To look Death in the Eye: A Phenomenological Perspective on the Use of First-Person in What Remains of Edith Finch, a Video Game

Abstract

First-person perspective in video games refers to the representation of an avatar’s visual field, in
such a way that the player sees on screen what the character's eyes perceive within the diegetic
world. This has a pertinent point of comparison with the first-person as a narrative style in literature,
and although such parallelism is not directly proportional, it allows an analysis of the narrative and
symbolic implications of this perspective in video games as a medium. For this, we propose an
approach from Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception, by which it is possible to
establish a theoretical bridge between corporality as the basis of the representation of space, and
the construction of a narrative experience, founded on structural narratology by Mieke Bal, and the
configuration of the story according to Paul Ricoeur. What Remains of Edith Finch, a video game
represented in the first-person, shows how this mode of representation of the virtual world can
articulate symbolic meaning regarding the intentions of an authorial instance, and the player's ability
to interpret the different elements of a game, in particular its interactive dynamics (gameplay).