Stepping In and Out of Media Characters

Identification with media characters is a highly prevalent phenomenon in media entertainment. Audience members may take the perspective of—or become experientially “one with” the personae of various kinds of entertainment media, including movie and novel protagonists, video game avatars, or talk show hosts. After briefly reviewing past theoretical work on identification, we introduce a new framework that contextualizes identification within a set of six different modes of audience positioning toward media characters. We suggest interindividual and intermessage differences as well as intraindividual dynamics in audience positionings, with identification being a mode that is bound to particular conditions, including an experience of transportation. The framework may harmonize discrepant past propositions on audience responses to media characters, pave the way for improved measurement of these responses in future experiments across different media and message genres, and advance conceptualizations of the links between identification, hedonic as well as eudaimonic entertainment outcomes.