Just an Ordinary Day - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 87

treasure chest. Even such mundane objects as walls, fl oors, and ceilings become not
just corridors but objects in the gameplay that restrict your choice and lead you on
to confront the next situation. When playing games we are constantly on the lookout
for such connotative meanings.
UNREALISMS
It is exactly these “other” meanings, connotations, that POs are designed to allow
us to consider, but before talking specifi cally about POs let's think a little about what
Poole calls “unrealisms” (Poole, 2004) but which have been identifi ed by various
other people under differing names. Denise Whitelock, for example, used the notion
of “ specifi cally defi ned infi delities” (Whitelock et al., 1996), “ infi delities ” here
meaning aspects of games that are deliberately designed to be unreal rather than
perceptual bugs that get in the way of the gameplay.
The idea of unrealisms is that any computer game will distort the reality it is
based on in order to make the game playable, in order to offer the aesthetic pleasures
players will expect of it. Such unrealisms might be cars that seem to stick to the
road and don't seem to get damaged easily, visible laser beams from laser guns, the
ability to jump off of 50-foot-high buildings and lose just a little health, and so on.
They might also be various elements of the interface that aid gameplay. For example,
rearview mirrors in driving games that are always just in front of and above you
even when you are using the third person point of view rather than sitting behind
the steering wheel. I am sure you can make a whole list of unrealisms from almost
every game you have ever played.
Think back to Chapter 5 and the two games Rez and Star Fox. Are there any
unrealisms in those two games? You bet there are! In Star Fox, star fi ghters are fl own
by animals. You are a fox and you do not have to say exactly where you are going
as your star fi ghter seems to do that for you. If you crash the wing of you star fi ghter
into the side of a building you sustain a little damage, indicated by the red line at
the bottom of the screen, but you don't bounce off, stall, and fall out of control to
explode on the ground below. This unrealistic behavior of your star fi ghter when
damaged is an unrealism and a good one for gameplay as well.
Rez is a game of unrealisms. Think of that gun sight you control. Where is the
gun? There is no gun! How do things that explode sound like dance sounds and not
big bangs? How does the character we play manage to just fl oat along with no visible
means of support or propulsion? How do we, the player, manage to fl oat along just
behind our character also with no visible means of support or propulsion? We do
not usually bother to ask such questions if the game is fun to play.
Unrealisms are not just there to compensate for qualities that are diffi cult to
represent realistically, health as a box or capsule, for example, they are also there
to make the gameplay more enjoyable. If an unrealism makes for a better game then
no one is going to object or even notice. In considering game content we need to
pay particular attention to unrealisms. They can be a very good way of focusing
players' attentions and stimulating their minds into forming connotations.