Big Bad Streets - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 109

him. You do not lose points by damaging other cars but you do fail if your car gets
too damaged to continue. You can be as reckless as you like as long as you complete
the mission. Our intentions should now be clear.
SURETIES
Now on to our experiences of Driver, the experiences Driver offers us. First of all,
we will make a few brief notes on sureties. Street furniture, building fronts, parking
meters, trees, pedestrians, and much, much more all give realistic sensations of
speed. Buildings at a distance and people and vehicles at various relative distances
give scale sureties. Distance is a little more problematic. We only see a few blocks
into the distance because the city at any one moment only exists for a few hundred
meters around us; buildings appear out of the “mist” as we speed toward them. This
is obviously to allow the game engine to run more effi ciently and achieve an accept-
able frame rate. Although there are recurrent shocks in Driver, this is not one of
them. The magical appearance of buildings—we never see them disappear—seems
to focus our attentions on the near and middle ground, the particular task at hand.
There is a lot of detail in the city: buildings, moving cars and people, gas stations,
underground car parks, and so on, all of which generate good levels of perceptual
noise.
There is also good self-image. Clive, for instance, always chooses the third
person point of view so he can see the car he is driving and see that it behaves very
realistically, with wheels that turn to steer, suspension, collision damage, and so on.
Car horns sounding at him and cars stopping and trying to get out of his way gives
a good sense of other people around in addition to the pedestrians. Sureties for the
past are provided by crashed vehicles, skid marks in grass verges, and the remaining
damage to your car and the police car. In terms of physics sureties you can crash
through tables, chairs, and parking meters but not streetlight poles or trees. It is very
easy to leave the ground going over humps and bumps but this is fun, so it still
provides good sureties. The car appears to behave very realistically in terms of
maintaining and losing grip on the road. All in all we see a rich set of sureties. There
is plenty to keep the unconscious mind occupied.
Before taking a look at surprises we might just mention shocks, as there are
some in Driver. Crashes often result in not only damage to cars, but also loss of
polygons, resulting in “ see - through ” body panels and so on. Cars also often seem
to defy the laws of physics when they hit bridges or hills. Flying police cars are a
fairly common sight in Driver and are also very funny, which would seem to suggest
a level of exaggeration at least bordering on shock; such fl ying cops do not constitute
a shock, however, because of their contribution to the game's aesthetics. We need
to add humor to our list of aesthetic concepts that need to be accounted for.
A true shock occurs in Driver when you have completed a mission or a section
of a mission and people run from a bank, for instance, and get into the car you are
driving, or they run from your car to the door of a building. Doors are never opened
in these situations. Instead the people seem to fade through to where they are going