intelligent Systems and Koei Tecmo 2019), for example, the player
can invite two students to have lunch with their teacher, Byleth, or invite
them to sing in a choir. Both segments strengthen their bonds with eachother and with Byleth, the player character. Once their bond level is highenough, the player can activate scripted scenes between the two students
to advance the students’ relationship to the next rank.
Conditions
The player cannot create bonds without any limitations; often they will haveto meet several conditions before they can form a bond with or between
NPCs. These conditions exist in the form of parameters, gender and sexualcompatibility, and resources that determine how much creative agency
players have over the characters: player characters often have parameters
or statistics which the player must raise for another character to become
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Joker’s social stats — e.g., attributes of knowledge, charm, guts, proficiency,
and kindness — through actions such as eating a giant hamburger or studying. Depending on the NPC that players might want to romance, a different
statistic needs to be at a specific level.
The availability of in-game resources is another condition. In an SA,
resources often translate into a character’s availability for a relationship. In
The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel, the player can only bond in a single
diegetic day with the same number of characters as the number of bonding
points. When the player has two bonding points, they can spend them on
two characters, even if there are three or four of them available for the player
to spend their points on. This game does not allow the player to completelydevelop each NPC’s bond with the player character Rean. Instead, the player
must strategically choose whose relationship they wish to influence anddevelop. This endows the game with replayability, stimulating players toplay the game once again to develop each relationship to its maximum.
The most common conditions are those of gender and sexual compatibility, which, unfortunately, are often defined by heteronormative standards.
Gender and sexuality often function as statistical values because they
determine the nature of relationships, particularly romantic ones. They
also reflect the inherent ideals behind coupling that stem from a normative
cultural understanding of how relationships work in society. Kim JohansenØstby points out that the Mass Effect series contains a heteronormative“public game” that every player will encounter. It also contains a “private
game,” which only some players choose to see, in which the player moves
tentatively into queer territory (2016, 407). For example, although the first
instalment in the series, Mass Effect, allows the player to romance Liara
T’Soni regardless of Shepard’s gender, in Mass Effect 2, a female Shepard
cannot enter into a romantic relationship with another female character. The
player is bound to a heterosexual relationship even if their female Shepard
romanced Liara in the previous game. Such statistical values promote dominant heteronormative readings of sexuality and gender when it comes toromance in games. In games such as Shin Megami Tensei Persona 4 (Atlus
2008), and Persona 5, the player characters can exclusively pursue romancewith characters of the opposite gender, and only friendship with charactersof the same gender. Even in cases in which the player can create same-sex
couples, these games can structurally punish the player for creating suchconnections, or never make these same-sex romances explicit.
Most often, the (romantic) relationships between characters are alsomonogamous. When romantic relationships are available, games tend toeither allow the player a monogamous relationship with another character

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131or punish the player for pursuing more romantic relationships. In Dragon
Age: Origins, the player can pursue a romantic connection with both Alistair
and Zevran. However, at some point the player must choose between them.
Zevran will let the player know that he is fine with the player having two
boyfriends, but states that Alistair is not fine with it, so that the player has
no other option but to choose between them.
Yet it is not all doom and gloom. The trend of heteronormative romances
is changing; particularly in independent (indie) games in Euro-American
game cultures, romance has become more open to depicting same-sex
romances, and in certain cases, also polyamorous relationships, as shownin my analysis of Hades below. The SA should therefore be understood asa process that demands scrutiny when gender, sexuality, and the shape ofthe relationship are used as conditions for the representation of romantic
relationships.
ProceduresOnce the player passes the hurdle of complying with the game’s rules on
who can enter a relationship with whom, they can finally begin working on
how to create a relationship. Each SA demands that the player goes througha set of procedures to establish a relationship. The processes that lead to a
relationship vary per character, but in general players will have to go throughat least one of the following procedures: transactions, character-targeted
dialogues, quests, or time-related events. Transactions—players giving items
or objects—are one of the most common ways to influence a character’s
affection. The player gives the character they wish to attract a valuableobject, so that the character’s parameters might rise or decline. In Stardew
Valley, the player must learn every character’s taste in specific items by trial
and error (or look it up online if they are lazy like me). For instance, if theplayer wishes to create a romantic relationship between their avatar andElliot in Stardew Valley, they will have to constantly give him items likelobsters, duck feathers, or squid to raise his affection.
Although these transactions often come in the form of gifts, they also
reveal the tension between a dynamic game character’s function as a ludic
agent (see chapter 3 for an explanation of the concept of ludic agent) and thegame’s encouragement to perceive the figures as quasi-persons. The transactions simplify elusive and complex concepts such as love and friendship.
The message is that a player only has to give nice trinkets for a characterto come around to liking them. The player cannot determine exactly how
the character will respond or in what direction the character will develop

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Video Game Char acters and Tr ansmedia Story telling(for more detail, see chapter 3). However, once the player has learned thecharacter’s preferences, it is simply a matter of giving them items to raise
the statistics of the ludic agent. Thereafter, the player’s impression of thecharacter as a quasi-person may decrease since the character no longer
upholds the illusion of being a person-like entity with their own will.
Another common procedure is character-targeted dialogue. This comesin the form of a “dialogue wheel” in which the player chooses options that
could lower or raise the character’s affection towards the player character.
The options presented consist of dialogue answers, actions that the player
character can perform, or both. The accumulation of these decisions changes
the probability of outcomes until the player has reached the necessary
outcome of the game’s end state. Games that have the SA as their primarymechanic and those with SA as a secondary mechanic are quite different.
Games with the SA as their primary mechanic use character-targeted
dialogues to direct the narrative to a certain outcome. But games that havean SA as a secondary mechanic, like Persona 5, have dialogue wheels that
exclusively affect the characters and not the overall narrative of the game.
For players of Persona 5 this means that regardless of their answers in the
dialogue wheel, the outcome of the game will not change. Only small nuances
inside the story might be changed such as how characters will respond to
the player character, but the end state of the game remains unaffected.
Quests tend to come in the form of requests or favours asked by characters.
The player must complete quests to influence the relationship. The actions
the player must execute can be simple or complex and might often involve
one or more of the other procedures in this section. However, they all share
a common objective: to advance the relationship between characters. In
Mass Effect 2, Miranda requests help to escort her sister to a safe location
by distracting enemies. The player traverses a maze-like area and takes
down enemies by running by them while kicking and shooting them. These
actions do not directly affect Miranda, but after the completion of the quest,
Miranda’s “loyalty” status changes from “neutral” to “loyal.”
Time translates into two kinds of mechanisms in an SA: waiting for andattending to the character. Waiting in games happens in two different formsof time: diegetic time in the game, and in “real-life time” as it passes in theworld of the player. The latter involves making the player wait by subjecting
them to the whims of the characters when the latter demand attention, suchas the Tamagotchi (Bandai 1996) or Mystic Messenger. Yet in other games
where the player is represented through a player character in a diegetic
world, waiting tends to be bound to the player’s progress. In Mass Effect 2,
waiting depends on how fast the player proceeds with the characters’ quests.

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If the player wishes to romance Garrus as Shepard’s boyfriend (like I did),they must complete several high-priority quests to receive opportunities
to attain that status. Nevertheless, some of Garrus’s quests do not become
available until the player has advanced in the game’s main narrative. It
cannot be said therefore that waiting in the game is entirely independentof the game’s main narrative.
Appearing is on the opposite end of the spectrum to waiting. In games,
appearing translates into game mechanisms in which players are expected
to appear at a given time in the game’s diegetic world. In Stardew Valley,
some characters give the player appointments to show up at a specifictime if the player wants to unlock scripted scenes to raise the characters’
affection. For example, the player can discover that Elliott is usually in thesaloon between three and ten. If they enter the saloon when Elliott has four
hearts of affection towards their avatar, Elliott proposes a toast and theplayer can decide what to toast to. Depending on the player’s response in
the dialogue wheel, Elliot’s affection for the avatar can rise or decline—all
because the player was at the right place at the right time.

Dating in Persona 5
As I have hinted on several occasions in this chapter, Persona 5 is a genericexample of how an SA appears in most video games. After an incident in
his former hometown during which Joker is unjustly accused of harassing Masayoshi Shido, a powerful politician, Joker is put on probation andtransferred to Shujin Academy in Tokyo. His criminal past is soon revealed,causing students and teachers to shun him. Immediately afterwards, amysterious application pops up on his phone: the Metaverse Navigator.
Joker deletes the application, but that night in his dreams, he is transported
to the mysterious Velvet Room where the room’s attendant, Igor, tells Joker
that destruction awaits him. The only way to avoid destruction is to become
rehabilitated into a free man again by stealing the hearts of corrupted
people and changing the world. Joker initially sets out to free the worldfrom corrupted people by himself but is soon joined by other students.
They call themselves Kaitōdan (“Phantom Thieves of Hearts”), a vigilantegroup that roams the palaces of the shadow world to steal treasure from
corrupted individuals to reform their hearts.
Persona 5 has a rigid main narrative that the player cannot change. Aslong as the player progresses through the game, these events will happen no
matter what the player does. From this perspective, Persona 5 corresponds

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neatly to the traits commonly associated with its genre, the Japanese roleplaying game (JRPG). According to Schules et al. (2018, 114), fans and industry
associate JRPGs with limited exploration possibilities in the game world,well-defined characters, anime/cartoon style art, a linear and singularstory, and a fantasy world. Persona 5 exhibits all of these traits. Yet, thegame is not without dynamic game characters; it has an SA as a secondary
mechanic which gives the player the creative agency to develop parasocial
relationships between the player character Joker and NPCs, all dynamic
game characters. Through the SA, the player can influence characters’
identities without interfering with the developer’s established versions of
the characters. Joker, Ann, Tae, and all the other optional confidants theplayer meets during gameplay will adhere to their rigid pathway, but how
they relate to Joker is up to the player.
Persona 5’s SA is called confidant (or kōpu in the Japanese version) by
the game itself. NPCs with whom the player can build relationships are
known as confidants. There are twenty confidants in total, and they include
the party members of the Kaitōdan with whom players traverse throughdungeons. Confidants also include NPCs that are not party members. The
game further divides confidants into optional and mandatory; players canchoose whether to build a relationship with optional confidants, whereas
the game’s main narrative naturally establishes a relationship with themandatory confidants as the player progresses through the game, because
these characters are important for the main narrative. For example, Joker’s
relationship with Akechi Goro, a party member, is mandatory and will
naturally progress through the game. The player will learn about Akechi’shidden motives which ultimately lead to Akechi’s betrayal of the entire
Kaitōdan. By doing so, Joker and the rest of the characters discover Akechi’sconnection to Shido, the person who harassed Joker prior to the events ofthe game. This discovery triggers the Kaitōdan’s final heist to discover thetrue culprit of the dangerous happenings in the game’s story.
The player’s relationship with each confidant is presented through aranking system, in which level one is the lowest level, at which Joker and theconfidants are merely acquaintances, up to level ten, the highest level which
represents a close relationship either as friends or as romantic partners.
The player needs to gather points through several procedures to level up
the ranks, mainly dialogue wheels and transactions, by choosing the rightanswer and giving the NPCs items they like.
Building these relationships allows the player to create meaningfulconnections between Joker and the confidants as narrative agents, while
simultaneously developing them as ludic agents. This system occurs in the

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periphery of the game, outside the game’s main storyline when the bondwith a confidant character is optional. For example, if the player wishes
to further the relationship with Ann, a party member, to the second rank,
they must reach “considerate” (the second level) in the kindness categoryof the Joker’s social statistics. As the player progresses through Ann’s ranks,
she develops as a narrative agent; she will get over her worries about her
friend Shiho. She also starts taking her modelling career more seriously
and overcomes her struggles with a competing model. After rank nine,
the player can choose to have Ann become Joker’s girlfriend, making therelationship either romantic or platonic.
Ann also develops as a ludic agent, which smoothens gameplay. Any party
member with whom the player builds a relationship learns new skills thatare useful for battles in dungeons; they will be able to perform follow-up
attacks or save the player character from fatal attacks. Each party member
will also obtain their own unique abilities. For example, Ann gains theability to negotiate with an enemy again if the player fails the negotiation
the first time. Once players have reached level ten, Ann’s persona Carmen,
the spirit that she uses to fight in battles, will transform into Hecate, a more
powerful persona, to reflect the change she has experienced. So, even if theplayer is not interested in Ann’s development as a narrative agent, they will
be rewarded nonetheless as she becomes more useful as a ludic agent. But
it will not affect the overall outcome of the game’s main storyline if theplayer decides not to engage with Ann at all (or any other optional confidant
characters for that matter).
NPCs that are optional as confidant characters function rather alike
their party member counterparts, with the exception that they develop only
minimally as ludic agents. Progressing through Tae Takemi’s relationshipranks, Joker’s (illegal) medical doctor, Joker takes part in clinical trials. As
their bond deepens, the player will discover that the trials are an attempt toregain her credibility as a doctor, which she unjustly lost a few years prior to
the events of the game. However, even if the player is not interested in theirdevelopment as a narrative agent, this does not mean that these NPCs are
not useful. Deepening the bond with Tae Takemi still rewards the player. As
the player progresses through Tae’s ranks and deepens the bond between
them, the player will be able to purchase more healing items, or the pricesof the items will drop as the player raises Tae’s rank. These changes are
beneficial because they smoothen boss battles to reach the game’s end state.
I have to note that despite the number of different dynamic game characters with whom players can create a bond, Persona 5 notoriously avoids
same-sex couples and explicitly celebrates heteronormative monogamous

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romantic relationships. The former is visible in the selection of characterswith whom Joker can enter into a romantic relationship; while the player
can choose whether the relationships with Tae and Ann becomes romanticor platonic after rank nine, such a choice is absent for male confidants. If theplayer decides to build a relationship between Joker and Yusuke Kitagawa,a party member whose confidant is optional, they will go through a similar
process as with Ann: Joker and Yusuke grow closer with each rank, Yusuke
will work through his issues, which have to do with his painting aspirations
and his late mother whom he never met. Simultaneously, he will develop
as a ludic agent, gaining more skills and abilities until the player reaches
rank ten during which his persona transforms into a stronger version. But,
even if the player fervently wishes so, the relationship will never becomeromantic.
There is a similar issue with monogamy in this game. The monogamy in
Persona 5’s romantic relationships is a double-edged sword; the game allows
the player to develop multiple romantic relationships at the same time (up tonine in total) but it will later punish the player for it: when the game reaches
15 February, the day after Valentine’s Day, any character with whom Joker isromantically involved will show up to call out Joker for two-timing them.
They will then beat him up off-screen. Yet, the scene ends with Sojiro Sakura,
Joker’s caretaker, saying he covered for him and got him off the hook. So,
in the end, the two-timing has no major consequences, instead providing
a supposedly funny scene, while simultaneously sending the message thatany romantic relationship outside heteronormative norms is heresy.
Confidants in Persona 5’s media mix strategy
Being part of a Japanese media mix strategy, the Persona 5 charactersproliferate across media. As I have been explaining throughout this book,
Euro-American theory on contemporary transmedia practices tends tostrive for narrative continuity across works, whereas Japanese theory usually
favours character proliferation. The strategies of control over characters’
identities in Japanese media mix strategies tend to be established based on
the characters as intellectual property (IP). In this way, the figures proliferate
so that fans can choose which product they want to consume, while theIP owner at the same time creates “more touchpoints to newcomers to aground of products” (Nakamura and Tosca 2021, 5).
Persona 5’s media mix strategy functions accordingly and maintains
multiple touchpoints through which consumers can experience the IP owner
Atlus’s products. While controlling the character’s transtextual identity toPar asocial rel ationships with non-pl ayable char acters

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create narrative continuity is not a major concern for most media mixes,
Persona 5 shows that the developer Atlus is still interested in policing theidentities of the Persona 5 characters in some regards. As I will show below,
this has consequences especially for the confidant characters, because theplayer’s creative agency to build relationships with them in-game cannot
easily be sustained by non-cybermedia.
In a prior study on Persona 5 (Blom 2020), I showed that Atlus recognises
two official Persona 5 adaptations: the Persona 5 manga series (Murasaki
2017a; 2017b; 2018a; 2018b) and the Persona 5 The Animation TV anime series(Ishihama 2018). Both adaptations follow the game’s rigid main narrativewith slight variations, since an adaptation is always a modification of theoriginal work (Hutcheon 2006). Nevertheless, the manga and anime series
remain faithful and equivalent to the original source work, granting it thestatus of “axiomatic primacy and authority” (Hutcheon 2006, 16). In thepreceding study, I stated that neither the manga nor the anime series containany hint to acknowledge that the player can build relationships between
Joker and various NPCs like Tae, Ann, and Yusuke. However, in the time
between that study and the writing of this book, Persona 5 The Animation
released an original video animation (OVA) episode on 26 June 2019, as an
extra, with the publication of the DVD and Blue Ray volume 12 that contained
the final episodes of the series.
The OVA episode is titled Persona 5 The Animation: A Magical Valentine’s
Day and briefly depicts each of the Valentine dates with the female confidants. Whenever the episode transitions to another date, the new scenario
starts with an “In case of,” clearly hinting at how the date would go in casethe player were to date one of these women in the original game. Eachdate also ends happily with a kiss between Joker and his date. Yet, the final
scenario of this episode is called “A Tragic Valentine’s Day.” It depicts thecase of Joker two-timing all nine female confidants on 15 February, and,as I described above, shows the women taking their revenge on Joker bybeating him off-screen.
The official animation does indeed acknowledge the SA in the original
game, but as an OVA, the A Magical Valentine’s Day episode falls outside
the main storyline. The facts 1) that it was not aired on television like theother episodes; 2) that it does not have an official episode number; and 3)
that it was released as an extra on DVD volume 12, demonstrates that this
episode is nothing more than a wink to the Valentine Day scene in-game. It
is meant to please fans as fan service, also known as an omake in Japanese,a “little something extra.” In other words, the developer, Atlus, places theSA, over which the player has a certain degree of agency, in the periphery138 

Video Game Char acters and Tr ansmedia Story tellingof the transmedia adaptations to maintain a degree of control over what is
and is not part of the Persona 5 media mix’s main storyline.
Such a strategy to control the main storyline can be seen in other manga
publications of the franchise as well. As per the strategies of a media mix,
the developer grants IP rights over the Persona 5 characters to manga
magazines, which use them to write alternative stories with the characters, not previously depicted in the original game. In Japan, merchandise
stores like Animate sell fan magazines that received copyright to use the
Persona 5 characters in their comics. The Persona 5 Dengeki Comic Anthology(DengekiComics 2017), and Persona 5 Comic Anthology volumes 1 (DNA Media
Comics 2017a) and 2 (DNA Media Comics 2017b), are such manga magazines.
These magazines consist of several short “what-if” comic stories written
by different authors. These short stories explore characters’ backgrounds
and provide additional information about the relationships between Joker
and the confidant characters outside the game. These stories function as
fillers; they are written to provide extra background, but do not change thegame’s main storyline. For example, Persona 5 Anthology volume 1 presents
the story Na mo Shiranu Kafetomo [“My café buddy whose name I do notknow”]. This story describes an encounter between Goro Akechi and Tae
Takemi in café Leblanc, where Joker lives. This story does not occur during
the events of the game, and there is no hint of it in the scripted sequences
between Tae Takemi and Joker, or between Joker and Goro Akechi.
These volumes also contain pastiche and parody stories making fun of
in-game events, also known as yonkoma. A modified version of the failed
Valentine’s Day where the nine female confidants beat up Joker is also
depicted here: the short comic Saigo no Kotoba [“Final Words”] depicts Joker
tied up and hanging from the ceiling surrounded by his female teammates
Ann, Makoto, Haru, and Futaba. The following words appear on the right of
the first panel: Uwaki ga BARE da (“Infidelity EXPOSED”). Joker’s infidelity
has been revealed. When Ann tells him that he is the worst of all for dating
all four of them, Joker delivers the punch line: she is wrong, he had been
dating nine women.1
So, while the magazines do acknowledge the SA in the original game,the actual adaptation of the SA within these magazines only resides on thelevel of convention. In his article on the friction between games and media
with narrative affinity, Espen Aarseth (2006) concludes that “cross-media
1 I originally wrote the short analyses on the stories Na mo Shiranu Kafetomo, Morugana
Kagehika, and Saigo no Kotoba for my prior study, published in the article “Manifestations of
Characters in the Media Mix” (Blom 2020).

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transfer happens relatively smoothly between forms that are alike, suchas books and films, and less so between forms that have strong structuraldifferences, such as amusement park rides, games, and narratives” (210). We
see this friction occur in both the official Atlus anime adaptation as well as
the manga magazines with the short stories and parodies; they acknowledge
the fact that the player can build parasocial relationships between Joker andthe confidant characters, but as non-cybermedia platforms, they have nounderlying mechanical system to incorporate the player’s agency of the game.
To make up for this, the exploration of the relationships between Joker
and other characters is relegated to the periphery of the media mix: either in
unofficial magazines (but with copyright licenses) or in an official episodeplaced outside the main storyline. This assigns an almost holy value andtruthfulness to the original game that proclaims that these characters—even
as they proliferate through different media platforms—are only acceptedby the developer as long as they correspond to the characters in the main
storyline. This conveys the message that the player’s creative agency overthe construction of the characters’ relationships matters only as far as thedeveloper can control it; that is, parasocial relationships outside the gameand official texts are implied to be heresies.

Queer and polyamorous dating in Hades
The majority of the games that I discuss throughout this book are partof franchises and are owned by large conglomerates with the means andresources to proliferate a story and its characters across different works.
However, such games are by no means the only types of games with dynamic
game characters with whom the player can build relationships. In fact,
there has been an increase in indie games with an SA since 2017 after the
global success of Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator in which a father
can date a variety of other fathers. Over the course of the years, the numberof such indie games has grown and it now encompasses a variety of genres,even genres in which one might not expect dating with characters to be apossibility. They therefore provide excellent examples to show how dynamic
game characters can allow for a diversity of queer (romantic) parasocial
relationships, a diversity that is entirely absent from Persona 5, which operates in a framework of heteronormativity.
In this section, I will focus on the indie game Hades, a rogue-like gamedeveloped by the small independent game studio Supergiant Games. As
an indie game, Hades does not have any official transmedia adaptations

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Video Game Char acters and Tr ansmedia Story tellingor expansions across multiple media platforms—at least, not at the time ofwriting this book, and not in the way understood in transmedia storytellingin which intellectual property is licensed across different works. The game’s
narrative and characters are inspired by the myths and mythological figuresof Ancient Greek, a common story setting for many popular transmedia
works and franchises from the past decades, which ranges from Disney’s
animated movie Hercules (Musker and Clements 1997) to games like Godof War (Santa Monica Studio 2005), Persona 3 (Atlus 2006), Assassin’s Creed
Odyssey (Ubisoft 2018) and many more (see Ford 2022 for an elaborate discussion on myth in games). Hades assumes a degree of familiarity with these
mythological figures on the part of its players, not only regarding who is who,
but also concerning the dynamics between the different gods and heroes.
The protagonist and player character of the game is Zagreus, the prince of
the underworld and son of Hades, the God of the underworld. The player istasked with making Zagreus escape the underworld in the hope of reuniting
with his estranged mother Persephone. Death is merely an inconveniencefor Zagreus, because every time Zagreus dies, he returns to Hades’ palacefrom which he has to start his escape anew—a move classic to the rogue
genre. However, not every escape attempt is an entirely new start; Zagreus isimmortal, so the game acknowledges that he dies and returns to the palace
without pretending as if his escape attempt never happened. Rather, NPCs
acknowledge the many attempts and failures to escape: his father mocks
him for it, whereas his mentor Achilles encourages him to not give up.
This narrative also translates into the game mechanics; with every escape,players will gain new resources and useful items that carry over to a newescape attempt. Every round, another Olympic god supports Zagreus in
his escape with magical boons that modify his attacks, his speed or healthin a unique way. To give a spoiler: Zagreus makes it out of the underworld
quite fast—within a single attempt or a couple of attempts—dependingon the skills of the player (it took me several attempts). Once he reunites
with Persephone, they discover he cannot stay alive for long in the worldof the living. Zagreus dies after only a brief encounter with his mother andreturns once again to the underworld.
The game only just starts then. Its gameplay relies on high replayability;with each new attempt, the player will be able to set new challenges, gain
greater rewards, and new weapons. The player can also build parasocial
relationships between Zagreus and different NPCs, such as his father, his
mentor Achilles, residents of the underworld like Eurydice, or Olympian gods
like his uncle Zeus or his cousin Athena. Through these bonds, the player can
explore the backgrounds of each character in greater detail. The game’s SA

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works similarly to Persona 5; each available character has an affinity gauge that
goes up to rank 10. The SA relies mostly on transactions. If the player wishes
to go to a higher rank, they need to give the character nectar or ambrosia,
resources that the player can obtain while in the dungeons. Doing so unlocks
a new scene during which the character in question will reveal a little bit
more about themselves, indicating the growing intimacy between them andZagreus. Once the player has reached rank 10, the gauge has maxed out andthe player has completed the relationship between Zagreus and the NPC.
Most relationships remain platonic, but the player can build romantic
relationships between Zagreus (and, thus, the player), Thanatos, Megaera(Meg), and Dusa. While the number of available romantic options is quite low
compared to the nine romantic options in Persona 5, the low number allows
for more variations of different types of relationships between Zagreus andthese NPCs. First, the player has the option to engage in a queer relationshipbetween Thanatos and Zagreus, both of whom identify as men; during
the relationship-building process, the game hints that the bond between
Zagreus and Thanatos might be of a romantic nature: they are childhood
friends (a common romantic trope), Thanatos is visibly upset that Zagreus
tried to escape the underworld without telling him, and he helps Zagreus in
his escape by defeating Zagreus’ enemies. Once the player has reached the
maximum affinity (level 10) with Thanatos, the player will be able to choose
to turn the relationship into a romantic one through a dialogue wheel. If
the player chooses the romantic relationship, they will be rewarded with abedroom scene between the two (although mostly off-screen).
Second, in extension of the game’s depicted queer options, the player canchoose to engage in consensual polyamory (unlike in Persona 5). Should theplayer pursue a romantic relationship between Zagreus, Thanatos, Meg, andDusa at the same time, there will be a possibility to turn the relationshipbetween Zagreus, Thanatos and Meg into a polyamorous one. Dusa andZagreus will always remain platonic friends no matter the degree of closenessbetween the two, but if the player has reached maximum romantic affinity
with Meg and Thanatos, the player will find both NPCs at some point in
Zagreus’ bedroom at the same time, giving the player the choice of the threeof them to engage in another (off-screen) bedroom scene.
The reason why I am quite keen on this variation in relationships is thatthe game prioritises neither path by design; the player can choose to havea monogamous romantic bond with either Thanatos or Meg, a consensualpolyamorous relationship, or none at all. Neither choice would put theplayer at an advantage or disadvantage. The only real difference lies in thecharacter development of the narrative agents on a story level.

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I would also like to emphasise the consensual aspect of the polyamorous
option. The heteronormativity in Persona 5 is rather toxic; building multiple
romantic relationships is always done non-consensually and is therefore
cheating, which is a recurring (and frankly, boring) joke across multiple
adaptations of Persona 5. However, Hades allows the player to choose
freely; they can choose to exclusively pursue a heterosexual relationshipbetween Meg and Zagreus, but that relationship is not prioritised above aqueer relationship between Thanatos and Zagreus. Rather, we might evenargue that by virtue of being rewarded with more romantic scenes, thepolyamorous option could be seen as the most rewarding.
The subversion of heteronormativity in Hades is something the gamecan be applauded for, but that does not mean that it is entirely free fromheteronormative standards. As Mark Kretzschmar and Anastasia Salter(2020) explain: “queer romances built into a framework for heteronormativity
does not itself subvert that heteronormativity.” Hades partially subverts
heteronormativity, but heteronormativity is also built into it due to thedesign of its SA.
The main issue of most games is that they simplify the development ofa relationship to a few predetermined steps so that players only executethe “correct” strategy to create a bond with a character (Kelly 2015). Such a
strategy is, as Peter Kelly puts it, “baked into the systematic processes fromwhich it cannot intrinsically escape” (47). Due to the game’s mechanicalsystem, the SA, the game cannot avoid employing a “correct” way of playing
if they want their player to successfully woo a character. As has been mentioned by other scholars, these games run the risk of depicting relationships
as something to be won (Kretzschmar and Salter 2020), and as somethingthat the player deserves by performing the right actions (Waszkiewicz
2022, 135). If the player carries out the correct actions, pushes the rightbuttons, or chooses the right dialogue option, they will win the affectionof the other fictional person. These actions resemble codes developed in
our modern societies to communicate feelings of affection, such as giving
gifts or showing up at a date.
Unfortunately, the procedures the player performs downplay the complexity of these relationships. Kelly, in his observations on the ludic romantic
systems in Dragon Age: Inquisition (Bioware 2014), argues that these systems
are “ultimately an exercise in masculinity” (2015, 59), due to their dependence
on logical parameters and strategic navigation (59). In other words, an SA
risks becoming a masculine practice that detracts from the emotional
experience and replaces it with cold logic. After all, all that the player must
do is to execute the correct strategy to attain relational satisfaction.

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Although Persona 5 is a clear example of such heteronormative design,
Hades also contains several mechanics and procedures that operate within
the framework of heteronormativity: the moment the relationships between
Zagreus, Thanatos, and Meg reaches rank 10, the relationship has becomeromantic and cannot be developed further, which implies it is completed andthereby “won.” This kind of design emphasises the creation of a relationshipover maintaining it, and privileges societal standards of what a relationshipshould look like. It also places the focus on sex as a reward to which theplayer has a right once a romantic relationship has been established, as all
three possibilities between Zagreus, Thanatos, and Meg will end up in a
bedroom scene (and we all know that means sex).
Another mechanic that implies heteronormativity is the game’s codex. At
the beginning of the games, Achilles gifts Zagreus a codex, an encyclopaedia
that contains information about the characters, enemies, creatures, items
and other resources. The affinity level with each character is also depictedin their biography in Hades’s codex. Encyclopaedias are common for digital
games, and are used to contain, catalogue, and label objects in-game. They
come in the shapes of bestiaries but also as diaries and character catalogues.
I would add that relationship ranking systems like those found in Hades
and Persona 5 can also be seen as encyclopaedic. The implication of encyclopaedias for characters and their relationships is what turns the characters
into objects, which Jaroslav Švelch (2018) calls “encyclopedic containment”
based on Janet Murray’s (1997) description of digital media as encyclopaedia.
Encyclopaedia containment contrasts, strikingly enough, with the idea thatcharacters are perceived as quasi-persons in contemporary transmedia
practices, but at the same time it shows how video games turn relationships
into something quantitative and collectable that can be contained andcontrolled, as something to be won rather than as the elusive businessthey actually are.
Despite this critique, Hades simultaneously shows a way to challenge
the heteronormative design in the romantic relationship between Achilles
and Patroclus, a relationship that is not parasocial per se since it is not aromantic relationship between Zagreus and them. As the player levels
up the affinity gauge between Zagreus and Achilles, Achilles will ask theplayer to grant him a favour by finding a way to reunite him with Patroclus,
his former lover when they were still alive, who resides in Elysium where
Achilles cannot enter. To do so, the player must deepen the relationshipbetween Zagreus and Patroclus. They have to travel as far as Elysium, thefinal section of the underworld’s dungeon, and have to be lucky enough tomeet Patroclus, as they will not meet him at every escape attempt even if

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they reach Elysium. Zagreus must also find out Patroclus’ name throughthe codex by asking Achilles. When the player has finally reached enoughaffinity with both characters, Achilles requests that Zagreus helps himchange Achilles’ pact with Hades so that he can enter Elysium. And when
the player succeeds, Achilles and Patroclus will reunite, setting aside theirregrets and move on together.
While the logical design of the SA is not explicitly gone, this example
shows that once the player is set aside—when the relationship is no longer
parasocial since it is not about the player—the focus shifts from building
a romantic relationship to maintaining one. It also moves away from theidea of sexual intercourse as a reward. In other words, it subverts the ideathat a relationship is something one expects can be won; instead, the player
is rewarded with a meaningful reunion between two lovers—but only inits periphery.

Conclusion
Dynamic game characters can provide players the possibility to play withand to build parasocial relationships with them that a game structurally
acknowledges—unlike non-cybermedia, which cannot do this because
it lacks an underlying mechanical system. Through the analyses above,
I have pointed to the fact that there are both benef its as well as critical issues of which we should be aware when games provide dynamic
game characters with whom players can build relationships, especiallycharacters that are dateable. We know that parasocial relationships with(dynamic) game characters are meaningful to players because games giveplayers choices to build such relationships and structurally acknowledge
the relationships. The dynamic game characters encourage emotional
investment; the player puts in effort to develop relationships, but theymust also manage the uncertainty that their effort might fail if they makethe wrong choice.
Creating parasocial relationships with different NPCs has the player
explore what Susana Tosca and Lisbeth Klastrup (2019) wonderfully call“a network of stories, a myriad of parallel worlds which together makesense as a whole and are sources of narrative pleasure and delight” (106).
It provides extra background to the characters to flesh out their humanlikeness. Persona 5 allows its confidant characters to come to terms with
their issues if the player pursues a relationship with them, and in Hades theplayer can even reunite the long-lost lovers Achilles and Patroclus, a very

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145satisfying ending to an otherwise sorrowful myth about the Trojan War.2
The emotional investment that the player devotes to fostering these kindsof relationships and intimacies between dynamic game characters builds
meaningful experiences from which the player can derive pleasure. For
instance, Tosca and Klastrup found that in otome games, dating simulators
aimed at straight women, female players wish to explore all the possible
routes of a romantic relation with a character, even going so far as to discuss
which rendering of the same plot point they favour (2019, 106).
Nevertheless, although such experiences are meaningful, they are often
reduced by games through rewards and player achievements, which arecommon to video games. I agree with Kelly (2015, 60) that the translation ofhuman connection in the form of rewards for making connections is reductive.
Both Persona 5 and Hades give the player achievements in the form of trophies:
completing one confidant character’s relationship rank in Persona 5 grants
the player the “A True Confidant” trophy. In Hades, if the player succeeds inreuniting Achilles and Patroclus, they will obtain the “Divided by Death”
achievement. As the player collects these achievements, the achievements
become visible in the player’s public accounts for other players to see, thereby
becoming a way to show off their success—implying that they have done better
than other players. As a result, the player’s emotional investment in these
relationships becomes nothing more than grounds for quantifiable bragging.
Such a heteronormative framework runs through these relationships. Even
the depiction of queer and polyamorous relationships as in Hades does notcompletely escape them. On a representational level, the relationships areseen as something to be won, with sex as the ultimate reward. Polyamorous
relationships are depicted in Persona 5 as non-consensual and as cheating,and although the polyamorous relationship in Hades is happily consensual,sex is still its ultimate reward. It just comes in the shape of a threesome.

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Ludography
Atlus. 2006. Persona 3. Playstation 2. Atlus.
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Bandai. 1996. Tamagotchi. Bandai.
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Cheritz. 2016. Mystic Messenger. Android and iOS. Cheritz.
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149Game Freak. 2018. Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu! Nintendo Switch. The Pokémon
Company.
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Company.
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Toby Fox. 2015. Undertale. PC. Toby Fox.
Ubisoft. 2018. Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. Microsoft Windows, Playstation 4, andXbox One. Ubisoft.

6.

The construction of transmedia gamecharacters
Abstract: This chapter explains how game characters are transmediallyconstructed when narrative continuity is not the dominant ideal acrossworks. For this reason, the chapter looks at the f ighting game genre,
which relies less on linear storytelling, instead using a set of transmedia
techniques to construct its fighter characters. First, I will discuss theambiguity of how media and video games construct characters. Then,the chapter moves to a discussion on transmedia game characters in thefighting game genre, and presents a close reading of the fighting games
Soulcalibur VI, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, and Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite
to show how their use of transmedia techniques depends on the player’s
repertoire of knowledge of the fighters across different works.
Keywords: Fighting games, transmedia techniques, Soul series, Super
Smash Bros. series, Marvel vs. Capcom series

The presentation of characters across media platforms
The fighting game genre lends itself well to explaining how characters can beconstructed without a focus on narrative continuity because it relies less onlinear storytelling and instead draws on a gamut of transmedia techniques
to construct its fighters as characters. Characters in fighting games often
move from game to game and from medium to medium, making themespecially relevant to our focus on transmedia qualities.
In the previous chapters, I explained how dynamic game characters
are constructed within video games and how they move transmediallyacross different works. Most of all, I have pointed out how players lose theircreative agency over the development of the dynamic game character once ittransfers to another medium or story due to the ideal of narrative continuityof transmedia storytelling. This is because dynamic game characters, like

Blom, J., Video Game Characters and Transmedia Storytelling: The Dynamic Game Character.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023
doi 10.5117/9789463722957_ch06

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any other type of character, are predominantly shaped through stories. But
what if the focus is not stories? Can video games construct characters withoutstories as the dominant discourse? And if so, how do these characters movetransmedially from work to work if narrative continuity is not the ideal? To
engage with these questions, I will shift the focal point in this chapter fromdynamic game characters to transmedia game characters in order to show
how game characters are transmedially constructed across works when
narrative continuity is not a dominant discourse in a game.
In this chapter, I will analyse characters from the fighting games Soulcalibur VI (Bandai Namco 2018), Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (Bandai Namco
Studios & Sora Ltd. 2018), and Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite (Capcom 2017). All
these games use different transmedia techniques to construct the games’
fighters as characters. I will first briefly discuss how medium specificity—or
rather, its ambiguity—informs how media and video games constructcharacters. Then I will move to a discussion of transmedia characters in thefighting game genre and will end with an in-depth analysis of three fighting
games that shows how the success of their transmedia techniques depends
on the player’s repertoire of knowledge of the fighters across different works
to understand their behaviour and internal motivations as characters.
As explained in chapter 2, characters are quasi-persons that we understand simultaneously as pieces of writing and as person-like entities(Frow 2014, 2). Because of their double nature, characters are therefore
independent from any given medium, that is, they appear across different
kinds of media platforms without needing any specific medium. Yet, at thesame time, the character relies on representational material to appear; itneeds a medium to exist at all. This means that the medium specifies how
the character is presented as a person-like entity and thus partially informs
how we understand characters.
The representational abilities of media and their role in society is a broad
topic in Media Studies. Marshall McLuhan’s (1964) famous phrase “themedium is the message” points out that any medium or technology has
physical and social consequences for already existing processes within humansociety, which determine how humans act and associate (8). His notion was
followed by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin (1999), who discuss “remediation”—the convergence of media within other media. They specifically
discuss the convergence of three technologies—computer, telephone, andtelevision—which each appropriate aspects from each other, and through thisappropriation will continue to produce future devices and practices within
our culture. How different media are related and shape our experiences ofcharacters thus deeply involves our relationship and experiences with media.

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Yet, more so than ever before, our contemporary transmedia culture
contains a plurality of different media through which content flows. Media
platforms are often almost indistinguishable from each other. Are we still“watching television” when we open Netflix on our computer? Is the interactive thriller Erica (Flavourworks 2019) on the Playstation 4 console a movie
or a game? The difference might lie in the terms only. Since characters move
between different media, they are affected by how these media platforms
present them. In turn, that presentation also affects our reception of them,
how we experience them, and what we believe characters should be like.
In order to understand the interrelations between different media, Lars
Elleström (2010) seeks to define more precisely what is meant by the term“medium”: “the understanding of what a medium is and what intermedial relations actually consist of has vital implications for each and every inquiry in
old and new fields of study concerning the arts and media” (11). This includes
a study on characters. His underlying argument is that any materiality ofart (or any form of expression) depends on the technology that mediates it.
Since he considers the concept of “medium” too broad to define, he divides it
into four modalities—material modality, sensorial modality, spatiotemporalmodality, and the semiotic modality (15). The element from Elleström’s
description that is relevant for characters is his explicit argument that eachmedium possesses these modalities in some mixture and combination to
mediate any form of expression. The distinction between different media
and their modalities is so ambiguous that no medium is entirely distinct
from another in how it communicates characters. Each medium—such asfilm, television, literature, and even digital games—shares modalities withother media. Some media materialise characters in ways that are similar toother media, while they have their own distinct properties and conventions
for expressing these figures. These properties and conventions can evendiffer within the same medium.
Just like films, novels, theatre, and television series, video games convey
characters to audiences. They wrap the character in representational material using culturally learned conventions so that the player will consider the
figure a person-like entity. The difficulty, however, is that the means andconventions that video games use to wrap characters in representational
material can differ greatly by game. Games focused on telling a story, likerole-playing games, will dedicate more time to the inner thoughts of acharacters than a puzzle game. Dynamic game characters, too, are subject
to the means and conventions of the medium, even more so, because they
rely on the processual nature of cybermedia (Aarseth and Calleja 2015). As I
explained in the first chapter, cybermedia have a processual nature that give154 

Video Game Char acters and Tr ansmedia Story tellingcharacters the potential to change depending on who plays them. Although
this nature sets dynamic game characters somewhat apart from charactersin non-cybermedia, they share many similarities with other characters in
how they are constructed through and across media platforms.
Daniel Vella (2015) offers an extensive account of how games turn
entities into characters. He constructs a semiotic-structural model of theplayer character—the figure “that emerges through the accretion of a setof textual signifiers” in digital games (371). Vella uses Uri Margolin’s (1986)“characterization statements” (CS) to explain signifiers as textual cues.
The reader uses these cues to deduce attributes and traits belonging to acharacter, giving the impression that a character has mental properties
and capabilities (Vella 2015, 373). Vella adds ludic elements to Margolin’s
CS, which he considers to be the vehicles for characterisation unique togames:–––––

Capabilities and Limitations: that is, what the players can and cannot
do through the character in the game world. (387)Passion: “the vulnerability and openness to be acted upon as much as
by its capacity to act” (387) so that player characters can be influenced
by other entities.
Goals: these might be self-imposed or set by the player, but they are theludic goals of the game. (388)Attributes: statistical values attached to the character that need to beable to be compared with those of other characters. (389)Development: the capacity for the character’s ludic elements to changeover time. (391)

Vella’s description demonstrates in extensive detail how games turn aplayable figure into a quasi-person. However, because his understanding ofcharacters is rooted in the field of Literary Studies—the dominant theoretical discourse on characters—he assumes that characters, even in games,
are exclusively constructed through stories. Although stories might be themost dominant way to convey characters, it is important to recognise thatsuch an approach can only be used in games that employ stories to create
a new character version. Additionally, Vella’s model only fits the player
character, which means that it does not explain how any other types ofgame figures turn into quasi-persons. This reflects the tendency of Game
Studies to primarily discuss avatars and player characters. Vella’s model
can therefore only explain how the ludic elements turn the playable figure
into a character.

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Transmedia characters in fighting games
Vella’s approach to the characterisation of game characters follows thedominant discourse on storytelling and, by extension, narrative continuity
across works. However, there are ways besides stories in which characters
can be constructed as quasi-persons. The fighting game genre is a category ofvideo games in which fighter characters are incredibly important. Games ofthis genre do not tend to construct characters in a linear narrative structure.
Rather, the fighter’s development happens through the games’ peripherals.
Rachael Hutchinson (2019, 71) explains that, having their roots in arcades
or game centres, fighting games deliver story and character development
at different points than game genres that rely on hours of linear gameplay.
Fighting games are structured around three-minute battles between two
characters that players control on a delineated stage before moving to thenext battle. The narrative structure of fighting games constructs charactersin a much more scattered manner than role-playing games. That is, according to Hutchinson, these fighters develop through story peripheralssuch as cover art, cabinet designs, and game manuals, outside the gameitself. Inside the game, there are opening cinematics, game environments
associated with different characters, speech lines, and short scenes before
and after the battles (Hutchinson 2019, 71). Hutchinson regards this typeof characterisation as a puzzle, as
players must piece together in their minds as they play through the game.
True experts know every character inside and out, not only adept atmanipulating the character’s moveset but also knowing their backstory,
likes and dislikes, enemies and allies. (2019, 73)

Hutchinson primarily focuses on the evolution of game characters fromtheir origin in fighting games. The fighting game genre uses an assemblageof different transmedia techniques to construct its game characters. These
techniques stimulate the player to connect one version of a character toanother, giving the figure a sense of personhood. As the story is relayed
through peripherals, characters obtain a sense of personhood through art,
move sets, speech lines, and short scenes that the player fits together intheir mind. This is why narrative continuity across works is not necessary
for fighting game characters.
Like many other genres, fighting games adopt and adapt characters fromother game genres and media. For example, fighting games such as the Super
Smash Bros. series consists exclusively of figures from other games. Other

156 

Video Game Char acters and Tr ansmedia Story tellingfighting games, such as the Soul series, which originated in the arcades,
bring “guest characters” into a new series. Characters are affected by how
media platforms are capable of presenting them. Therefore, quasi-persons
borrowed from non-cybermedia or even other game genres have to be
adjusted to fit the fighting game genre. This means that, although theirinitial character development might have happened through linear stories,
their appearance in fighting games forces their development to unfold in amore dispersed narrative structure.
Such is also the case for dynamic game characters: while certain gamecharacters might be dynamic in some games, once they transfer to another
game, they might not be a dynamic game character in that game. Sincefighting games use different transmedia means to construct game characters,
dynamic game characters initially seem to be largely absent from the genre
due to its dispersed narrative structure and lack of player’s creative agency
over the character’s development. Yet, it would be a mistake to assume thatthe genre does not engage with dynamic game characters at all, as I will show
in the analysis of Soulcalibur VI. The remainder of this chapter will discuss
three examples of fighting games with different transmedia approaches toconstructing game characters from different works: Soulcalibur VI, Super
Smash Bros. Ultimate, and Marvel VS. Capcom.
Geralt of Rivia in Soulcalibur VI
The Soul series was first developed for the arcade in Japan, then later ported
to and developed for home game consoles. It currently consists of fourteen
games, of which there are seven main instalments—the fighting games that
advance the story of the series. The current main instalments are: Soul Edge
(Project Soul 1995), Soulcalibur (Project Soul 1998), Soulcalibur II (Project
Soul 2002), Soulcalibur III (Project Soul 2005), Soulcalibur IV (Namco 2008),
Soulcalibur V (Namco 2012), and Soulcalibur VI (Project Soul 2018).
The instalments up to and including Soulcalibur V tell a continuousstory set in the same world with characters that represent the same person.
Soulcalibur VI breaks with this tradition and introduces a new timeline. Thisnew timeline is a retelling of the original timeline as it occurs from Soul
Edge up to and including Soulcalibur V. For someone lacking experience
with the previous instalments, the timeline introduced in Soulcalibur VI isthe timeline as they know it. For other players, it would be a retelling of theoriginal storyline, which they might or might not consider blasphemy. The
reboot is an excellent illustration of how invisible hands alter perceptions ofa character’s authenticity and identity through canonisation (as explained

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in chapter 4), as there is now an “original” timeline from the previous games
and a new timeline, with Soulcalibur VI overwriting the first story withnew plot twists, introductions of new characters, and endings enforced by
a top-down approach to appeal to both old and new players.
Soulcalibur VI introduces its story through a mission mode and a story
mode. The latter is the main storyline that carries most of the new timeline.
In the game’s story mode, Soul Chronicle, the player is presented withmultiple timelines. There is a main timeline, and individual timelines forover twenty different fighters—including Geralt of Rivia, whose adventures
I will discuss below. In the main timeline, the player experiences the historyof the evil sword Soul Edge and sees how different characters battle for thepossession of it. In every other scene, the player gains control of a different
individual and defeats opponents to advance the story.
In each individual timeline, the player controls individual fighters andexperiences that person’s perspective of the events of the main timeline. The
individual timelines show the figures’ personal motivations for why they
are searching for Soul Edge. This narrative structure of a main narrative andindividual narratives is also known as the “character-world relationship”
common to media mixes, in which a grand story structures how smaller
story fragments fit based on individual characters (Ōtsuka 1989; [1989] 2010;
Schules 2015). As the player progresses through the main storyline, the gameadds the individual experiences of different characters, to help the player
understand the workings of the world of the Soul series.
In addition to the story mode, the game includes a mission mode, called
Libra of Soul, in which the player can create their own avatar. Their custom
avatar embarks on a journey to stop the evil mastermind, Azwel, fromgathering the Soul Edge shards to create a new Soul Edge. In this mode, theplayer can “shape their own path” (Romano 2018) by meeting and fighting
characters from the main story line, which suggests that the avatar andthe other fighters are dynamic game characters. However, the player’s
choices have no impact on the main storyline of the story mode. Instead,by separating the story into two modes, the game is effectively split into
different games, or “games within a game” (see Aarseth and Calleja 2015), toavoid a clash between the player’s creative agency in the player’s timeline
and the main timeline as determined by the developer, which implies thatnarrative continuity is an ideal here. The ideal for narrative continuity also
affects Geralt, one of the many guest characters that appear in the Soul series.
Within this swirl of modes, we find a familiar character that has notpreviously appeared in the Soul series: Geralt of Rivia from the Witcher
series. The Soul series has a history of cross-overs by bringing in characters158 

Video Game Char acters and Tr ansmedia Story tellingfrom other media franchises. These include Yoda and Darth Vader fromthe Star Wars franchise, Link from The Legend of Zelda series, Lloyd Irving
from Tales of Symphonia (Namco Tales Studio 2003), and Ezio Auditore daFirenze from the Assassin’s Creed series. From this perspective, Geralt ofRivia fits perfectly into the mould that the Soul series has created for itself,
in which guest characters bolster the roster of the series’ original characters.
The series’ new timeline allows the developer to add and alter elementsfrom the original timeline to make space for new characters. This is the casewith Grøh, a completely new fighter, but also with Geralt, who originatedelsewhere. His appearance promises that he is somehow part of the newtimeline. For example, the online encyclopaedia Fandom, where fans share
their knowledge on popular culture, claims on the page on Geralt of Rivia
that “Geralt is the first guest character to be part of the Soul series canon”(“Geralt of Rivia” n.d.). According to the page, Geralt is part of the official,rebooted timeline. Unlike previous guest characters, Geralt seems integrated
into the new timeline—but is he really, and if so, to what extent?
Geralt of Rivia was originally the protagonist of the Witcher book series(1993–2013) created by the Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski. This fantasy
book series consists of several novels and short stories, in which Geralt is
a “witcher”—a monster hunter for hire. This series was later adapted into
several other media, including a film called The Hexer (2001), two televisionseries—The Hexer (Brodzki 2002), and The Witcher (Schmidt Hissrich 2019)
on Netflix—and The Witcher video game series (CD Projekt RED 2007–2016).
In the video game series, the player controls Geralt, performing his duties
and navigating challenges they meet as Geralt travels through the Northern
Kingdoms and the Nilfgaardian Empire. The version of Geralt in the video
game series diverges from the version in the book series. For example, inthe books, Geralt is partially disabled, but the video games do not portray
any such injury.
Geralt as he appears in Soulcalibur VI resembles the Geralt in The Witcher
video game series. Not only is his visual appearance similar, but the transmedia techniques of Geralt’s voice and fighting style also link both character
versions. The main difference lies in what type of game character Geralt
portrays in both games, as they are of different genres. The Witcher 3 is arole-playing fantasy game in which the player roams and develops Geralt
as a dynamic game character over the course of the game. Depending on
the player’s choices in Geralt’s interactions with Ciri, his protégé, the game’s
endings will differ. Geralt is not a dynamic game character in Soulcalibur
VI, a fighting game whose characters develop almost exclusively throughits peripherals.

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Although the Fandom Wikipedia page claims that Geralt is integrated
into the new timeline of Soulcalibur VI, it is hardly possible to argue that
he is part of the series’ canon. The main story’s timeline starts in 1583 andends in 1590 AD. Geralt’s part in the timeline starts in the year 1586 andends in 1587, so the player receives one year of Geralt’s adventures. At thestart of his story, Geralt is looking for a sorceress. When he finds her, shetransports him to the world of Soul Edge against his will. In this world,
he tries to find a gate to return him to his former world, but to reach thatgoal he must fight and defeat different opponents. While most characterspresented in the timeline are shown to know each other or meet each other,
Geralt knows nobody. He only meets Zasalamel and Mitsurugi, whom hemust fight and defeat to return to his own world. Geralt is not interested in
the Soul Edge, nor in anyone in that world; all he cares about is returning
to his former world, which he manages to do. In fact, Geralt’s presence does
not influence how the rebooted story plays out; he appears but does not
influence the other characters’ attempts to find the cursed sword Soul Edgeand its counterpart, the spirit sword Soul Calibur. Rather, he disappears
back to his own world almost as soon as he enters the world of Soul Edge.
I suspect that Geralt’s role has been minimised in Soulcalibur’s new canon
because he clashes with the game’s narrative continuity. As I discussed in theprevious chapters, aside from being manipulated by the strategies of controlof canonisation and the author function, characters are valuable intellectual
property for character merchandising. This type of merchandising does not
combine well with the ideal of narrative continuity. If Geralt had played alarger role in the story, this would clash not only with the previous timelineof the Soul series, but it also with Geralt’s established identity in The Witcher
book series and video game series on which this game’s manifestation of
Geralt is based. As such, we may assume that marketing is the obvious
reason for Geralt’s presence. Playing as Geralt, feeling how he moves anddefeats enemies in a different game, is probably of interest to fans of boththe Soulcalibur series and The Witcher 3 series. Given that the Soul series
has been making use of guest characters since Soulcalibur II, any guest
character’s appearance is a marketing strategy; it attracts both old and new
pools of fans from The Witcher series and the Soul series.
Link in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate
The fighting game genre originates from the arcade, but a notable exception
is the Super Smash Bros. (SSB) series, which first appeared on a Nintendo
home console. In 1999, Nintendo released the first game instalment, Super

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Smash Bros. (SSB) (HAL Laboratory 1999), for the Nintendo 64 console.
This game featured twelve fighters from different Nintendo game series,
including Mario from Nintendo’s Super Mario series, Link from The Legendof Zelda series, Kirby from the Kirby series, Pikachu from the Pokémon series,
and Fox from the Star Fox series. With this first set of fighters, Nintendo
created the initial template for future instalments. In 2001, the company
released Super Smash Bros. Melee (HAL Laboratory 2001) (SSBM). This gameused the prior game’s fighters, move sets, and stages, but also expanded
the group of fighters with newcomers such as Marth, originally from Fire
Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light (Intelligent Systems 1990),
and the Ice Climbers from the Ice Climber series. Every new instalment
expanded the roster of fighters with new characters, move sets, and stages,
and simultaneously updated the older group of fighters to fit the new game.
The template that Nintendo has set over the series tells us about the processof how the game transmedially constructs its characters through the useof kyara (explained in chapter 2), and how it depends on the player to use
their repertoire of knowledge to make sense of the fighters as characters.
Nintendo tends to adjust the fighters’ visual design, move set, and voices
in newer game instalments so that the figures resemble earlier versions.
Consider the fighters originally from The Legend of Zelda series: the firstfighter introduced was Link in SSB, whose visual design referred to his
manifestation in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (Nintendo 1998). The
next instalment, SSBM, introduced new fighters from this series: Princess
Zelda, Sheik, and Young Link, who also all visually resembled their counterparts in Ocarina of Time. Princess Zelda and Sheik are the same fighter;during a match, Zelda can transform into Sheik and gains the ability tomanoeuvre around the stage. This transformation refers to them being
the same person in Ocarina of Time. In the next instalment, Super Smash
Bros. Brawl (Sora Ltd. 2008) (SSBB), the characters started to refer to other
The Legend of Zelda games. Link’s and Zelda’s appearances mirror that of
their counterparts in the Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (Nintendo 2006).
Young Link was replaced with Toon Link to resemble Link’s counterpart in
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (Nintendo 2002).
Currently, there are over eighty different transmedia characters in theseries, which shows how Nintendo asks its players to know where the different characters originally come from. Just recognising all the references
to different versions of what is only a handful of characters is a job in its
own. Link, Toon Link, Sheik, and Zelda, all underwent drastic changes fromSuper Smash Bros. for the Nintendo 3DS handheld console (Bandai Namco
Studios & Sora Ltd. 2014) (SSB4) to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (SSBU). For

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example, Sheik and Zelda became two different individuals, and Zelda and
Link are not presented as a matching couple anymore; Zelda’s appearance
now resembles her version from The Legend of Zelda: A Link between Worlds(Nintendo 2013), whereas Link resembles his counterpart from The Legendof Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Nintendo 2017).
I will now address how the player makes sense of the fighters as charactersin the most recent instalment, SSBU. The game presents two modes: Smash
mode and Spirit mode. The Smash mode is a multi-player mode in which two
or more players can fight, each choosing one of the over eighty characterson more than a hundred different stages. The Spirit mode is designed to bea single-player campaign or an adventure mode, in which the goal is to savethe fighters captured by the evil Galeem. There is, in other words, a story
embedded in this game. With Kirby as their starting fighter, the player is
asked to free fighters from the evil Galeem by defeating puppet fightersthat resemble the captured fighters. If the player manages to win, the freed
fighter joins their roster, and the player can choose to play as them.
Unlike Geralt of Rivia’s integration into a pre-existing storyline in Soulcalibur VI, SSBU’s story is unconcerned with continuity between character
versions from earlier games and media. SSBU’s Spirit mode attempts no narrative continuity between fighters and their prior versions, and just repeats
the formula from the previous SSB’s instalments. Transmedia charactersfrom different series are united without any logical explanation of why they
appear together. It would even be incorrect to state that SSBU presents a
Nintendo universe, as not every character that appears is created or owned
by Nintendo. Simply put, these characters are not characterised by theirnarrative continuity with prior manifestations. Rather, they are controlled
as intellectual property and function as kyara in the SSB’s media mix.
Kyara, the visual representations of a character detached from a story
world, are an excellent way to avoid narrative continuity between the
different character versions. The kyara plays a major role in character
merchandising in Japan, in which income is generated through selling and/or leasing of the rights to use a figure’s image (see also Steinberg 2012, 40).
As I explained in chapter 4, when a character is licensed to third parties,
the IP owners control the character’s development across works by licensing
the figure to multiple parties. Eventually, the figure ends up with multiple
transtextual identities.
Kyara avoid the problem of continuity between identities since they are
to be consumed independently from the story in which they were originallyplaced. Hiroki Azuma states that kyara exist in a “grand non-narrative,”
which refers to a “realm that exists behind small narratives but lacks any

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form of narrativity” (Azuma [2001] 2009, 38–54). However, I disagree withhis claim that they exist in a grand non-narrative. Transmedia characters
are not completely independent from other stories; there is just no dominantfocus on storytelling. Such a point of view minimises the reader’s efforts
to make sense of the multiple identities of a character appearing acrossmultiple works. Instead, in SSBU, a kyara functions as an amalgam of thedifferent versions of the character, minus their story. It requires the presenceof the player and their repertoire of knowledge about the character to thinkof the kyara as a character. But it does not enforce narrative continuity
between prior versions. Rather than on storytelling, it focuses on fragmented,
predominantly visual references that, as Hutchinson (2019, 73) stated aboutfighting games, the player pieces together.
Let us return to Link, who functions as a kyara in SSBU. SSBU uses
transmedia techniques to connect Link (not Young Link or Toon Link) to
his counterpart in Breath of the Wild. They visually resemble each other, as
this fighter sports the hero tunic, the master sword, and Hylian shield from
Link in Breath of the Wild. SSBU also connects the two Link versions throughgameplay. For example, Link uses an ancient bow and ancient arrows during
his all-out attack. The bombs that Link can throw and detonate on impact
in earlier instalments are now replaced by remote bombs.
As a kyara, Link’s move set only makes sense if the player is familiar
with his version in Breath of the Wild. Yet it would be inaccurate to say that
only those familiar with that particular version of Link would be able toconstruct Link as a character. Link’s original context is not Breath of theWild, but the first The Legend of Zelda game, and he is the protagonist of all
instalments within The Legend of Zelda series. Within this series and media,
Link’s manifestations are quite similar; he often wears green clothing andbears the mark of the Triforce of Courage, a major emblem throughout theseries. So even if the player is only familiar with one or two games from thisseries, they would likely still recognise Link.
Nintendo no longer exclusively uses characters that it owns. Since SSBU4,
Nintendo has started using characters from third-party developers. In SSBU,
the player can obtain and download several fighters originally from game
series not created and owned by Nintendo. These third-party fighters also
demand that the player knows the context in which the characters haveappeared before but only few players are likely to recognise the specific reference. For example, it was revealed at the Game Awards in December 2020
that Sephiroth, the antagonist of Final Fantasy VII would be joining SSBU asa fighter. For some reason (fan service, most likely), the player can choose
to have Sephiroth enter battle without a shirt on. When I tried to find in

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which games Sephiroth has been shirtless before, I discovered that a shirtless
Sephiroth appeared in Dissidia Final Fantasy (Square Enix 2008), not in the
antagonist’s origin source Final Fantasy VII. In other words, a player must
know a repertoire of game characters that expands beyond Nintendo’s
intellectual property to make sense of the plurality of references.
In short, the SSBU fighters function like kyara. Their construction does
not depend on storytelling, yet nor are they completely independent fromearlier games. Rather, the characters were licensed through intellectual
property, as Nintendo united fighters from its own franchises and others.
The player is then asked to make inferences to prior games and media,
though it is not required that players know all the characters. Rather, thehuge roster of characters appeals to different players, as most players of
this game will be familiar with at least one or more of the characters. The
fighters in the SSB series therefore also function as amalgams; throughtransmedia techniques in the game’s narrative structure, the constructionof these fighters as characters depends on what transmedia connections
the player can make.
The cast in Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite
Of the three games I discuss in this chapter, Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite is
the least character-oriented game. This game is a crossover between thecharacters from the American company Marvel Entertainment and theJapanese video game developer Capcom. Like Soulcalibur VI and Super
Smash Bros. Ultimate, this game also belongs to a longer series—the Marvel
vs. Capcom series. The collaboration between the two companies started
with X-Men: Children of the Atom (Capcom 1994) for the arcade, developed
by Capcom using licensed characters from Marvel Comics. The releaseof Marvel vs. Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes (Capcom 1998) was the first
instalment of the Marvel vs. Capcom series, making the game I discuss here
the fifth instalment of the series.
As a young girl in the 1990s who mostly played family-oriented Nintendo
games, I had almost no exposure to the products of either company. The
Marvel comics and films were of little interest to me if I noticed them atall. Superhero comics did not grab my attention as I was mostly reading
comics made for teenage girls. I only became familiar with Marvel films
when I met friends in my twenties who were all fans of the Marvel Cinematic
Universe (MCU). They dragged me to the cinema whenever a new film wasreleased and explained the plot to me when I did not understand what was
happening. I was not even aware of games made by Capcom until Phoenix

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Wright: Ace Attorney (Capcom Production Studio 4 2001) was adapted fromthe Nintendo Gameboy Advance to the Nintendo DS handheld game console
in 2005 in Europe. Even then, I was not interested in popular franchises by
Capcom such as Resident Evil, Monster Hunter, and Street Fighter.
I am relating my background to emphasise that the construction oftransmedia characters in fighting games relies on the player’s knowledgeof the characters in other media and games. Games can contain manyreferences to other sources, but if the player does not grasp these, they
will have no idea what motivates the character and why it acts as it does.
In my case, that means my repertoire for Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite waslimited to my knowledge of the MCU and the Ace Attorney series. Since
no characters from the Ace Attorney series appear in Marvel vs. Capcom
Infinite, my practical knowledge to make sense of its characters relies on
my knowledge of the MCU, which will be the main source for the analysis
on the next pages.
Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite offers the player a story mode for playing on
their own, a battle mode in which players can face off against each other,a training mode to develop a player’s skills with individual fighters, anda mission mode, which is essentially a tutorial for new players to become
familiar with the fighters’ move sets. Just as in the previous games, I limit
my analysis here to the story mode in which the game attempts to explain
the combined presence of all the different characters. The story mode starts
in medias res, when the Marvel and Capcom heroes are trying to stave off
Ultron Sigma, a villain who merged the world of Marvel and the world of
Capcom into a single world to control both. Amid all the chaos, the heroes
aim to restore both worlds by trying to defeat Ultron Sigma.
Hutchinson (2019) explains that because fighting games use peripherals totell stories, they rely less on linear gameplay than other genres. However, we
see that Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite suffers from trying to tell a linear story;
it seems to want to look like a movie. The narrative structure is similar tothat of Soulcalibur VI. Both games contain cut scenes for battles. However,I see two major differences between the two games. First, aesthetically,
Soulcalibur VI looks more like a comic. The player is shown in drawn static
images in each cut scene. Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite, on the other hand,looks more like a Marvel movie, with moving polygon characters fighting
their way through all the action.
Second, Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite exclusively contains a main story
line with little opportunity for the player to breathe. As soon as one battle
is over, the player is launched in another quick-cut scene leading up toanother battle. In almost every scene, the player is introduced to another

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set of characters whose move set they must learn quickly. This suggeststhat the game not only requires players to be familiar with the characters
but are also used to the fighting game genre in general.
When I said that this game focuses the least on its characters, I did notmean it does not focus on its fighters at all. Rather, the pace of the story
it attempts to tell downplays characters in favour of storytelling. As aresult, this fast-paced narrative structure demands a thorough repertoireof knowledge of both franchises to construct its characters. The Marvel
heroes in this game are not modelled after their cinematic counterparts,
which means that for players used to the MCU, certain character versions
feel more alien. For example, Thor in this game appears larger, bulkier,and less charismatic than the actor Chris Hemsworth’s Thor version in the
MCU movies. The lack of similarity between Thor in this game and Chris
Hemsworth’s version signals that the character has a different identity in
Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite than in the MCU.
One difference stood out for me when comparing the Marvel and Capcom
f ighters. Most Marvel heroes in the game had appeared in comics andmovies together before, whereas the Capcom fighters came from different games and franchises. Marvel heroes generally have different origin
sources. For example, Captain America first appears in Marvel Comic’s
Captain America Comics #1 (Simon and Kirby 1941) and Captain Marvel/
Carol Danvers first appears in Marvel Comic’s Marvel Super-Heroes #13(Thomas and Colan 1968). They appear together in Marvel’s Avenger comics,
where these heroes band together to fight evil. This pattern also occurs
in the MCU. Captain America, played by Chris Evans, f irst appears in
Captain America: The First Avenger (Johnston 2011), the fifth instalment of
the MCU. Captain Marvel, played by Brie Larson, first appears in Captain
Marvel (Boden and Fleck 2019), the twenty-first film instalment of that
series. They appear together in the twenty-second instalment Avengers:
Endgame (Russo and Russo 2019).
Creating a larger universe that contains multiple linear worlds like the
MCU is a common transmedia technique to enforce narrative continuity ina larger transmedia franchise (Thon 2015). From that perspective, it makes
sense that these characters—and any other Marvel figures that belong to theMarvel’s complex universe—have pre-established bonds that can transfer toanother work. Yet I am not aware of a similar pattern for the Capcom heroes.
During my research of the Capcom heroes, I did not find Capcom heroes
banding together outside of the Marvel vs. Capcom game series. I believe
this is because Euro-American-centric transmedia storytelling strives fornarrative continuity, while Japanese media mixes proliferates characters.

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That is, the Capcom characters function like kyara and are used in a similar
way as the fighters in Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros. series.
The problem with the story’s linearity and pace is that it gives the player
little opportunity to gradually construct the heroes as quasi-persons. Not thatevery game needs to entirely explain a character’s motivation and background.
However, this game’s presentation of references to other sources demands
a huge amount of knowledge from its players to understand the linear plot.
There is probably a whole gamut of techniques and references that the gamehad been throwing at me, which players might not understand due to theirlack of knowledge of either one of the franchises. For example, I know I missed
the transmedia reference of the combined name of Ultron Sigma. The firstpart of the name refers to a Marvel antagonist, and the latter to the villainof the Mega Man series produced by Capcom. So this game predominantly
appeals to a group of fans who are either familiar with both franchises orthis series in general, or do not mind it if they miss specific references.
In summary, Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite’s transmedia techniques areless character-focused and instead create a cinematic experience with alinear story. The characters are then subjugated to supporting the plot. The
player requires a vast amount of knowledge to understand the plot and therelations between the characters (particularly Marvel superheroes), yet
the game barely explains them. The game does not deepen the connection
between the Marvel and Capcom fighters, nor does it make clear references
to the relationships between Capcom fighters. The Capcom fighters also
have fewer pre-established connections between each other, since theycome from different franchises and function like kyara. Unlike the Marvel
heroes, the Capcom heroes are not part of a bigger universe that creates aform of narrative continuity. What we see is that Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite
requires the player’s prior knowledge to understand the game’s plot and theconstruction, relationships, and motivations of its characters.

Conclusion
The fighting games discussed in this chapter provide the opportunity to
explore how game characters move across works when narrative continuity
is not an ideal. Although storytelling is not completely absent, treating
it as secondary shifts the focus from story to character. Furthermore, toconstruct their fighters, the fighting games demand a broad repertoireof knowledge from players, or at least familiarity with the context of thecharacters in other works.

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Soulcalibur VI does not require that players are familiar with the original
story since it has created a new main timeline, which can appeal both to oldand new players, but it does ask the player to be familiar with Geralt as themain guest star in their roster of fighters. He is the one who sells the game,but his presence in the game’s canon is in the end downplayed in favour ofthe plot between the original characters from the Soul series.
On the other hand, while it is the least character-oriented among theexamples covered here, Marvel vs. Capcom’s fast-paced and linear narrative structure requires thorough knowledge on the part of the player tounderstand the characters’ behaviours and motivations, and perhaps gain
some narrative catharsis in the process.
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate relies little on storytelling, less so thanthe other two games, and provides no narrative continuity between its
huge roster of fighters and their counterparts in other works. Instead, thegame predominantly presents its f ighters as kyara; the f ighters function
as visual amalgams in which the game stimulates the player to makeconnections with the f ighters’ original contexts to make sense of them.
Since the roster is so huge, has been growing with DLC characters, andincreasingly has characters from third party owners, the game does notseem to require player familiarity with all the characters, but instead
appeals to a large group of players familiar with at least some of thecharacters.
Looking at these games shows not only that the three strategies ofcontrol (authorship, ownership, and canonisation) are the mechanisms
underlying the transfer of characters from one media to another, but more
importantly, I argue, it also demonstrates that the scope of transmedia
game characters and their crossovers to other works is limited to theaudience’s knowledge. Indeed, a developer may make as many crossovers
and references to prior works as it wishes to construct its fighter characters,
but if almost no one can understand the references, then what use would
this be?

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7.

The future of dynamic gamecharacters
Abstract: This chapter reflects on the need to study fictional charactersin the current transmedia landscape. As this landscape sees an increasein affective economics within transmedia franchises, dynamic gamecharacters shape consumer desires and influence their purchasing decisions since these characters promise users creative agency. In this chapter,
I will therefore chart my vision of how dynamic game characters will be
depicted in the upcoming transmedia landscape.
Keywords: Parasocial relationships, 2.5D culture, character monetisation,affective economics

Charting a vision
Characters matter. They are the reason why we invest so much energy inpopular culture, why we become immersed in movies, television series,
novels, or video games. Our contemporary media landscape is seeing an
increase in affective economics, as Jenkins (2006) predicted would happen,
to increase the appeal of transmedia franchises. Affective economics can beunderstood as the building, developing, and maintenance of relationships
in order to shape desires that influence purchasing decisions (Galbraith2019). We see affective economics in the increase in parasocial relationships
with f ictional characters (Karhulahti and Välisalo 2021). Within these
economics, dynamic game characters are an ideal type of character toshape desires and influence purchasing decisions, because they promise
users creative agency so that the characters become personalised according
to individual tastes and enhance personal experiences. These characters
become a part of us, and, in turn, we become a tiny part of them. Below I
will briefly chart my vision on how dynamic game characters are and should

Blom, J., Video Game Characters and Transmedia Storytelling: The Dynamic Game Character.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023
doi 10.5117/9789463722957_ch07

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Video Game Char acters and Tr ansmedia Story tellingbe depicted across our transmedia landscape, which relies increasingly on
affective economics.
Increase in diversity in romances
Dynamic game characters provide a way to break with heteronormative
standards in game culture. Video games are becoming more diverse in
their representations of characters. One way in which we see this for the
dynamic game character is in video games with a System of Affection thatallows players to date a variety of different characters. Recent years haveseen a rise in romance simulation games from indie game developers thatcarry more representation in terms of the characters’ gender, ethnicity,and sexuality. Hades (Supergiant Games 2020), the game I discussed inchapter 5, is one of the best examples that provides players with the opportunity to date a small group of characters in different relationshipstructures (i.e., monogamous or polyamorous). More games like thathave entered the market: Mystic Messenger (Cheritz 2016), Dream Daddy(Game Grumps 2017), Monster Prom (Beautiful Glitch 2018), Your Royal
Gayness (Lizard Hazard Games 2018), or Boyfriend Dungeon (KitFox Games2021), are just a few examples of games in which the player can enterromantic relationships with characters of various genders, ethnicities,
and sexualities.
At the same time, dynamic game characters have the tendency toreinforce any imbalance in narrative continuity, which also affects therepresentation of characters, and might even reinforce heteronormativity. Developers may contribute to harmful discourses around sexual
identities by enforcing heteronormativity as the default, as shown by
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (Ubisoft 2018) in chapter 4. Chapter 5 showedthat romance simulation games, like Hades, still tend to operate withinheteronormative frameworks, depicting romantic relationships and sex as
something to be won, and systematise love and friendship. These games
tend to frame a character’s sexual orientation in terms of the player, a“player orientation” so to speak. Regardless of the players’ actual sexual
orientation or gender, the character will be attracted to the player. The
characters might be dynamic in how the player creates the relationship,
but they lack dynamicity and their own agency to choose anyone but theplayer. That said, I am still rather optimistic. The increase in diversity inromances in video games that are LGBTQIA+-friendly shows that dynamic
game characters can provide a way of breaking with heteronormative
standards.

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Character monetisation
Dynamic game characters have become ways to monetise games. Game
monetisation has changed since the early 2000s. In the early 2000s, video
games were sold as cultural commodities that generated value throughthe sale of boxed or digital units (Bernevega and Gekker 2021). However,with the rise of smart phones and tablets as gaming devices, the freemium
model became the monetisation model that dominates the game industry:
free-to-play games that contain in-game purchases (Nieborg 2015). This
shift occurred in the East-Asian game markets ahead of the Euro-American
game markets, but now dominates the game industry globally (Alha 2020).
In-game purchases often contain gambling-like mechanics. In the EuroAmerican game markets, we often think of loot boxes as in-game purchases,
which are little treasure chests that contain a random set of rewards anditems. The East-Asian game markets use gacha, derived from gachapon
machines associated with Japanese media mixes, that sell capsule balls
containing different items. By purchasing a ball, consumers may or may
not obtain a desired item. Gacha is found in the form of playing cards and/or in console or mobile games. Above all, gacha is character-oriented—theitem usually contains a desired character.
Characters are usually the most important collectibles in gacha games.
Character collection is reported to be the main feature among the highest
ranked mobile games worldwide and the reason for these games’ success(SensorTower 2023, 32). One of the highest grossing games on the global
market is the China-based free-to-play game Genshin Impact (HoYoverse2020) that generates most of its revenue from China, Japan, and the USA(Chapple 2022). The game shows how important players’ desire for charactershas become to fuel the monetisation of a game. Every couple of months,
HoYoverse releases new (and popular, old) characters in a so-called “wishbanner,” their most lucrative source of revenue, for which players use ingame resources, obtained through hours of gameplay or by paying, to havea chance at obtaining a character they desire. HoYoverse uses all kinds oftransmedia marketing techniques to stimulate this desire in their players:
the characters look like cute Japanese cartoon characters found in anime or amanga, they use popular Japanese voice actors that players know from otherJapanese media platforms, and release information about these characters
across their multi-lingual social media channels like Twitter and YouTube.
HoYoverse has even added a System of Affection to increase the characters’appeal: in the game, players can go on dates with characters like Thoma,
Barbara or Beidou. The dates are designed in a tree structure, in which

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Video Game Char acters and Tr ansmedia Story tellingeach player choice leads to a different path with a different ending. Thatmeans that these characters are dynamic game characters. However, thecatch is that no choice truly matters, since none of the endings affects thegame’s main storyline; it only provides rewards that players can use in thewish-banner. This is yet another game example that diminishes relationships
for the purpose of obtaining external rewards, and from which the developer
will benefit economically. So, while I am optimistic about the possible
diversity that dynamic game characters may provide, I remain critical about
their role in current game monetisation for free-to-play games, which will
only continue to increase.
Beyond video games
Finally, dynamic game characters will increasingly appear outside of video
games. As a matter of fact, they already are. Dynamic game characters
are not entities exclusive to video games; as characters that appear incybermedia, dynamic game characters appear across all different kinds of
media platforms. In her extensive work on Japan’s emerging 2.5-dimensional(ni-ten-go jiten) culture, Sugawa-Shimada (2020) defines 2.5-dimensional
culture as “cultural practices which reproduce the fictional space of contemporary popular cultural products (such as manga, anime, and videogames)
along with the fans’ interplay between the real and fictional spaces” (125).
Examples of this cultural phenomenon include cosplay, voice-actor/character
concerts, anime-induced tourism, or virtual YouTubers (also known as
VTubers), just to name a few (125). According to Sugawa-Shimada, the 2.5D
cultural phenomena started to emerge since the early 2000s in accordancewith the rise and development of the internet, social media, and virtualtechnologies (129). In other words, 2.5D refers to a hybrid reality in which
the virtual, fictional, and real merge. We may connect this to the rise of
convergence culture that we see also in Euro-American-centric popular
culture.
The dynamic game character thrives in the hybrid reality of fiction, real,and virtual that Sugawa-Shimada describes. As an example, she mentions
virtual reality (VR) technology that has come to be sold at an affordable
price for the normal customer since 2016: “Through products like PlayStationVR, players could easily experience close and realistic interaction withfictional VR characters in the pseudo-reality space of their own home” (129).
We have been seeing examples of this ever since. With regard to games,
for instance, the gaming platform Steam sells VR Kanojo (“VR Girlfriend”)(Illusion 2017), a virtual reality experience in which players can play out

The future of dynamic game char acters

175

an erotic fantasy with the character Sakura Yuuhi, the player’s virtual
girlfriend, in her room by directly interacting with her, for instance bysharing food, kissing her, and touching her. As per the dynamic gamecharacter’s nature, the fantasy plays out along different paths based on
the player’s choices.
It is thanks to this hybrid reality that we see dynamic game charactersoutside video games. To name just a few examples, first we have SugawaShimada’s curious case of fictional characters from anime, manga, andvideo games having their own official Twitter accounts from which they
(supposedly) send their own messages and personal photos (2020, 129). As
a result, the line between the virtual, the fictional, and the real, but also
between human and machine is increasingly blurred (see Turkle (2017[2011]). This also means there is more space for characters in real life.
Secondly, nowadays, technologies are coming in the shape of humanoid
robots or voice assistants. In my own work (Blom and Mikkonen 2022), I havementioned that voice assistants have become increasingly character-like.
The case of the Japanese voice assistant Hikari Azuma, developed by thecompany Gatebox, who has the visuals of a cute character found in anime,
manga, and video games, is an example of how dynamic game characters
can be found outside games. She is designed to serve (straight), single
men, telling them when to take an umbrella with them, and turns on thelights for them in their house. Most strikingly, she is supposed to change
overtime as she interacts with the user, becoming more idiosyncratic
to match the user’s preferences. While voice assistants like Siri and theGoogle Assistant do not have Hikari Azuma’s cartoon girl visuals, they
nonetheless emulate a sense of intentionality, associated with the human
likeness of characters (174).
Finally, VTubers are surging in popularity as well, including outside Japanin countries like South Korea, China, but also the USA and the UK (Suan
2021). They align with the increasing popularity of online streaming on
gaming and social media platforms such as YouTube or Twitch, where thehosts assume anime avatars through motion-capture software to perform
as an anime character while playing games as audiences watch. The appeal
lies in the character persona that the actor performs. In Japan, fans of these
VTubers can even buy their song albums to support them not only online,
but also through the purchase of character goods.
All in all, I expect that as affective economics continues to grow in
popularity, new forms of dynamic game characters will emerge from thephenomena that have just been mentioned to develop beyond the video
games that I discussed throughout this book.

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Video Game Char acters and Tr ansmedia Story telling

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Glossary: A brief typology ofcharacters
Throughout this book, I use specific terms to refer to different types ofcharacters. Importantly, it is entirely within this book’s framework thatmultiple terms can be applied to a single character; a character can betransmedial, as it disperses throughout different media, and dynamic
within a video game. A character can simultaneously be an avatar and aplayer character. The point is that although there are different categories ofcharacters, they are not mutually exclusive. This glossary serves to provide
short explanations on what I mean by certain terms.
Characters: I refer to characters as quasi-persons, a concept borrowed fromJohn Frow (2014, 2), who describes our current understanding of thesefigures as both pieces of writing and person-like entities. Quasi-persons
are simultaneously a f igure of speech and a f igural representation (8).
This dual understanding of characters is relatively recent and the resultof a long debate in Literary Studies since the early 1900s between those
who saw characters as structures of a text and those who regarded themin terms of their humanity. I will therefore occasionally also refer tocharacters as “figures.” It is in this context that characters have come tobe understood as pieces of writing and as entities that the reader considers
to be person-like.
Dynamic game characters: I define dynamic game characters as a type ofgame character whose development outcome, and thus identity, changes
depending on how the player plays the game. By exercising creative agency
over a game character’s growth and development, players become part ofthem. Dynamic game characters may be playable characters, like a player
character, or characters over whom the player has no direct control like
non-playable characters. As long as the player’s agency in the game has
consequences for their growth and outcome as quasi-persons, I will treat
them as dynamic game characters.

Blom, J., Video Game Characters and Transmedia Storytelling: The Dynamic Game Character.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023
doi 10.5117/9789463722957_glos

180 

Video Game Char acters and Tr ansmedia Story tellingGame characters: ultimately, I treat game characters as quasi-persons thatare materialised through the artefacts of games. This means that any being
we recognise as a character that appears inside a game may be called a gamecharacter. Yet, game characters can become transmedia characters when they
appear in other media platforms. This does not mean, however, that different
types of game characters do not exist. I make the following distinctions:
Avatars and player characters: a distinction can be made in games between playable characters that players control directly and non-playablecharacters (NPCs), which they do not control. A common distinction
for playable characters is between the “avatar” and “player character.”
Although the two terms have different meanings, they are often conflated.
The avatar is an extension of the player, whom the player uses to engage
with the game world. Avatars can take the shape of a hammer, mouse,or a playable person-like figure. By contrast, the player character is aplayable figure—a quasi-person—that the player controls. As such, anavatar can be a character and a player character can be an avatar, butboth categories do not necessarily have to be present in the same figure
at the same time; while most player characters can be considered avatars,
not all characters in a game have to be avatars, nor do player charactersconsistently have to be avatars in the same game.
Non-playable characters: there is a stark lack of significant discussions
in Game Studies on different types of game characters other than theavatar and player character. I use the term “non-playable characters”
exclusively for quasi-persons over which the player has absolutely nocontrol in terms of how they develop, such as background characters orfunctional characters like merchants.

Kyara and kyarakutā: I explain the difference between these terms
extensively in chapter 2, but to put it briefly, kyarakutā is the Japaneseword, borrowed from the English language, for “character,” which denotes
a fictional figure with a personality and human-like behaviour, as definedby Itō (2005). In other words, a quasi-person. A kyara is a (usually visual)
icon that only looks like a character. It is a “proto-character” that precedes
the kyarakutā before readers perceive it as a character (ibid.). Since theseare Japanese nouns, they can both be used as plural and as singular.
Transmedia characters: once characters hop from one medium to another—across novels, television series, video games, and figurines—we can saythat they are transmedia characters. Transmedia characters are inherentlyGlossary: A brief t ypology of char acters

181transtextual. As Richardson puts it, they are “characters that exist in morethan one text” (2010, 527). The difference between transtextual charactersand transmedia characters is mostly theoretical, and is in fact redundant,
since we see characters appear virtually everywhere. But while a transtextual
character could potentially stay within the same medium, like a novel,a transmedia character necessarily is a character that moves to anothermedium, whether it be a novel, video game, or film.

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Supergiant Games. 2020. Hades. PC and Nintendo Switch. Supergiant Games.
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IndexAarseth, Espen 15, 26‒27, 72, 138‒39
affect 59, 125‒26
affective economics 30, 171‒72, 175
agency 9, 14, 20‒21, 24‒28, 43, 59‒60, 69‒71,
77‒78, 80, 84, 87, 89‒93, 97‒100, 106‒09,
111, 113‒14, 118‒19, 126, 129, 134, 137, 139, 151,
156‒57, 171, 179
agent
ludic 29, 69, 80‒86, 93, 99, 107, 109‒112,
131‒32, 134‒36
narrative 29, 69, 80, 84‒88, 93, 99, 107,109‒10, 112‒14, 134‒35, 141
performative 29, 69, 80, 88‒93, 99, 107,
109, 114‒18
see also character
Aldred, Jessica 45, 57
Animal Crossing 10‒11, 29, 90‒93, 97, 99,
114‒18
comics 117‒18
New Horizons 10‒11, 29, 90‒93, 115‒18
New Leaf 90‒92, 117
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey 59, 108‒09, 140, 172
archetypes 46, 49
authorship 13, 18, 24‒26, 29, 55, 87, 97‒103,
106‒07, 110, 114, 118, 159, 167
authority 21‒25, 101, 104, 106‒08, 111‒13, 119,137
avatars 11, 14, 29, 41, 43‒45, 76, 80, 91‒92, 115,
127, 129, 131, 131, 154, 157, 175, 179‒80; see alsocharacterAzuma, Hiroki: 52‒56, 161
Backe, Hans-Joachim 84‒85, 104‒06
Barthes, Roland 24, 82‒84, 99‒100
cardinal functions 88
Batman 18, 46‒48, 57‒58
Bertetti, Paolo 48, 56, 58‒59
bishōjo 11‒12
Brooker, Will 48, 103‒05
Calleja, Gordon 20, 27, 71, 153, 157
canon see canonisation
canonisation 25, 29, 48, 97‒98, 100, 104‒07,
110, 113‒15, 118, 156, 159, 167
characters
dynamic game 9‒10, 14‒15, 24‒25, 27,29‒30, 44, 59‒60, 69‒72, 75‒78, 80‒85,
89‒90, 92‒93, 97, 99, 107‒09, 112, 114,
117‒19, 125‒28, 131, 134‒35, 139‒40,
144‒45, 151‒54, 156‒58, 171‒75, 179
fictional 9‒10, 28
game 9‒11, 13‒14, 20, 23, 28‒30, 41, 43‒45,
56‒57, 69, 73, 76, 80‒81, 92‒93, 115,125‒26, 144, 151‒52, 155‒56, 158, 163,166‒67, 173‒74, 179‒80; see also agent

non-playable, NPCs 14, 29, 44, 77, 81,
125‒45, 179‒80
player 14, 29, 41, 43‒45, 70, 72, 76‒77, 108,
110, 125, 127‒30, 132, 134‒35, 140, 154,
179‒80serial 18, 48, 57, 117transmedia 13, 15, 17‒21, 29‒30, 41‒42,
44‒45, 47‒48, 53, 57‒59, 99, 119 107‒08,
151‒52, 155, 160‒62, 164, 179‒81
transnarrative 17, 55
transtextual 17, 181; see also identity
versions 14, 23, 27, 41‒42, 45‒47, 58‒59, 71,
76, 81, 91, 97‒98, 101‒05, 107‒08, 110‒12,
114, 116‒18, 134, 136, 154, 158, 160‒62, 165
see also avatar; kyara; kyarakutācharacterisation 78, 80, 114, 154‒55
character-world relationship: 52, 157
capitalism, commodity 19, 98, 102
logics of 18, 22
consistency see narrative continuity
consumption 18‒20, 50‒53, 102
narrative 52‒53, 55
database 53
control, strategies of 29, 97‒119, 136, 138,
159, 167; see also authorship; canonisation;
ownership;
convergence culture 13, 15‒20, 49, 152, 174
Cool Japan 12
creative agency see agency
cross-media 9, 11‒12, 14, 18, 45, 50‒51, 53, 138crossovers 157, 163, 167
cybermedia 15, 20, 27, 69, 71‒72, 108, 118, 127,
153, 174; see also non-cybermedia
cybertext 15, 72
dating simulators 11, 128, 139, 145, 172
Dena, Christy 15
Denson, Shane 47‒48, 57‒58
derivative works 21, 55, 105, 114
art 21, 105
cosplay 21, 56, 105, 174
fan fiction 21, 56, 59, 105, 114
dōjinshi 105
magazines 105, 138‒39
development structure 29, 69, 71, 73, 75‒80,
86, 88, 93
Disney 10, 105, 140
Dragon Age 72, 113, 131, 142
Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator 11, 128,
139, 172
Eder, Jens 15
Elleström, Lars 153
encyclopaedia 143, 158
Ensslin, Astrid 28

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Video Game Char acters and Tr ansmedia Story telling

ergodicity 70‒71
Evans, Elizabeth 59, 125
exploitation, labour 22
Façade 90
fandom 11‒12, 21‒22, 53, 100, 103, 105, 108, 111,
117, 125, 134, 136‒38, 158‒59, 166, 174‒75
fujoshi 104
fans see fandom
fan service 137, 162
omake 137
fighting games 155‒67
Final Fantasy 11, 23, 162‒63
figures 179
mythological 140‒41, 145
playable 41, 151
serial 57
flying wedge, model for human-computerinteraction 73‒75, 79‒80, 84
Foucault, Michel 24, 100‒02
free-to-play games 10, 30, 106, 173‒74
Frow, John 42, 97, 152, 179
Fuchs, Christian 22‒23
game analysis: 27
game cultures 11‒12, 22, 131, 172
Japanese 12, 50‒51, 173
game industries 11‒12, 21, 23, 51, 106, 173
game pieces 11, 29, 69, 80‒81, 88, 109
geemu 51
Genshin Impact 10, 12, 173‒74
Geralt of Rivia 156‒59, 161, 167
Gō, Itō 53‒54
Grusin, Richard 152
Hades 29, 125, 127‒28, 131, 139‒45, 172
Hall, Stuart 114
Harry Potter 100-01
Hermione 18, 100‒01
Hutchinson, Rachael 11, 155, 162, 164
identity, transtextual 29, 97–109, 114, 118, 136,
161, 165, 181
intelligence, artificial, AI 10, 88-89
implied reader 26
independent games, indie games 131, 139, 172
intellectual property (IP) 10, 21, 23, 48, 98,
102‒03, 114, 117‒18, 136, 139‒40, 159, 161, 163;
see also ownershipintermediality 15, 152‒53
Iwabuchi, Koichi 12
Japaneseness 12
Jenkins, Henry 15‒18, 21‒24, 44‒46, 60, 113,
171
Jørgensen, Kristine 44, 72
Kascuk, Zoltan 54‒55
Kelly, Peter 142, 145

Kinder, Marsha 16, 19
Klastrup, Lisbeth 144‒45
Klevjer, Rune 43
knowledge, intertextual 20, 160, 162‒67
Kretzschmar, Mark 142
Kunz, Tobias 13
kyara 19, 49, 53‒59, 110, 114‒18, 160‒63,
166‒67, 180
kyarakutā 53‒57, 180
Lamarre, Thomas 50, 52‒53
Lamerichs, Nicolle 21, 59, 105, 108‒09, 125
Lara Croft 47, 58
Laurel, Brenda 73‒75, 79‒80, 84, 87
licensing see intellectual property
linearity 30, 84, 110‒11, 134, 151, 155‒56,
164‒67
Marvel Cinematic Universe, MCU 10, 47, 103,163‒67
Marvel vs. Capcom series 151, 163‒65
Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite 30, 151‒52, 156,
163‒67Massanari, Adrienne C. 22
Mass Effect 23, 29, 69‒72, 77, 81, 85‒88, 97, 99,
108, 112‒14, 128, 130, 132
comics 112‒14
Mayer, Ruth 57
McLuhan, Marshall 152
media mixes 18‒19, 41, 49‒53, 55, 91, 110, 115,
117‒18, 136‒39, 157, 161, 165‒66, 173
ludo mix 51
medium specificity 10, 41‒45, 47, 53, 59,
152‒54meta-narrative 55‒56
Mittell, Jason 46, 97
moe 19Mortensen, Torill 26‒27
multiplicity 14, 18, 29, 41, 46, 48, 55‒56, 60, 76,
98, 100‒02, 104‒05, 107‒08, 116, 161‒62
multiverse see story worlds
Nakamura, Akinori 136
narrative continuity 9, 13‒17, 20‒21, 25, 25,
28‒30, 41, 45‒49, 52‒53, 56‒58, 60, 70,
93, 97‒98‒104, 106‒12, 115, 117‒18, 136‒37,
151‒52, 155, 157, 159, 161‒62, 165‒67, 172
Nintendo 20, 90‒92, 109‒11, 115, 117‒18, 129,
159‒64, 166
non-cybermedia 14, 20, 24, 27‒28, 76, 107‒09,
112, 114, 117‒18, 127, 137, 139, 144, 154, 156
Octopath Traveler 73, 75
Ōtsuka, Eiji 49, 52‒55, 157
otaku 53, 55
otome 11, 145
Overwatch 11, 23, 106
ownership 22, 25, 29, 97‒98, 100‒04, 107, 114,
118, 167; see also intellectual property

207

Index

Packard, Stephan 59
participatory culture 15, 19–25, 99
Pearson, Roberta 18, 46, 57‒59, 101‒02
Pelletier-Gagnon, Jérémie 12, 50‒51
Persona 5 11, 29, 125, 128‒30, 132‒39, 141‒45
anime 137
manga 137‒38
Picard, Martin 11‒12, 50‒51
player game 115‒18
player response 26‒28; see also
reader-response
Pokémon 11, 15, 20, 41‒42, 57, 129, 160
Pikachu 12, 41‒42, 47, 57‒58, 129, 160
popular culture 9‒13, 15, 19, 22, 50, 158, 171, 174
Japanese 9, 11‒12, 50, 174
possibility space 69, 72‒73, 75‒76, 78, 80,
89, 127
propaganda, audience-participatory 49
quasi-persons 42, 54, 56‒57, 71, 81, 89, 116,
131‒32, 143, 152, 154‒56, 166, 179‒80
queerness 59, 105, 108‒09, 118, 125, 128, 130,
139, 141‒42, 145, 172
slash 105
yaoi 105
Raessens, Joost 22‒23
reader-response 25‒28, 99‒100; see also
player response
Red Dead Redemption 2 77‒78
relationships, parasocial, PSR 29, 125‒29, 134,
139, 143‒44, 171
remediation 152
Richardson, Brian 17, 181
role-playing games 9, 11, 55, 69, 73, 75, 153,
155, 158
Japanese, JRPG 9, 11, 134
romance 11, 29‒30, 76, 85‒88, 108, 125‒27,
129‒31, 133, 135‒36, 142, 172
heteronormativity 29‒30, 59, 105, 108‒09,
128, 130‒31, 135‒36, 139, 142‒43, 145, 172
monogamy 87, 130, 135‒36, 141, 172
polyamory 87, 125, 128, 131, 139‒45, 172
Rosenblatt, Louise 26
Rosendo, Nieves 16, 59
Rowling, J.K. 100‒01
Saitō, Tamaki 56, 116
Salter, Anastasia 142
Schechner, Richard 88‒89
scripts 88‒89, 92, 93, 116‒17
Schröter, Felix 44, 80‒81
Schules, Douglas 52, 134, 157
seriality 18, 48, 57, 117
Sherlock Holmes 17‒18, 57‒58
Soul series 151, 156‒59, 167
Soulcalibur VI 30, 151‒52, 156‒59, 161,163‒64, 167

Spider-Man 18, 103
Stardew Valley 128, 131, 133
Steinberg, Marc 49‒53
story worlds 9, 15‒16, 19‒21, 42‒44, 46‒49,
56‒58, 100, 103‒04, 106, 161
structuralism: 26, 42
struggle, reader-author 22, 24, 98, 104, 106, 109
Sugawa-Shimada, Akiko 174‒75
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate 30, 115, 151‒52,
156, 159‒63, 167
System of Affection 127‒33
conditions 129‒31
gender 130, 172
masculinity 142
procedures 131‒33
sexuality 59, 130‒31, 172
Tales of Symphonia 9, 24–25, 158
Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of a New
World 24, 108
The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel 11,
126, 128, 130
The Legend of Zelda series 82, 109‒11, 158,160‒63
Breath of the Wild, BotW 29, 72‒73, 82‒84,
88, 97, 99, 109‒112, 161‒62
The Witcher series 156‒59
Thibault, Mattia 59
Thomas, Ebony Elizabeth 23‒24, 99‒100
Thon, Jan-Noël 42, 44, 46‒47, 58‒59, 80‒81
topoi 82, 91, 110
Tosca, Susana: 57‒59, 136, 144‒45transmedia
adaptations 10, 15, 48, 93, 109, 125, 128,136‒39, 142
character networks 18, 42, 45, 58
ecologies 10, 44, 76, 93, 107‒08
practices 9, 15, 22, 28, 50, 58, 98‒100, 102,
118‒19, 136, 143
storytelling 9, 12‒20, 41, 44‒46, 49, 97, 113,
140, 151, 165
techniques 30, 151‒52, 155, 158, 162‒63,
165‒66world-building 15, 49
worlds see story worlds
Umberto, Eco: 18, 46, 102‒03
Uricchio, William 18, 46, 57
Vella, Daniel 43, 77, 154‒55
virtual reality: 10, 30, 174‒75
virtual YouTubers, VTubers 10, 174‒75
voice actors 42, 173‒74
voice assistants 10, 30, 89, 175
Wilde, Lukas 13‒14, 19, 53‒59
worlds see story worlds

G A M E S A N D P L AY

Combining theories on fictional persons from Japanese and Euro-American
practices, this book discusses video game characters embedded in our
popular media culture in which they are constantly produced and reimagined.
This book introduces the dynamic game character, a type of game characterwith a development structure that consists of multiple outcomes in agame. Through their actions and choices, players can influence these gamecharacters’ identities and affect their possible destinies.
Games subvert the idea that fictional persons must maintain a coherent
identity. This book shows that dynamic game characters challenge strategies
of top-down control through close readings of the Mass Effect series,
Persona 5, Hades, Animal Crossing: New Horizons and more. It is directed toall scholars interested in the topics of transmedia storytelling, video games,characters, and Japanese narratology.
Joleen Blom is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre of Excellence inGame Culture Studies and at the Game Research Lab at Tampere University.
Her research interests include transmedia storytelling, Japanese games andculture, characters, and para-social relationships and intimacy throughtechnology and media.

ISBN: 978-94-6372-295-7

AUP. nl
9 789463 722957