What lies below is the third part of my 25 page essay on player positioning in video games for the completion of my Bahelor's degree in English. Be careful! It's a lot of text and no pictures....

The phenomenon of a player watching his own actions within a semiotic domain has implications regarding Foucault’s examination of the Panopticon and his theories on discourse and power. The Panopticon, which Foucault uses as a metaphor for modern western society, “are like so many cages, so many small theaters, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible…Hence the major effect of the Panopticon [is] to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power (554). Foucault then gives an example of this system operating in context:
The panoptic schema, without disappearing as such or losing any of its properties, was destined to spread throughout the social body; its vocation was to become a generalized function. The plague-stricken town provided an exceptional disciplinary model: perfect, but absolutely violent; to the disease that brought death, power opposed its perpetual threat of death; life inside it was reduced to its simplest expression; it was, against the power of death, the meticulous exercise of the right of the sword. The Panopticon, on the other hand, has a role of amplification; although it arranges power, although it is intended to make it more economic and more effective, it does so not for power itself, nor for the immediate salvation of a threatened society: its aim is to strengthen the social forces – to increase production, to develop the economy, spread education, raise the level of public morality; to increase and multiply (556).

The Panopticon provides a system of social reinforcement by means of a mutual and partially democratic, but invisible gaze from the tower. In the original panoptical prisons, this was a literal tower in the center of a circular prison. In its ubiquitous incarnation in Western Society, it is the mutual gaze of ruling discourses engendered and reinforced by its most powerful members (the ruling body). The model of the video game provides a means by which the player can watch the operations of the panoptic schema from a distanced position.

By virtue of the third-person perspective and reverse-theatre schematic, the player of a video game can perform the role of both the outside watcher and the participant in the panoptic system. The player can control the protagonist who is inside the Panopticon, while observing the process by which the rules inside the game act. In Foucault’s interpretation of the Panopticon as it operates in modern western society, the tower is the anonymous gaze of ruling discourses divided mutually through members of a society (in its original prison structure, it was a literal tower at the center of the circular prison). But then, who is the tower? In the schematic of the video game, the tower is essentially the characters of the game world who operate the ruling discourse the game developers have decided to create. In a very basic model, individualized characters with distinct AI, such as in Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, will react to certain actions upholding the ruling discourse of the virtual society. In this way, in some games, the protagonist controlled by the player is always under the gaze. For example, if I make my protagonist kill someone or even break a law in Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, virtual characters will either attack him or guards will come and try to arrest him. So, in this particular game world, one can observe the operation of the gaze and the Panopticon on the protagonist while they participate in its operation. This could be argued as a subversion of the panoptic model, in which, instead of the social reification of roles and duties, one is effectively both inside the Panopticon of the game and outside of it viewing the process by which it acts. This schematic alienates the players from the gaze of the tower and in involvement in the Panopticon by engaging them in a deciphering of that gaze, both because they are located outside of the schema and because they are a part of the gaze. The player of a game is forced to distinguish the rules by which the game operates. In a virtual world with narrative functions and real-time AI character interactions, this becomes a deciphering of the ruling discourses in the game and the Panopticon.

Drakengard takes this schematic of the video game and uses it as an integrated theme in its narrative. In this universe, there are towers, “the watchers,” and two forces locked in constant battle (the Union and the Empire):

The unsuppressed soul
lets flow oceans of blood
The Watchers
drink and raise high the basin of fire
Mighty generals
hesitate beneath a crimson sky
As the tears of the goddess
flow, the four lost temples forebode
the coming of the queen
The dragon plummets
from the tower of red thunder
and where it falls no one has seen (qtd. in Shirokage)

During the course of the game, it becomes clearer that “the watchers” are really the players of the game. This is indicated through two means; most obvious perhaps is that at the end of the narrative, one of the characters (the playable female dragon, Angelus) is transported to modern-day Tokyo, which she calls the land of the gods, shockingly removing the player from the game-world. The other is by the nature of the silent-protagonist. Caim’s voice is silenced through a soul-pact with the red dragon Angelus. Through Caim’s silence and the player’s control of him, it becomes clear that the statements that are directed towards Caim are also directed toward the player, or “watcher” (god). These are clips of dialogue from in-game action (while the player is controlling Caim):

Dragon: Does only slaughter calm your soul, Caim?
Verdelet: If you are truly her brother, you would not be so quick to bloody
your sword.
Verdelet: Caim. Do you wish to kill the entire Empire alone?
Such a frightful ambition.
Dragon: There will be no end if you try to crush them all. Enough! (qtd. in Shirokage).

Because Caim cannot respond, the player has the sense that the characters are directing the dialogue toward the player as much as Caim. In this way, Drakengard uses the schematic of the game which creates the liminal space between player and game-world as a motif. In other words, these pleas are directed as much at the player or “the watchers,” who also form the ruling discourse of the game by playing it and continuing the violence. This motif places the player both inside the narrative and outside of it, as a “watcher” or god in the virtual game world and as a player of that game, in a sense conflating both in a liminal space.

The self-referential structure of a video game used as a motif in Drakengard resembles the operation of power structures and the Panopticon. The game narrative admits to the existence of the player and creates a character for the player within the game (“the watchers”). Since “the watchers” or gods in the game are presented as the ruling body and are equated with the player, the player is presented as a ruling body. The game consists of a narrative that integrates the player in a liminal space and asks the player to consider himself as authorial of the ruling discourse (as “the watcher” or god) in a perverse and violent world. So, the player is both a character in the narrative (“the watcher”) and the observer of that character as they carry out the actions of the game. The game presents a basic model of power structures as a theme in the narrative by placing the player as at least part of the determinant of the ruling discourse of that world. This ruling discourse is one of chaos and violence. The structure of Drakengard itself asks the average video game player to consider the ramifications of his actions as at least a part of the ruling discourse of many games as he plays them, which is violent discord. Also, the game asks the player to consider the nature of power structures outside of the game in the world we live in.

In order to observe anything in the hopes of investigating its true form, we must have separation from it. Nothing can adequately describe anything that is integrated into its germane nature or quality. A rock cannot tell us what a rock is like, grass cannot tell us what grass is like, trees cannot tell us what trees are like, flowers cannot tell us what flowers are like, a person cannot tell what their face is like if they have never looked into a mirror (in itself a means of separation from self). But a rock can tell us what grass is like, or of the qualities of trees and flowers. A rock is capable of this because it is different from grass, trees, or flowers. So it is the same with language and everything else in the universe. The qualities of objects, especially material, are only discernable by their difference, as Saussure put it:
The conceptual side of value is made up solely of relations and differences with respect to the other terms of language, and the same can be said of its material side…Everything that has been said up to this point boils down to this: in language there are only differences (68).

It is because of this, that in order to truly know ourselves we must attain differentiated knowledge of self, or knowledge of ourselves through a different lens. We must be separated. This comes in an altered perception of self through the context of a distanced reality, or domain. Video games provide a model for this separation from self through projection onto a distanced semiotic domain, providing a strange environment where from the player questions conceptions of self that are dependent upon a world that is determinate of that self. It is by separation from this natural self-determinate that we may finally gain a true sense of an independent self. This entails the process of discerning and decoding signs in different semiotic domains. The structure of video games aid in this process. They provide an alienation from self and the self-determinate world by presenting an interactive reality (semiotic domain) that has not determined self.