Big Game Hunting - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 179

interactive properties of one of these. Furthermore, we should easily be able to
identify the interactive sign, or signs, because the signs of intervention link us, the
player, to it, them.
We would expect the player to recognize, intuitively of course, the CBS class
that the various signs belong to and make use of this in terms of both the signs of
intervention and the level of agency that sits just above this. As we have already
suggested, game players will instantly recognize the basic mechanics of agency: the
relationship between the signs of intervention and the interactive sign— however
simplistic or complicated the latter might be—and the relationships between control-
ler, actor, and object signs. Understanding this leads to the next level of relationships,
which is the aesthetics of agency, intention, and perceivable consequence. By under-
standing what we can affect and what can affect us—or rather our interactive
sign—we are in a position to identify attractors, form intentions, and make nonse-
miotic acts—issue commands through intervention signs—and assess perceivable
consequences looking for rewards. Understanding this enables steps 3 and 4 in
the GIS we outlined earlier; the mechanics underpinning forming and resolving
intentions.
At this point we have to take account of the more high-level view. We know
that intentions are strongly infl uenced by genre and back-story. They also infl uence
the rewards we fi nd in perceivable consequences and the attractor(s) we identify—
within perceptual mapping structures of choice points and retainers, for instance—as
the stimulus for the next round of intention forming. In conjunction with our knowl-
edge of the CBS attributes of signs and the meanings of signs derived from the genre
and back-story, on the one hand, and POs and semiotics in general, we are able to
identify and prioritize attractors and from these form intentions. This leads us into
repeated applications of the GIS. GIS can be nested, sometimes to many levels; an
intention may be suspended while we attempt to resolve another more pressing one
or a series of lower-level intentions that need to be resolved in order to resolve the
higher level one. Collecting health and ammo in an FPS as we continue the fi re fi ght
are good examples.
Gameplay is exactly the repetition of these processes and leads to the unfolding
of narrative potential, the awareness of co-presence, the experience of transforma-
tion, and hopefully presence itself. In doing this we will be aware of the type of
activities we are involved with and the twitchiness of the game. The genre, activity
profi le, and general twitchiness will be factors which helped to infl uence us to play
the game in the fi rst place. This, then, is the code of interaction and is visualized in
Figure 12.2 .
The code of interaction looks pretty complicated and to some extent it is; our
studies thus far have been suggesting this. But it is quite understandable— it is! We
can see the semiotic underpinning of this cycle quite clearly in Figure 12.2. We can
see, for instance, why agency (aesthetics) and attractor-reward pairs (POs) are so
complementary. Attractors and perceivable consequences are both on the plane of
the signifi er, the lilac swathe that runs from the bottom left to the top right corner.
Intentions and rewards are on the plane of the signifi ed—the pinkish swathe that
runs top left to bottom right. Attractor-intention pairs and perceivable consequence-