I don’t think game designers talk quite as much about player empowerment now as they used to, and that’s probably a good thing. Power, from the player’s perspective, could be said to be that which lets them affect intentional change on the game world. In practice, though, “power fantasy” usually means the offering of bigger guns with louder booms. Sometimes lip service is paid to “empowering the player to make interesting and important narrative choices” – but even then the emphasis is on the world-changing reach of those choices and the bombast of their presentation rather than their detail, granularity, or emotional impact. It’s all about pomp and circumstance, so even these loftier goals of narrative expression often reduce back down to the aforementioned bigger booms.
If players really wanted power to affect the game world, to make material changes in its construction or systems, they could manifest that with mod tools. I suspect that more than that they mostly just want the game to tell them that they’re cool, and whatever choice they made was a cool choice for cool people. Maybe that’s what the idea of power looks like in our imaginations now. That is mostly how we portray it – powerful people are cool and beat guys up and everyone loves them, even as these traits have no intrinsic connection to power but for the associations we’ve built over decades of cinema. We’re chasing the fulfillment of this meaningless aesthetic shell of power, and we’re doomed never to find it.
The tragedy of the human mind is that it can only desire the idea of a thing, never the thing itself, and thus can never be satiated. There will always be a vast gap between love and the idea of love, wealth and the idea of wealth, food and the idea of food, and so any desire for these, unanchored by specificity, will soon become a wound that will never close. These unfulfillable desires are the sites of our greatest triumphs and of our greatest evils. The chase after ethereal half-remembered visions may power our art, but it still hurts to realize those dreams can never be reached – the itch can be scratched only enough to allay it, not to cure it. At the same time, the love of the idea of wealth, the idea of safety, the idea of purity, the raw desire for these unattainable ideas leads us to collectively leap off cliffs over and over. It’s like the idea of the love of money being the root of all evil: The love of any abstract idea over the reality it’s meant to represent will lead to great harm.
It is an important lesson all too often neglected that not all desires are meant to be fulfilled. The American dream, the American promise, is that dreams are made to be fulfilled and if you can climb to the top it can all be yours. So we have a system where the people on top, with more reason to be happy and satiated than anyone else in the world, still find themselves as far as ever from the ideas and fantasies and desires that brought them to this point, and the only answer is to seek more. More what? Who knows.
That’s only to speak of the desires that can’t be fulfilled. In addition, there’s whole classes of desire that oughtn’t be fulfilled – for violence and domination and cruelty, for destruction of the self and destruction of others. Most people learn somewhere along the line to keep these in check – to, perhaps, think lovingly of their dreams of mayhem while scrupulously ensuring that they remain dreams. If, however, you’ve been taught that your wealth and power ought allow you to realize any dream, and that the only thing that should ever stand in the way of these dreams is insufficient wealth and power…
It’s time to wake up. Not only can we not always get what we want, what we actually want is to want. Past a certain point it becomes your responsibility to parse out those desires that can be attained from those that must be simulated, and those that can be safely and responsibly chased from those which intrinsically cause human suffering to pursue.
This really shouldn’t be that hard.