Big Game Hunting - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 176

Chapter 12
Big Game Hunting
So, we are just about at the end of the topic. But we're not quite fi nished yet. We
have not answered the question that is the title of Part II of this topic: “What Is a
Game?” We, the authors that is, have got some answers: not all of them, by any
means, and certainly not the answer . But in order to get at these answers, the fi rst
thing we are going to do is step back from the detailed theoretical studies we have
been making and take a look at the big picture, the helicopter (or SimCopter) view
of what we've been doing and see how it all fi ts together. It does all fi t together!
With this big picture in mind we're going to defi ne the “code of interaction”:
the code that players use to play games. The code that allows players to make sense
of and therefore to make meaningful the games they play. The code of interaction
will help us put together some answers to the question of “What is a game?”
The fi nal purpose of this chapter is to discuss ways in which you, the reader,
maybe a student of video games, a game developer in some capacity, or someone
involved in the industry in some way or other, can put what you've learned to practi-
cal use.
We—everyone—need to be more open, more honest, more questioning about
what video games really are! This chapter will bring together everything we have
put forward in this topic and will, hopefully, help stimulate much debate and ques-
tioning. So, fi rst things fi rst: how on earth does all this theory fi t together?
SEMIOSPHERE
Yuri Lotman, a Russian semiotician, coined the term “semiosphere” to refer to the
whole semiotic space of a culture in question (Lotman). Games do not exist in a
cultural vacuum; the social codes and many of the textual codes upon which modern
3D games rely so heavily are all part of this semiosphere, the culture in which all
media of whatever form exist.
All the theories introduced in Part II of this topic are based on semiotics: POs,
CBS, the inside-out code, and the discussion on locating the player are all semiotic.
As can be seen from Part I, genre and aesthetics are defi nitely part of the wider fi eld