Big Game Hunting - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 178

meaning-making happens: where the game player makes sense of the game. We
mentioned this in the previous chapter. We'll look at it in detail in the next section.
Those familiar with playing games will intuitively look for these codes and the
way they are implemented. Such codes operate strongly at the paradigmatic level;
the choice of what mode, for instance, to use (text, platform, 3D, etc.) has a great
effect on the way people respond to the game. All together these make up the range
of textual codes which both characterize a particular communications medium and
enable us to interact with it and derive pleasure from it.
We noted several times the importance of the inside-out code, with which we
build up our own mental map of the internal economy of the game engine. Without
the inside-out code, the code of interaction and the associated textual codes would
not be very effective as we would not have enough information to know how we
are to play the game.
There is also the whole gamut of social codes which allow us to fi nd aspects of
the world outside the game meaningfully inside the game: body language, speech,
dress, and so on. And now we seem to have the complete picture, or at least a fairly
complete picture that gives an overall view of the relationships between all the theo-
ries we have been studying in this topic. Of course, not all games require the player
to use all these codes. We don't need to go over again the differences in this respect
between Tetris and Final Fantasy, do we?
Let's repeat that all the theories focus in on the code of interaction. That is the
heart of all gameplay and therefore of all games. But notice also that it is the GIS
that are the fi lter for understanding particular games and that allow us to build
models of particular gameplays. The code of interaction is the beating heart of the
meaning-making process of gameplay.
THE CODE OF INTERACTION
The theories used in this topic range from a fairly high-level view of games, activity
profi les, genre, and twitch factors through to content-oriented views, which get
pretty close to gameplay, namely, POs and computer-based signs. Aesthetics seems
to bridge the divide: narrative potential, transformation, co-presence, and presence
belong more with the high-level view of Part I and agency sits closely with the
content-oriented view of Part II. All these views are underpinned and largely com-
pleted by semiotics. The discussions of the work of meaning, the signs of interven-
tion, Andersen's CBS, and the inside-out code in the previous chapter seem to give
us a more low-level, functional view. The code of interaction is the set of rules which
allow us to recognize the signifi cations of agency that allow us to play the games at
all. This is our theory that characterizes gameplay.
Let's start at the bottom. CBS give us a very low-level view of game func-
tionality. We would expect all content, all assets, in a game to be one of the follow-
ing: interactive, actor, controller, object, layout, or ghost. In other words, whatever
form an asset might take, car, chair, NPC, vulture, gun, door, bunch of fl owers, Alien,
or Predator, we would expect it to belong to one of these categories: to have the