Interactive Narrative Wk6: Fez

1.  As the player, do you interact with a character or an avatar and how does this affect your involvement in the narrative?

Fez is a 2012 indie puzzle platform game in which you play as Gomez: a tiny villager who is bestowed upon a red fez all the while baring sight to a hexahedron that unveils a third dimension to his previously two dimensional world. While I would say that Gomez is both a character and an avatar within this world, I would firmly claim that he is more so the latter. Gomez is at first established to be a character that is an existing member of his village's community, but despite this, Gomez is a character so simple in design and lacking so much dialogue that he doesn't firmly identify to be a strong character with apparent individuality.

The only legitimate interactions I ever experienced between Gomez and another character was with the guide 'Dot'. Apart from the inevitable problem faced by the player in the beginning of the game, any character motivation derives from the player and not Gomez. In fact, because of the lack of interaction, Gomez is left to be a rather inexpressive character, seemingly 'happy' all the time and not having any real change in emotions.

What defines Gomez as a character is essentially what affects the only involvement in the narrative, and that was to establish that there was already a special relationship between the 'Geezer' and Gomez before the player's introduction to the beginning of the game. This Geezer had entrusted this power to be able to see the third dimension to Gomez out of any other candidate, and this relationship between them is his only saving grace in being seen as a character. With this in mind, I can confidently say that Gomez is more of an avatar than a character. As Ragnhild Tronstad says, an avatar is an “extended, prosthetic, part-of-ourselves type of character(s)” that prioritize “embodied empathy, in which the player experiences a kind of physical or bodily connection to the character”. Being a very lackluster character in terms of depth of personality and background, Gomez could instead be seen as a physical means of surpassing the puzzle platformer that is Fez.

References:
- Polytron Corporation (Developer). (2012). Fez [Video Game]. United States of America
- R. Tronstad (Author). (2013). Characters from: The Routledge Companion to Video
Game Studies Routledge. [Article] The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies