Liminality, Embodiment, and Desire: "Vulnerable You" and "Vulnerable I"

This paper argues that narrative video games achieve their emotional power through "functional liminality," a fragile, in-between state in which player and character become intertwined through embodiment, vulnerability, and desire. Drawing on Victor Turner's concept of liminality, Janet Murray's account of dramatic agency, and Paul Ricœur's work on emplotment and narrative identity, the authors contend that this shared vulnerability, rather than gesture-based interface design alone, is central to how games produce immersion and transformative experience. Their analysis is grounded in close readings of two narrative games, Death Stranding (2019) and The Signifier (2020), which serve as contrasting case studies.

In the analysis of Death Stranding, the authors show how controller-based mechanics, such as rocking the controller to soothe the Bridge Baby BB-28, and the protagonist Sam Porter Bridges' physical persistence, including the lasting effects of terrain and the consequences of bodily needs, ground Sam as a fully realized dramatic agent. The triadic relationship among player, Sam, and BB blurs the boundary between player and avatar, and the game's emotional climax, the incineration of BB, depends on this alignment of embodied vulnerability and desire. The Signifier is read as a counterpoint: Frederick Russell's disembodiment and the resulting loss of player agency dissolve the boundary between player and character and unsettle the distinction between human and artificial consciousness. Johanna Kast's death is interpreted as a suicide driven by an inescapable repressed memory, and the player's own liminal status is presented as mirroring hers, a categorical interstitiality that, following Noël Carroll's theory of horror, becomes a source of unease.

The authors ultimately broaden the notion of embodiment beyond physical controls or literal placement in a game world, defining it as the meaningful situating of characters within their worlds so that players empathize with them and share their vulnerability and longing. Death Stranding exemplifies this through its landscape, which feels alive due to the player's emplacement and the traces left by other players, and through the empathy generated by Sam and BB's bond. The Signifier, by contrast, underscores Russell's prior loneliness through his isolated, disembodied existence and digital death. The paper concludes that liminal thresholds and shared vulnerability between character and player are key conditions for producing transformative game experiences.