Big Game Hunting - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 184

WHAT IS A GAME?
A game is not its genre or activity profi le; nor its rendering style; nor how realistic
it is, or is not. Certainly, it is not the number of weapons or vehicles, it certainly is
not how you win or lose or, indeed, whether you can win or lose at all. Any game
will be some or all of these but none of them characterize what a game actually is.
In Chapter 3 we started to learn that games are about what the player actually does.
From the high-level view of activity profi ling, to the step by step view of perceptual
opportunities, and fi nally to the highly abstract and focused insights given to us by
computer-based signs: a game is how it implements the code of interaction.
Games are designed to grab players' attentions, to entrance them and in doing
so to force them to addictively follow through thousands and thousands of cycles
of interaction with limited degrees of variation in the name of play or entertainment
or achievement or whatever. A game is the succession of moments of intervention
that compel the player to make the next intervention and the next and the next,
perhaps hundreds of times in every minute. A good game, a great game, is one in
which chasing these endless, more or less repeated moments of intervention become
so compulsive for the player that nothing else matters. A game is essentially com-
pulsive repetition. That is what a game is; and that is why some people play them
and some people don' t.
The rest is, quite literally, window dressing. Pared down games, such as simpler
casual, puzzle, and retro games, rely on the very bare minimum of agency and
presence but still manage to engender compulsion in their players. Other games
dress up the window with extremes of narrative potential, transformation, and co-
presence, building amazingly detailed worlds and landscapes, epic story lines and
character sets. Some games add to this the online presence of thousands and thou-
sands of players. But at the heart of it all there still has to be this compulsive
repetition at whatever frequency, fast and furious or measured and thoughtful; that
is what a game is. Simple; isn't it? Yes, in a sense; but it is probably one of the
hardest media to succeed in. But maybe by understanding the cycle of compulsive
repetition in more detail it will be easier to master its art in new games yet to be
designed and made.
In a very fundamental way, video games are quite different from virtual reality
despite the similarities we have alluded to in earlier chapters. The illusion of some
imagined reality is part of some games, but it is an illusion. However sophisticated
the illusory world, the internal economy and the program logic for updating it will
be such that just about anyone can understand what is going on. Notice that the
program logic for rendering the visual gamespace with its supporting physics and
artifi cial intelligence and so on is always immeasurably more sophisticated than
that for the internal economy. Video games are sophisticated illusions; they are, in
a very real sense, confi dence tricks. SimCity, whatever version, presents us with a
model of millions of possible cities that just about anyone on earth can enjoy
building and being mayor of. What an amazing achievement. How compulsive
is that?
But before we fi nish, we have yet one fi nal question: