One of the strange, hard-to-grasp questions that quietly haunts a lot of games is whether we are the people we are controlling. Whether we are meant to be those people, anyway. Are we Mario, or are we his custodian for the hours in which we play? Is there one of us involved in these jumps and dashes and Goomba stomps, or two of us, and where are the boundaries to be found? Sometimes the controls in a game are so intuitive that it really feels like it’s us on the other side of the screen. We’re in sync. And then something will happen – a glitch, a funny movement, a cut-scene – and the gap between avatar and player becomes jarringly visible. It’s odd stuff and tricky to think about for long stretches of time without starting to feel a bit weird.
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