All Work and Play - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 170

signs which can affect or be affected by others constitute the major events in the
gameplay. One of the nice things about CBS is that they allow us to incorporate the
signs of intervention, of the physical interface, quite readily into the model. Figure
11.1 illustrates this and shows the nature of the nonsemiotic act of command, the
intervention.
But let us emphasize the fact that the act of pushing a button, to change Pac-
Man's direction for instance, is nonsemiotic as far as the console/PC is concerned
does not mean it is devoid of meaning to us the player. To us the button signifi es
the possibility to interact, it signifi es direction, and pushing it signifi es directing
Pac - Man.
CBS, as we have used them, talk only of the mechanics of interaction, in the
sense that they don't differentiate between a blue rectangle representing the paddle
in Breakout, a group of blocks to be spun and moved in Tetris, and a detailed 3D
avatar with a wide range of movements (e.g., Ryo in Shanmue). They are all interac-
tive signs according to CBS. Underpinning all games is a simple mechanic that is
captured by CBS, and that is strength.
We have a range of theories to take care of more complex layers of meaning-
making and, as we have already noted, even very simple games can have meanings
that conjure up associations with the world outside the game world. In the next
chapter we'll show how all the theories in this topic interrelate and work together.
But we still have more to gain from studying and using CBS.
THE INSIDE-OUT CODE
In this chapter we have considered games in terms of the work of meaning— pressing
buttons, working joysticks, and moving mice—in conjunction with the process of
meaning making itself. We have seen how the signs of intervention integrate with
CBS and how this low level of viewing games integrates with higher-level views via
GISs. Let's look again at the work of meaning because there are other aspects to do
with gameplay that the game engine attempts to signify to us which are quite funda-
mental. The “ side effects ” in Figure 11.1 are a clue to this because they represent the
game engine, often via the HUD, trying to give us information necessary to the
gameplay that is not accessible through the main gamespace: the number of lives
remaining in a Pac-Man level is a good example. Let's think about this some more.
The heart of any computer game is the game engine and its associated data. The
game engine of a modern computer game is a very large and highly complex piece
of software consisting of hundreds of megabytes of code written in a high level,
perhaps object oriented, programming language. By contrast, early classic games
were very often only a few thousand bytes of code written directly in assembler. But
in this case, size really doesn't matter when we ask the following question: how
much of the game engine's actual functioning does the player need to understand?
The vast majority of players are not programmers; they would not be able to
make any sense at all of the game engine's source code, its algorithmic structures,
the interdependency of its subroutines, the data it stores and how it stores it, the