[dark steve]

You might want to glance at this first.

Tonight in #IRC, we were discussing this wiki article, formerly "spherical_protagonists." Vision was updating it and ran into a stumbling block: during the course of deciding where various games fall in this category, it got clear pretty fast that "there is no concise term for something that is a player controlled agent (besides 'the main guy')." In Marble Madness, you manipulate the little ball yourself, whereas in Cameltry, you (mostly) just rotate the maze; in Sonic Spinball, you perform the majority of your interaction with flippers. So then, presuming that these objects are all in fact the same kind of entity, what is that entity, exactly?

[Gironika]

[Broco]

Well, bottom line, the player controls a dozen or so values which, at every frame, are pressed or not pressed (or, for analog inputs, at a certain point along a continuum). That's the way the player appears at the hardware level. Anything higher-level you come up with will encompass some but not all games.

[dark steve]

c'mon dudes take a stab

[oligophagy]

i would call them children or pets. the former's apt especially as most cultures conceive of children as somewhat autonomous though still depedent and as not responsible (morally or however) for their behavior.

the distinguishing features seem to be that, though the character is not directly controlled, the player has a monopoly on influences AND the wellbeing or state of the character is of direct concern to the player. hence children. or pets. or whatever.

[haze]

"THE USER"

he lives outside the net

[dmauro]

Avatar
_________________

[bort]

[dmauro]

Yeah that IC wiki definition is a bit wrong. An avatar is just an embodiment or personification, but the AI isn't personified as an in-game character, so much as it IS the in-game character. Maybe not technically, but there's not the distinction between player character and that which controls it that there is between the player and a player character.
_________________

[parkbench]

player controlled agent sounds pretty good. avatar works in most cases except when, as you noted, you're controlling the movement of the terrain, and in that case the mental image just doesn't fit. it has to work in every scenario, so that phrase alone works fine i think.

[Judge Ito]

I was hoping this would be a thread about The Crossing.