While not a physical body, a digital character with embodiedness produces a reaction from players: this character feels real, like it is an actual body.
A character body endowed with embodiedness is one which gives off an impression of presence, weight, realism, or, for lack of a better term, existence. I distinguish the term embodiedness from the philosophical notions of embodiedness or embodiment, and instead I propose a procedural embodiedness, an embodiedness that implies the construction of an empathic person out of a collection of digital materials in a game: an interactive, audiovisual, humanized body. Specifically, this aesthetic produces embodiedness, a characteristic of a video game body that lends it a sense of reality. Through qualitative content analysis, I find that not only does this aesthetic exist within this medium-defining genre, but its themes and tropes dictate the digital corporeality of video games. In this article, I discuss and analyze the most prominent tropes of the corporeal aesthetic in third-person action games through a qualitative content analysis of several popular titles. This aesthetic is unsurprising considering that the defining characteristic of third-person games is the near constant audio/visual/interactive presence of a digital body representing the player's character.
Turning Pixels into People: Procedural Embodiedness and the Aesthetics of Third-Person Character CorporealityĪn aesthetic of corporeality pervades third-person action games-one of, if not the most popular-genres on video games.
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