Concept: The Power Fantasy

Boredpostin'

Most games today (and, indeed, to date) have fallen into one seemingly unavoidable pitfall: the power fantasy. I'll do another post later analyzing the male power fantasy in other media, particularly Japanese anime and manga, because it's quite a similar case there, but right now I'll just cover the power fantasy in video games.
So what is the power fantasy? It's a pretty simple concept: the protagonist always wins. This sort of thinking is ubiquitous in games, most obviously in mainstream action games. Take the Call of Duty series, for instance. If the player does what he's supposed to, he wins. If he doesn't, he dies, and gets to try again. This is the power fantasy in its most basic form. There are two outcomes, victory or death, and the correct one is the former. Linked to this are a few other similar concepts, many of which can be seen, again, in Call of Duty. Firstly, the protagonist is the most important character. Call of Duty is infamous for its tendency to force the player to do literally everything. There's a reason that this isn't considered widely objectionable, namely that it makes the player feel like the most important character in the storyline (which he is, but only because no one else is allowed to be). Secondly, the protagonist's superior ability. Naturally, a human player will usually be better than an AI at thinking outside of the box, but oftentimes the AI is artificially worthless to make the player more powerful. This can be seen in Call of Duty, both in the static enemy AI, and in the nigh-useless friendly units; if left to their own devices, the AI could probably skirmish for a nearly indefinite amount of time without doing significant damage to each other, whereas the player can take on a ludicrous amount of enemies with minimal effort. Thirdly, the moral certainty of the protagonist. Again, the issue of morality, particularly in war games like Call of Duty, deserves its own post, so I won't go too deeply into it here. Suffice it to say that there are a hell of a lot of armed soldiers in the favelas of Brazil, to the point where it seems almost like some sort of absurd clown car. The favelas are one of the few levels in the entire Call of Duty series that even have civilians, too. Most of the time, it's a simple dichotomy between the Bad Guys With Guns and Our Boys.
There's another level to the power fantasy that's more often explored in role-playing games, namely that the world exists for the protagonist. Take, for example, any single Bioware game. You, the player, are The Hero. Your allies are all either devoted to you from the start or there is Something Very Wrong with them that must be Solved. Anyone who doesn't like you, in short, is either Bad or Wrong; if they're Bad they are killed or redeemed, and if they are Wrong, they are Fixed. There's not a lot of room for moral uncertainty, because that would mean that the player might not be the one true hero any more. Possibly the most damning factor of this in modern RPGs is the concept of the NPC romance. While this bears further investigation in a later post, it's worth mentioning here that modern "romances" in games are generally closer in structure to an encounter; that is to say, a fight or a puzzle. The player says what the developers have decided is "right" and is rewarded with a profoundly immature and embarassing conclusion. While Bioware games are probably the worst about this, even (especially?) games like Atlus' Persona series fall prey to this. Every female character is attracted to the protagonist, because otherwise the player might not feel like he's the most important person in the world anymore, and game designers have decided that is the most important illusion to perpetuate.
Why is the power fantasy so important? It's one of the most visible fetters holding gaming back and perpetuating the image of games as an immature medium, so why do designers keep it around? There's definitely an aspect of customer satisfaction to it. In the earliest previews for S.T.A.L.K.E.R., it was proposed that the AI might be able to finish the game before the player did. While this was obviously untrue, imagine the effect it would have on a player if a message box just suddenly popped up: "Some guy beat you to the punch. You lose." Most gamers would have a fit, and rightly so. Nobody wants the game to win itself; it's vaguely perverse. But at the same time, there has to be a method to keep the player from inevitably becoming the only vector of any change in the game world. Essentially, the question becomes this: How can the player be presented with a world where he is an actor, a person, and not a god?