Big Bad Streets - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 107

Chapter 8

Big Bad Streets

Remember that ordinary day we were talking about? It's not fi nished yet. We need
to talk about your driving habits; at least, we need to talk about your driving habits
in Driver. 1 We will consider Driver in terms of POs and then we can compare it to
SinCity to see if we can learn anything in general about games.
Relating attractors to intentions and both of these to perceivable consequences
and rewards is at the heart of gameplay and a good game should make this process
so natural to the player that maybe the player never realizes how narrowly focused
and cleverly designed the agency is. If Driver is a good game—and Clive is not
alone in the world in thinking this—then how does it establish the intention-forming
process in the mind of the player? Not unusually, Driver uses an introductory series
of cut scenes to establish a back story that introduces the game; tells us who we, the
player, are; suggests the kinds of situations we are likely to fi nd ourselves in; and
tells us what our allegiances are.
So, let's start by considering Driver's back story to see how it attempts to make
clear to us the game's particular genre characteristics. We will then go on to analyze
Driver in terms of POs and see how the game directs our choices of attractors and
formulation of intentions. From this we can build up an abstract model, based on
POs, of Driver's gameplay. We can then compare this to the model for SinCity and
see where that gets us.

DRIVER SCHOOL

It's pretty clear that Driver is a driver . But it should be pretty clear by now that
driving is a metagenre that can be customized to a whole range of subgenres.
Remember, Ernest Adams and Andrew Rollings use the metagenre VS ( vehicle simu-
lation ), which can include spaceships and fi ghter planes and railway trains and
anything else you could imaginably drive, pilot, sail, or ride. Remember, we call our
version of this metagenre driving/piloting/crewing ( DPC ). So, we know that there
are racing drivers , simulation drivers , war and fi ghting DPCs , and many more.

1

Published by Refl ections.