Numbers > Number 21 > Thatgamecompany’s emotional avatars: forging digital human connections through the worlds of video games
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ISSN: 1885-365X
RUIZ CAÑERO, Adrián Contact 000-0001-6258-8418

Thatgamecompany’s emotional avatars: forging digital human connections through the worlds of video games

27 de noviembre de 2024
19 de diciembre de 2024

We preconceive the avatar as a kind of digital puppet that is usually customized to our liking and resemblance, to travel through a virtual environment through a screen. This discourse of creating digital identities usually focuses on the pillars of aesthetic personalization and the pursuit of visual realism. But what happens when we focus the experience on the emotional, on the human connections that it allows us to make? This research examines this concept through the company Thatgamecompany, being a specific and unique case, which explores the avatar from the emotional and aims to create an unforgettable impact on the player’s experience, facilitating in its works anonymous encounters with other players and promoting collaboration between them through non-verbal communication. The player embodies in his characters the vulnerability and loneliness of the journey, inviting them to an inner search for their own meaning, traveling the path to the final objective of the game. Through beautiful landscapes, the player’s inner journey with their avatar allows them to explore universal themes such as loss, hope and transcendence. Therefore, the analysis for this research focuses on how the elements of their games (design, narrative and mechanics) contribute to the creation of an emotionally significant experience, facilitating simple but unique human interrelationships, dealing with universal themes through said digital characters, which are an extension of our own being.

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