Big Bad Streets - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 115

damage as possible. “Threading” a police road block is another generic retainer.
There is usually a way through if you drive very accurately. Similar, though not
nearly so catastrophic, retainers might occur when we inadvertently crash into non-
police traffi c on the road. This might result in some serious efforts to “get back on
track.” We sustain damage, waste time and may well attract the attention of the
police.
Chase missions — usually involving A13 —may be considered to be retainers in
themselves, much in the way we observed many early games to be in the previous
chapter. In a chase mission we have to follow a vehicle, identifi ed by a dynamic red
arrow, the end-of-mission marker, to some point where it stops or where we can ram
and destroy it.
Other things to look for include the range of intentions a player holds at any
one time. How many sources of information is the player offered for monitoring at
any one time? Where and how is such information presented? For instance, are they
abstractly represented in the HUD or are they directly presented in the main game
display? How does all this affect the nature of the gameplay? We will answer these
questions in the next section by way of a comparison with SinCity, which we ana-
lyzed in the previous chapter.
DRIVER AND SINCITY COMPARISONS
If we compare the Tables of Surprises for SinCity with that for Driver we see
that, despite their differing genres and the fact that we are comparing a DM
level with a complete single-player game, POs and POs organized into tables of
surprises do capture the essence of the gameplays of the two games. This is
because we are dealing here with the underlying dynamics of gameplay. We can
see now that the two original situations described in the opening paragraphs of
the previous chapter were actually examples of attractor/connector/reward triples.
Despite their superfi cial differences, the POs do identify them as having certain
similar structures. Furthermore, comparison of the two tables highlights a number
of interesting things. The actual sizes of the tables are not signifi cant as we can
never be sure we have all possible entries nor can we be sure we are identifying
attractors at exactly the same level of granularity. Remember, complex attractors
are composed of any number of attractors including other complex attractors. Size
does not help us.
The attractors for SinCity display an even balance of objects of desire and
objects of fear. This indicates that reward and risk can balance out. In Driver the
attractors are almost exclusively objects of fear with a few being objects of both
desire and fear. There are fi ve objects of desire in Driver:
• A1: main intention
• A5: losing a police tail
• A13: end of mission
• A17: pedestrians, a false attractor