All Work and Play - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 171

relationship between code and hardware, nor the functioning of the hardware. Yet
somehow, players come to know something of all these, including:
• The signs of intervention and how they can be used to affect the game state;
• The internal economy of the game, the values associated with resources at
the players disposal or threats to the player's continued success; and
• The logic, the rules of the game, and how the game engine affects the game' s
internal economy.
It is certain that players build up abstract models of how games work and use these
to build up customized models for particular games. It is also certain that the genres
we fi nd in the press and in discussions of games in general are a vain and clumsy
attempt to describe in words the very subtle and powerful nonverbal abstractions
that our brains construct and employ so effortlessly and unconsciously when we
play games.
Computer games are superfi cial in the extreme! That is one of their great
strengths. We come to recognize the appearance of cities and landscapes, the appear-
ance of people, creatures, and alien life forms. We recognize the appearance of
behavior and intelligence, weather, health, wealth, and food. But they are all just
that: appearances. And one of these appearances, perhaps the most important of all,
is the glimpses of the game engine's logic and the internal economy it manages. A
good game signifi es an appearance of its own internal workings, it “ superfi cializes”
itself in the name of gameplay. We will call this aspect of a game the “ inside - out
code” for obvious reasons. It is a media code of games and some other forms of
interactive entertainment.
Without an understanding of its inside-out code, any game is going to be very
diffi cult to learn and to play. Such diffi culties would seriously detract from the
aesthetic pleasures of the game. But a game must nonetheless signify as much of its
internal working as necessary to allow players to make choices between competing
attractors, form intentions, and assess perceivable consequences. Sometimes there
is almost nothing to hide: Tetris is a good example. Sometimes much has to be
hidden or made less than clear to make the game playable. To succeed at SimCity
a player has to use the inside-out code to gain some understanding of the algorithms
the game uses to determine if your city is growing or shrinking, prospering or failing.
If the player were given comprehensive descriptions of these algorithms, the game
might not be worth playing at all.
Players work all the time with the inside-out code; it's a natural and necessary
part of gameplay. Players have a surprisingly intimate relationship with their game' s
software. And remember, one way to start to make sense of the inside-out code for
a particular game is to take notice of the way object signs change as a result of side
effects caused by actor signs or the interactive signs affecting changes in other signs.
Of course, there will be other causes, the passage of time for instance, but this is a
starting point. We are learning by building an internal mind-map of the algorithms
within the game. So in fact the game is teaching us the rules as we play. We are
learning by building an internal map of the algorithms within the game.