Big Bad Streets - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 119

bring our knowledge of the criminal world, however secondhand that may be for
most of us, to bear when we interpret undercover investigation, seedy hotel rooms,
mysterious messages on answering machines, and so on, as a license to break the
law. To what extent do we need to bother ourselves about this process? The question
will arise again in the next chapter.
FURTHER READING AND TASKS
Further reading for POs was discussed in the previous chapter but the main reference
is Fencott (2003). Comparative content analysis has been shown to be a very power-
ful way of utilizing POs—and the other analyses we have used in this topic— to gain
insights into the fundamental nature of computer games. A good example, which
consists of a comparison of three games and two virtual reality applications, can be
found in Fencott (2001). POs have developed over the years and the content of
Tables of Surprises in particular has changed somewhat but this should not affect
the usefulness of earlier versions.
We have an interesting challenge for you. It's more of a case study really. For
this and the following three chapters we want you to conduct a thorough analysis
of a sim game called OpenCity. It's free and open source so anyone can download
it and play it. You can fi nd it at http://www.opencity.info/en/Index.html. It' s similar
to the very earliest versions of SimCity. It's complex enough to test your understand-
ing of POs, but because it's decidedly non-twitchy you will have plenty of time
while playing to think about game content and gameplay and so on.
So, we suggest you download and play this version of the game for a while and
then get on with just your PO analysis: construct a Table of Surprises, look for choice
points, retainers, and challenge points, and so on. In Chapter 9 we'll get you to add
in your own analyses using the theories from Part I, while Chapters 10 and 11 will
get you to fi ll out your analyses even more; but how you will do that will remain a
mystery for a few more pages.
One reason for choosing OpenCity as a case study is that the gameplay is so
different from that of all the games we have studied so far. It is also quite a complex
game: there is a lot of information to process and the relationship between the per-
ceivable content of the game is not nearly so obvious as Driver or SinCity; there' s
a hint for you.