First-Person Gaming and The Photographer

Recently, I’ve been playing Campo Santo’s February 2016 release, Firewatch, a first-person exploration-based video game set in the Wyoming wilderness in the 1980s. I’m interested in approaches to narrative in video games, particularly in the techniques that games use to immerse and involve players in action, and some of the approaches used in Firewatch seem similar to those used in Guibert, Lefevre, and Lemercier’s The Photographer. The more that I think about it, video games and comics have significant elements in common, and some of those commonalities may help to explain why graphic formats are so effective at challenging mass-media stereotypes and assumptions.

For those that aren’t familiar with the game, in Firewatch, players experience the world through the perspective of Henry, a middle-aged man who has begun a job as a firewatch in a Wyoming state park as a way of escaping tragic elements of his life. Most of the game is spent guiding Henry through the park as he investigates a series of mysterious happenings, as well as selecting his walkie-talkie responses to his colleague, Delilah. Although players occasionally catch a glimpse of Henry’s hands and lower body, for most of the game, “Henry” is simply a role that the player inhabits, an avatar that stands in for the player’s own consciousness and presence in the game.

The sense of inhabiting an avatar is evoked extensively, too, in The Photographer through the use of photographs. Most of the photographs included the book are offered without explanation, and readers are expected to look closely and to make sense of what is being shown, to determine meaning without extensive guidance. At the same time, Didier’s representation in the rest of the book, gives a strong sense of his character, and while looking at the photographs it is difficult to avoid the sense of seeing through another’s eyes, of inhabiting another person and attempting to understand his thoughts. Often, while reading The Photographer, I felt that I was not only expected to create my own meaning for the photographs, but that I was also trying to puzzle out what these photographs meant for Didier, to develop a close understanding of his psychology and perspective.

This kind of reading promotes a strong sense of reader participation, the feeling that the reader is also, to a degree, present in the text, and closely aligned with the characters. Many games such as Firewatch use choice to create a similar effect. In selecting Henry’s actions (Will he respond flirtatiously to Delilah’s advances or will he be more standoffish? Which trail will he take on his trip to the lake?), the reader effectively becomes implicated in Henry’s story, and intricately involved in the world. Similarly, by asking readers to create meaning and by allowing them to make basic small choices while reading (Should I look at the images first or read the text? Do I examine the photo outlined in grease pencil before the others?), The Photographer, (and many other graphic narratives), involves the reader in the process of storytelling in a way that can immerse readers more deeply in the world than traditional text and that results in a deeper engagement with and connection to the subject.

A common stereotype of video games is that they distract players from the physical world in a way that can be harmful, by limiting physical activity, for example, or by inhibiting social connection. But what about the ways that gaming can encourage people to become intimately and empathetically involved with subjects that they might not encounter otherwise? It’s difficult not to be astounded by the natural beauty of the world in Firewatch, in a way that, I think, encourages players to pay attention and be moved by natural beauty in the real world. Similar approaches in graphic narratives can result in the same effect. By involving readers in the act of storytelling, as The Photographer does by encouraging readers to see the world through Didier’s eyes, and as many comics do by asking readers to make choices and to decipher the visual messages at work, graphic narratives may be uniquely capable of increasing empathy and altering perspectives in the same way that games are, by creating a deep sense of connection to and involvement with the subject of the narrative.