Meaning What? - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 152

least—construct trance music and trance music has connotations of pleasure, of
clubbing and partying.
But how many players would be familiar with the codes that comprise synes-
thesia or those for Kandinsky's particular style of painting and the abstract school
of art he was also part of? Very few, we suspect. So we cannot explain the game' s
visual appeal by appealing to intertextual references to the codes of abstract art or
one of its particular movements. Yet the visual aesthetic of the game is very unusual
and very strong. Having played the game in a lecture theatre packed with almost
eighty students I can quite confi dently say that the game and its visual style, the way
this integrates with the music and the integration of all this with the exercise of
agency, are quite literally mesmerizing. Although most people have never heard of
synesthesia, we would suggest gameplayers intuitively understand some of its basic
tenets. The idea for instance that we affect the playable character' s movements
haptically or that an Xbox game controller signifi es a longbow through force feed-
back vibration and colored pixels but not the feel and weight of wood.
So where else do we look to fi nd the explanation for the pull of the visual aes-
thetic of Rez? At this stage in our thinking Clive played the game again but this time
trying to think what the attractors would be for those who don't know anything about
the codes of modern art. One thought that came to mind very quickly was fi reworks:
vivid explosions of intense color that fade and are gone and are all overlaid on
brightly colored wire frame models. When we target and destroy objects in Rez the
results look very much like a fi rework display which, it seemed to me, would be
understood by almost everyone.
Rez as a fi rework display seems a real possibility but does this connect with
Kandinsky's visual aesthetic? Not directly; Kandinsky never seems to have men-
tioned fi reworks as an infl uence despite the fact that he did write extensively about
his own personal aesthetics. However, he wanted his painting to express only “ inner
and essential feelings.” He believed that color and shape should be viewed less in
the perceptual dimension and in more in their possibility to affect the soul. He
stressed the psychological effects of pure color, the way in which “a bright red
could affect us like the call of a trumpet,” for instance. In other words he was
trying to appeal to the interpretive code of visual perception, as Chandler calls it
(Chandler, 1994). In other words we have a primitive response to color and shape
rather than it representing something else. In this sense Kandinsky has a strong
affi nity, however unspoken, with fi reworks, for his paintings were intended to
appeal to us in the same primitive way that fi reworks do. I think this is the expla-
nation. Both Rez and Kandinsky's abstract paintings appeal directly to interpretive
codes rather than social or textual ones.
Let ' s refl ect a little on Driver and the way semiotics can help us with our analy-
sis of this game. A particular issue we raised at the beginning of Chapter 6 was the
role of genre and back-story in forming intentions. We did not actually explain how
this worked; we merely observed it in action. Semiotics can help us understand it
better. When we watch the opening prerendered scenes that introduce Driver and its
back-story we are presented with some narrative fragments, basically fi lm codes,
that tell us who we are and what we are going to be doing. We do this by building