Big Bad Streets - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 108

Driver is one of those “many more.” In effect it belongs to a subgenre of DPCs in
which we have to race against the clock to get our vehicle across diffi cult terrains
in the face of various dangers, whether natural or sentient. Rally games fall into this
subgenre. In the case of Driver the dangers are police cars, traffi c, and street layouts
rather than diffi cult off-road terrains. The back-story for Driver establishes this quite
clearly.
The opening cut scenes establish not only that the player is a policeman but also
one who has some sort of experience as a racing driver. Of course, we are now asked
by our boss to go undercover and drive cars for criminal gangs robbing banks and
doing just about anything else criminal that needs fast cars and driving on the edge.
We are going to be a racing driver who, as a policeman undercover, is allowed to
break the driving laws in order to fi nd out what we can about the criminal gangs we
work for. The role of transformation in this game is not diffi cult to determine.
One of the interesting things about this back story is that it is simply there to
affect the way we prioritize attractors and formulate intentions. Never during the
game are we actually asked to supply information to our police masters. This is not
part of the game. It is just a justifi cation for enjoying breaking the law. Perhaps
simply playing a driver for a criminal gang didn't sit too well with the game's pub-
lishers, who feared a moral backlash from indignant parents. We don't know. The
fact of the matter is that the back-story sets the scene and gives us clear guidance
on high level gameplay but the rationale for the back story, a policeman working
undercover, does not fi gure in the narrative potential we are to be offered.
Back-stories are often like that; take Star Trek: Voyager , for instance. We know
from the back-story that Voyager has accidentally been transported millions of light
years across the galaxy and it will take the crew some eighty years to get home.
This is just a narrative context, as most of the episodic stories make (if any) only a
passing reference to this. The back story establishes a context in which all sorts of
unknown species and physical phenomena can be encountered and, as importantly,
all the species and histories of the species in other Star Trek series can be discarded.
That is what Driver's back story does for us, the player.
We are not fi nished yet with Driver's back story and its scene-setting, intention-
forming exercise. Having absorbed the opening cut scenes we are required to prove
our driving skills to someone who organizes “jobs.” To do this we have to complete
an opening level which requires us to perform a series of highs speed maneuvers,
handbrake turns, and so on, in the confi nes of an underground car park. This level
is cleverly done because it not only acts as a training level for the controls but also
reinforces the back-story and in particular its effects on agency.
The person we meet is a cool, black dude—we guess this solely from his voice,
for we never see him—who is only too happy to make very pointed remarks about
our driving skills and in particular the lack of them. We not only learn to use the
simple yet deep controls (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990)—you only need six fi ngers — and
the range of maneuvers they can enable but, most importantly, we have met our fi rst
criminal. We have become part of the criminal underworld. The guy testing us is
not concerned about damage to other people's cars; he's only concerned about his
own car, the one we are driving— “ Mind the paintwork! ”—and our usefulness to