Big Bad Streets - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 117

• The viewing frustum: The 3D view into the current cityscape.
• The rear view mirror: Another 3D view into what is currently behind us, not
just an aid to safe driving but a vital tool when engaged in a retainer to lose
police tails.
• The 2D dynamic map: This not only shows us where we are and the general
direction of the location we have to fi nd, it also shows us where police cars
are in the vicinity, but not necessarily visible in either of the two 3D views
above.
• The police radio messages we are listening in to: These tell us if we have
been spotted and if we have lost a tail.
There are also some more traditional connectors:
• Damage: Indicates how much damage our car has sustained and thus how
close we are to failure.
• Felony: How wanted we are by the police, this in turn affects the amount of
attention the police pay us.
• Time: Which might be time taken or time left.
We need to be aware of and make use of all seven to be successful in a Driver
mission. The Driver worldview is multifaceted, multimodal, and changes in real
time. By contrast a typical FPS such as SinCity uses a single coherent worldview,
the viewing frustum supported by traditional connectors giving indications for
health, guns, and ammo. We suspect this is one of the reasons for Driver' s original
success. The game, the intentions we must form and resolve, is not simply “ in the
screen.” It is distributed in various forms in both sound and vision in the game space.
The player has to work hard to form a coherent mental model of what is actually
going on. This has other implications for the game.
As in a typical stealth game, there are various ways to complete a mission. We
can simply take the shortest route and attempt to outrun the police or we can plan
a route to avoid the current positions of the police and give ourselves less hassle;
we can go for “all twitch” or we can go for “twitch and stealth.” On the whole you
can't escape the twitch factor entirely in Driver. This is due mostly to the ever present
and ever vigilant police who never seem to miss a suspect. The police cars— or rather
their behavior—constitute a major unrealism even by U.S. standards. The city
appears “real” but the psychotic police cars, always willing to sacrifi ce themselves
to ram suspects and anyone else that gets in the way, are not at all realistic. In terms
of behavior the police cars do not so much follow the suspect as match the car' s
movements moment by moment; it is thus quite possible to make them crash into
other traffi c by swerving in and out and thus lose them. All in all, the police cars
are the very connotation of menace. The game is thus an intriguing contradiction
between the visually real and the behaviorally unreal. No accident, we suspect (pun
intended).
We can thus see that POs and their perceptual maps can tell us much about the
underlying structure of games and allow us to see something of why games are as