Just an Ordinary Day - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 85

by the players, so playing SinCity can sometimes be about measured and stealthy
activities while at other times it's fast and furious. It's usually fast and furious;
very twitchy, in other words.
Your scuba diving trip was made possible by AS-OceanFloor, an assault level
from Unreal Tournament. The consequences of your less than sensible driving habits
are provided by Driver from Refl ections. This is a fi rst or third person single player
driving game with the whole big, bad city for you to play in. There are no weapons
or power-ups to collect but you've got a dynamic local map to help you. You do
have a weapon of sorts, however: your car. Everything around you is pretty natural
except the big red arrow you know is out there somewhere signaling you' ve reached
the objective for the level. Keeping your car free from damage is a good tactic. Not
getting noticed by police is also a very good idea though not always possible given
the time constraints you have to work with.
Think about SinCity and Driver for a moment. Two very different games: dif-
ferent genres, very different game plays, differing intentions and perceivable conse-
quences, differing narrative potentials. Notice that GIL only has activity profi les and
twitch factors for whole games, not for individual levels or missions, but again, these
will be quite different for the two games.
Yet somehow the situations are very much alike. You are suddenly in great
danger and have to fi nd a way out or lose and start all over again. You can take
pleasure in using your skills, both motor and intellectual, to keep failure at bay. You
also have to recognize the possible way(s) out offered within the content of the game.
That is a part of the skill set you have. These are some of the generic pleasures of
games. So, on the one side, the pleasures, we have similarities; while on the other,
genre, we see almost no similarities. It would be useful to know in more detail why
the situations are so different superfi cially and yet similar in some sense under their
skins of pixels. Are there general structural similarities, principles that we could
apply to all games?
Rather than pursue the kind of generic analysis we conducted on Rez and
Star Fox in Chapter 5 we are going to look at game content directly. We are
going to look at particular elements of the game world and see how they
enable gameplay and affect the aesthetics of games. And, as importantly, we are
going to generalize all this in order to arrive at an abstract theory of computer
game content.
Perceptual opportunities (POs) is a theory of the content of computer games
and virtual environments—another name for virtual reality—in general which aim
to consider the basic mechanics of gameplay (Fencott, 2001, 2003). POs address
game content at a fairly low-level, moment by moment and will complement our
previous studies of genre, activity profi ling, and aesthetics. In this chapter we will
use POs to dissect SinCity and then go on to consider an AS-OceanFloor; just to see
how we can distinguish between two levels that are both FPS and yet have a differ-
ent feel in terms of gameplay. In the following chapter we will consider Driver in
some depth and then relate SinCity and Driver in terms of what we have learned by
applying POs.
But fi rst a power - up.