CHAPTER 2.7: THE ROLE OF PSYCHIC DISTANCE
The player’s viewpoint will simulate looking through V’s eyes, seeing what they see. As a Role-Playing Game (RPG), this is seen by a good portion of the gaming community as an unusual choice. Contemporary, 3D RPGs tend to give the player the option to choose between third-person and first-person gameplay. Some examples of flexible camera placement in gameplay are the The Elder Scrolls and Fallout RPG series, which both allow the player to switch between third- and first-person at essentially any time. In an interview at Eurogamer, Cyberpunk 2077 Quest Manager Patrick Mills had this to say about the decision:
Though there might be underlying technical considerations behind the decision of a solely first-person gaming experience, like the skyscraper-dominated environment of Night City causing issues with an external camera following the player’s avatar, the main official reason behind the choice is one of immersion. The Cyberpunk 2077 creative team has gone on record multiple times proclaiming that playing the game in first-person will result in a more intimate player/avatar experience, leading to the smallest amount of psychic distance possible (Momot)."With Witcher 3, you're playing Geralt and you're watching Geralt. You're controlling Geralt. He's a character, right? He's somebody who already exists," Mills said.
"In this game we wanted to put you in the shoes and in the body of the character you're controlling, so you feel like this is your character. First-person was one way to do that." (Yin-Poole)
The keyword tends to be “immersion." While it is used liberally in the gaming industry as a whole, a defense for immersion has been the Cyberpunk 2077 team’s most prominent talking point when it comes to the first-person concerns. Immersion is a way of rephrasing the urge to eliminate the psychic distance between player and protagonist. It is a common, collective fantasy among video game communities that at some point, a threshold will be passed and the virtual world will prove to be as “real” as the physical. The psychic distance will melt completely away.
Emphasizing the immersion of Cyberpunk 2077 and its first-person gameplay style implies that the experience of playing V is the best way CD Projekt Red could create an experience that transports the player into Night City. V is the player’s window into the narrative, and they are supposed to be as transparent as possible. This also follows the genre trends of RPGs, which tend to prioritize player agency in the narrative along with deep, customizable protagonists and multiple avenues with which to interact with the game environment.
Almost all of V’s depictions so far are White, which means that the Cyberpunk 2077 creative team might believe that Whiteness is the most immersive experience for the audience. This conclusion might initially seem unfair, though it is important to acknowledge how important the visuals of Cyberpunk 2077 are represented. According to the creative team themselves, all that they present from the game is meant to showcase the levels of close connection that the player will have with the protagonist. Just as the mesh of neon lighting, complex gadgetry, and giant corporate logos establish their importance by taking up space on the screen, placing the audience literally within V’s body establishes the heightened transparency of the first-player perspective by removing a lot of the avatar’s presence.
With that said, V is still meant to be a separate entity from the player. Otherwise, if V were truly a complete player-insert protagonist, then an even more blank slate approach to avatar creation would have been chosen. An example would be Gordon Freeman in video game company Valve’s Half-Life series, a protagonist with a barebones backstory who remains mute throughout all two and a half games that he stars in. Like most RPGs, it seems that the character development for V is meant to be as malleable as customizing their cosmetics and weaponry. To clarify, though V is not meant to literally represent the player, they are supposed to be a character that the player has a major hand in crafting over the course of the narrative. As stated before, the psychic distance is supposed to be at a minimum so that the player feels fully invested in the narrative that V is experiencing. There should be an emotional alignment with V, which means that there should be a shared understanding of the stakes and obstacles at hand.
So when V mocks the Voodoo Boys’ accents in the gameplay demo, mimicking their patois, it seems like an odd choice. The dialogue occurs when V and Placide are walking through the Voodoo Boys’ main district in Night City, Pacifica. As they move through Pacifica, Placide mentions a third party that might get involved in the local gang warfare. V responds with “who are dey?” seemingly unprompted by the player. If this had been a choice of dialogue in a branching tree during a conversation, then the argument could have been made that this jab was a characterization option for the player, putting the agency back in their hands. Since it seems to have been an automatic response, something for V to say as the player walks around the district, the mockery is inevitable.