Experiencing something as happening to you

In some video games, it feels like I am doing the in-game character’s actions and in others it feels like I am playing a character that does the actions. The distinction does not map onto the distinction between first-person-view and third-person-view. In a first-person view game, even a virtual reality one (I’ve been playing Asgard Wrath 2 on my Quest 2 headset), it can still feel like a character is doing the action, even if visually I see things from the character’s point of view. On the other hand, one can have a cartoonish third-person-view game where it feels like I am doing the character’s actions—for instance, Wii Sports tennis. (And, of course, there are games which have no in-game character responsible for the actions, such as chess or various puzzle games like Vexed. But my focus is on games where there is something like an in-game character.)

For those who don’t play video games, note that one can watch a first-person-view movie like Lady in the Lake without significantly identifying with the character whose point of view is presented by the camera. And sometimes there is a similar distinction in dreams, between events happening to one and events happening to an in-dream character from whose point of view one looks at things. (And, reversely, in real life some people suffer from a depersonalization where feels like the events of life are happening to a different person.)

Is there anything philosophically interesting that we can say about the felt distinction between seeing something from someone else’s point of view—even in a highly immersive and first-person way as in virtual reality—and seeing it as happening to oneself? I am not sure. I find myself feeling like things are happening to me more in games with a significant component of physical exertion (Wii Sports tennis, VR Thrill of the Fight boxing) and where the player character doesn’t have much character to them, so it is easier to embody them, and less so in games with a significant narrative where the player character has character of their own—even when it is pretty compelling, as in Deus Ex. Maybe both the physical aspect and the character aspect are bound up in a single feature—control. In games with a significant physical component, there is more physical control. And in games where there is a well-developed player character, presumably to a large extent this is because the character’s character is the character’s own and only slightly under one’s control (e.g., maybe one can control fairly coarse-grained features, roughly corresponding to alignment in D&D).

If this is right, then a goodly chunk of the “it’s happening to me” feeling comes not from the quality of the sensory inputs—one can still have that feeling when the inputs are less realistic and lack it when they are more realistic—but from control. This is not very surprising. But if it is true, it might have some philosophical implications outside of games and fiction. It might suggest that self-consciousness is more closely tied to agency than is immediately obvious—that self-consciousness is not just a matter of a sequence of qualia. (Though, I suppose, someone could suggest that the feeling of self-conscious is just yet another quale, albeit one that typically causally depends on agency.)