All Work and Play - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 160

keys which are in fact implemented as buttons within the applet you'll know exactly
what I mean. Instead of employing tactility and proprioception to issue the four basic
commands you constantly have to look at the arrow keys (buttons) and the cursor
and in doing so look away from the game space itself. The game gets a lot more
diffi cult. Many web-based versions of Breakout suffer from a similar problem.
Many games, though not all, employ this sensory split to distinguish the signs
of the game state from the “signs of intervention”—the input devices and what they
mean to us. In RTS games, which are less twitchy and more measured, we can suc-
cessfully make use of a mouse, cursor, and buttons to be clicked as signs of interven-
tion in order to command NPCs, order things to be built, and so on. Force feedback
joysticks are interesting because there is actually a split between passive haptics—
the feel of buttons and so on—and active haptics—vibrations that signify forces
acting on the player—and so there is still a subtle but clear split between signs
associated with the game state and those associated with intervention.
Pac-Man appears to be a sign we can handle but we can only handle him indi-
rectly, we cannot touch him. In actual point we can touch him—on the screen— but
he will not be aware of our touching him or respond to our touches. We have to
handle him indirectly through the signs of intervention. One of the great pleasures
of games is the sense of agency we are offered. In effect, this means we are offered
the ability to reconfi gure certain signs in a limited number of ways; these signs in
turn may cause reconfi gurations in other signs.
The ability to intervene, to be able to reconfi gure signs, constitutes the basis of
the pleasure we gain from playing games; agency, in a word. Intervention signs are
principally conventions, they are symbols; we have to learn them anew for each
new game. As with all consoles, the Dreamcast uses the same game controller for
Shenmue, Rez, and many, many more games. Shenmue uses several sets of conven-
tions, one for each of the genres the game is liable to switch to. The highly symbolic
nature of intervention signs seems not to bother players, whereas the signifi cation
of the game world and the current game state seems to need to be iconic- indexic to
a large extent for more and more games. At the end of this chapter we will consider
some later signs of intervention technologies that are not so symbolic, Wii and
Kinect for example, where the sensory split is not so clear cut.
The result of this sensory split is that, for very many games, the audio- visual
modes denote the past and connote possible futures while the haptic mode denotes
the particular interventions we can make moment by moment and, importantly, con-
notes the means of achieving the possible futures connoted to us through the audio-
visual senses. It is rare of course that invoking intervention signs leads directly to a
game future that we desire. The pleasure of agency is that we have to plan and act
on those plans in the hope getting what we want.
It is tempting to think that agency therefore breaks down into a simple cycle in
which the game engine signifi es the game state to us and we in turn signify intention
through particular interventions to the game engine. It does not usually work that
way, however. The computer usually doesn't stop and wait for our next intervention;
it keeps going, even in most overtly turn based games. Of course, there are examples
where everything stops until the player makes their required intervention.