Cetashwayo
Lord of Ten Thousand Years
- Location
- Across the Horizon
Power fantasies are intrinsic to quests. Even the basic total agency afforded to voters over the main character or mechanism of movement is a power fantasy, leaving aside it being a power fantasy in the quest. That's fine because quests could not function without that agency. But it also obviously lends itself to power fantasies and rejects loss of agency much louder than even popular fanfiction. It has to, because to do otherwise would make it a terrible quest. Even the most railroady quests give the illusion of choice and don't explicitly take it away from the player, or constrain those choices within specific turns on the railway.
It has this in common with video games. Bioshock took narrative control away from the player, but its genius in the central conceit of agency was that the player did everything freely following the instructions of Atlas, and that became the basis of their mind control. It wasn't "built into" the mechanics. You weren't literally forced to do what Atlas said by the game taking control of your character from you until the actual cinematics about it. A game where you actually had no control in the broadest sense of actually being able to play it wouldn't be a game at all, because the whole point is that one way or another it's interactive. That, again, lends itself to power fantasies, but it's obvious games are a very big medium and there are many games that despite giving control to you don't 'feel' like a power fantasy at all.
It's just that games are big and have been around a long time, quests have not, and there are very few metaquests that explore questing as a medium, because it's so small.
It has this in common with video games. Bioshock took narrative control away from the player, but its genius in the central conceit of agency was that the player did everything freely following the instructions of Atlas, and that became the basis of their mind control. It wasn't "built into" the mechanics. You weren't literally forced to do what Atlas said by the game taking control of your character from you until the actual cinematics about it. A game where you actually had no control in the broadest sense of actually being able to play it wouldn't be a game at all, because the whole point is that one way or another it's interactive. That, again, lends itself to power fantasies, but it's obvious games are a very big medium and there are many games that despite giving control to you don't 'feel' like a power fantasy at all.
It's just that games are big and have been around a long time, quests have not, and there are very few metaquests that explore questing as a medium, because it's so small.