02/04/16 - Game Blog - Fez

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

It doesn't take that long to play through Fez to understand the world that the main character, Gomez lives in and to find out what is required of you, the player. The narrative in Fez is quite simple, which I can also say the same about the main character and the supporting characters. There is a lack of depth within this game's narrative, the only thing that makes it uniquely interesting would be the ability to rotate the world to find and collect the objectives of the game, and solve the hidden puzzles.
Regarding the question of whether the player is playing as a character or an avatar can be debatable. In a sense, Gomez could be both a character or an avatar. The lack of depth within this character's personality, background story and life allows for the player to project themselves onto this blank slate of a character and potentially play as themselves within this world. At the start of the game the player is introduced to the character Gomez in his house and is briefly shown his village, a few village members and how to interact with a few objects. The main character doesn't speak, and neither do most of the members of the village. Only the necessary plot points will show characters and/or objects that you can interact with, and even so, these characters will not say much and they will only repeat the things they last said if you talk to them again.
To think of whether or not Gomez is an avatar or a character, a quote from the reading 'The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies' discusses this thought.
'Rather than using the terms “avatar” and “character” interchangeably, some scholars have sought to locate them on a continuum wherein avatars function primarily as projections of their players, while characters may take on strong, fictional identities that are recognizably separate from those of their players.'
Referring to this argument and comparing it to Fez, it could be argued that Gomez is simply an Avatar, because his identity as a fictional character is quite weak and therefore the player doesn't feel that they have to take on this fictional characters personality in order to play the game. This lack of identity allows for the player to play the game without worrying about how the character would act, rather than themselves.

References:

Jessica Aldred. 17 Dec 2013 ,Characters from: The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies Routledge. Accessed on: 26 Nov 2015 https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9780203114261.ch44