Just an Ordinary Day - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 90

SURPRISES
Surprises are nonmundane details that are not always predictable but they do arise
however surprisingly from the logic of the space consciously accepted. Surprises
therefore are intended to deliver the memorable pleasures of the game by allowing
players to accumulate conscious experience. Surprises are concerned with the con-
notative meaning of objects in games; they can be:
• Implausible but benefi cial (unrealisms)
• Completely plausible but perhaps unexpected
and there are three basic types:
• Attractors
• Connectors
• Rewards
POs can be both sureties and surprises depending on the context in which they are
offered—there is no mutual exclusivity between them. The ladders in SinCity can
be both sureties, familiar objects that provide sureties for scale, and can also be
surprises, giving access to rooftops. Some content items will be more or less surpris-
ing than others and may thus draw attention to themselves at the expense of others.
To put it in a nutshell, surprises will be particular features of perceivable content
that lead players to form intentions, help in the process of satisfying those intentions,
and fi nally, hopefully, provide the perceivable consequences that the player recog-
nizes as satisfying those intentions. That's quite a big nutshell, but it does summarize
the relationship between agency and POs and points toward the integrated analysis
technique that was suggested at the beginning of this chapter. Let's discuss each of
the main forms of surprises in more detail and use SinCity to fi nd them in practice.
ATTRACTORS
Attractors are POs that seek to draw the attention of a player directly to areas of
interest or to situations which offer agency. Attractors are the means by which
players are stimulated into forming intentions for themselves. It is thus important
that major attractors are associated with rewards, things to do, remember, excite,
puzzle and so on and which will allow players to feel that it was worth the effort of
trying to achieve the intention they formed as a response to a particular attractor.
Attractors may be characterized according to the reasons they draw attention to
themselves, as:
• Mystery objects: Partially obscured/revealed objects, strange or unknown
objects, e.g., both closed and open doors and doorways.
• Active objects: Movement, fl ashing lights, sounds changing pitch or volume.
• Alien objects: Objects that belong to another world, game, or context alto-
gether, 2D maps, strange symbols to indicate the end of levels.