I am Geralt: Pronoun Usage (Part 1)

I am Geralt. I am not always Geralt, but sometimes I am. I have hinted at this in previous Witcher Wednesday posts:

This is not the way I see myself-as-Geralt

I slept with the witch Abigail. I did it in a moment of empowerment. I did it to spite the villagers and the game. I did it because I liked her.

I am Geralt and I see myself as Geralt in a certain way. I am Geralt and I had a very real emotional reaction to Abigail and the villagers outside of Vizima - a reaction that was born of being both Geralt and a woman raised in America.

This isn't about a style of writing. I speak this way as well. I hadn't consciously noticed until my roommate pointed it out ... in fact, given that she knows I stream and she has never played Witcher, she had to ask me who "we" was during one of the stories I was regaling her with one day. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I didn't think about it, not that I didn't notice, because this is quite common among gamers.

In fact, I first took note of this phenomenon years ago when I was writing about World of Warcraft (WoW). As an anthropologist of course I recognized the implications of this, but I had a whole thesis to write and although identity was a part of that thesis, it is was not the main focus. So I mostly left it alone and as I continued to engage in gamer culture and geek communities this manner of speaking became so natural that I stopped noting it. While with other (video) gamers I can code-switch pronouns without any disruption in communication.

I am not the first academic to take note of gamer language and identity. I know this because I teach it as a part of my Video Games and Learning class and the readings available to choose from are plentiful. Yet, there is more to be said, and threads to be woven together, as what I have found so far tends focuses on deep issues of identity while failing to elucidate the basics, and furthermore, streaming adds a new layer to these old arguments.

Beyond game studies, identity as a (philosophical/cultural/national/personal/etc) academic pursuit is nothing new. Off the top of my head,  my experiences with WoW and Witcher remind me of Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life and Austin's How to Do Things with Words in addition to Gee's Learning and Identity (chapter 3 of What Video Games have to Teach us about Learning and Literacy). Unfortunately, all 3 of these works are deep enough to require a full post each in order to make the arguments I want to make here, and so this line of inquiry will be broken into parts. I am not sure yet how many parts, as I may come up with other ideas as I work through this, but for now I am guessing probably 5 in total - this intro, a conclusion, and 3 middle posts for each of the named books.

Before I close though, I want to lay the groundwork from which I will be starting, by clearly laying out what each of the pronouns means.

• "We" = me and Geralt. I most often use this word in this way when I am meta-gaming. In this use, me and Geralt are separate. I am, in these moments, not completely immersed within the game and so I see myself as distinct from Geralt who is a character in a game that I am trying to engage with in particular way (which is a fancy way of saying I am looking something up online in order to get the outcome I desire). In these moments I am interacting with the game as a piece of software rather than embodying Geralt and interacting with the game world.
• "We" = me and chat (the people chatting with me in Twitch). I use this pronoun when talking about conversations I am having with chat whether we are talking about the game or not. This is the common English language use of this word - the nominative plural of I.
• "Him" = Geralt. This use is rare but happens in 2 contexts. The first is when there is a bit of dialogue or a cutscene within the game during which I cannot control what Geralt is doing - or in other words, in moments during which I have no agency. The second use of this happens when I am talking to someone who is not enculturated to understand and so I must consciously use pronouns in ways that are unnatural to me in order to communicate effectively. 
• "I" = me-as-Geralt.* This pronoun use and the next one are the two most common usages on this list. An example of this is the quote from before the page break when I say "I slept with the witch Abigail." That was a choice that I made while I was playing the game, immersed in the world. I had agency and I acted. Yet within the game world I am Geralt - I am not Krista-Lee - and so this use does in fact mean something different from the other use of "I" below. 
• "I" = me-as-Krista-Lee. This is the common English language use of this word, the personal pronoun used to refer to the self (bodily or mentally) as a contained/discrete unit (such as the self is imagined in Western culture). 

*This phrasing, ie the use of "and" and "-as-" to make the definitions clear is borrowed wholly from Gee's book linked above. However, even though I take Gee's language, my analysis of this phenomenon is going to go in a very different direction. While Gee was concerned with identity in relation to education, I am interested here ina more anthropological treatment of changing understandings of identity within a connected and playful world.