Big Game Hunting - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 182

you, Ryo that is, judge to be hungry and lost. You have already gone through a cycle
here in identifying and responding to the audio attractor of the cat's meow and
forming and resolving the intention to fi nd the cat that is meowing.
But now you have a choice: ignore the cat and get on with resolving your main
intention, trying to fi nd anyone who saw your father's killers making their getaway.
Or, set yourself a new intention of fi nding something for the cat to eat and put your
main intention on hold for a while. If you choose the later—and a little altruism in
a game like Shenmue is often rewarded—then you have a hierarchy of intentions:
to feed the cat you need to fi nd some food, but where can you fi nd some cat food?
There is a small general store nearby and a convenience store downtown. You could
visit the shops and fi nd something that the cat could eat. And so we have nested
intentions, remembered attractors, multiple perceivable consequences and a hierar-
chy of rewards. All this reinforces:
• Narrative potential: The little side drama of the hungry cat.
• Our transformation as Ryo Hazuki.
• Co - presence: We 'll meet more people.
• Presence: All this exercise of agency adds to our sense of involvement and
acceptance of the game world.
In the end, your reward is talking to the little girl whose cat it is and who saw a
black car speeding down the road soon after your father was murdered . . .
Breakout and Shenmue both adhere to the code of interaction despite their
apparently sharing nothing in common. What they do share is what is at the heart
of all games: the repeated patterns of interaction.
Maybe we have attempted to explain that which did not at fi rst seem to need to
be explained. You all knew this, didn't you? If that is the case then interaction is not
just a code but a code supported and enabled by a myth, a myth in semiotic terms
of course. Remember, a myth in semiotics is not some fantastical story that probably
never happened but a deeply rooted set of cultural beliefs that we take for granted
as being in some way “natural,” as being how the world works.
The myth of interaction provides the motivation for all this: for the predilection
of people to spend huge amounts of time and energy playing these games; and for
the creation of a huge industry that feeds and sustains this predilection by designing
and building ever more games and evolving the technology, the platforms, on which
these games can be played.
THE MYTH OF INTERACTION
One way to get at this myth is to do a paradigmatic test on the verb table for a game;
remember verb tables. Take a game like Driver, which we have spent some time
examining. Make a list of the present participles that characterize what forms of
agency we are offered. We get such things as: steering, accelerating, slowing down,
hand-brake turns, and so on. This is, of course, the process we went through to get