You Are the One - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 2

Chapter 1
You Are the One
Games are about creativity! Right? Games are about great gameplay ideas translated
into great graphics and sound! Right? And because they're creative there is no place
for science and experiments and all that measurement stuff that comes with them.
Games should be purely about creativity! Right? Wrong! They can't be. Games are
probably the most technological, most science-based entertainment medium there
is. There are aspects of physics and rag dolls and collision detection and a whole
lot of other stuff involved, not to mention math and programming. Games are where
creativity and technology meet head on. That's what makes them so fascinating
to study.
This topic is an investigation into the nature of computer games. It's an invasion
that gets below the pixelated surface and digitized sound the player sees and hears;
that gives designers and producers and publishers tools to gain their own insights
into how existing games work, to get some clues as to where games are going and,
maybe, to give the investigator an edge in a hugely competitive world. There's bound
to be a few maybes here; games are too big and complex and there are too many of
them for there not to be a few maybes.
This topic offers you some very practical tools to work with in analyzing games;
they are also tools to think and invent with. It's all based on a module Clive ran in
the School of Computing at Teesside University in the North East of England. The
module was called “Games Futures” and was mostly taken by students in their fi nal
year of the BSc Computer Games Design degree. It was designed to make students
think about computer games in a more fundamental way. By their very nature,
computer games are designed to deceive. They are designed so that the player is
deceived into believing that the fl ickering pixels and digitized sounds amount to
something real: a planet in the far future, a steampunk city, a football game, a
Formula One Grand Prix, and so on. Of course the player is more than willing to
go along with this deception if he or she possibly can. Most of us want to be deceived
by computer games. That is when the fun starts. Hence the term “willing suspension
of disbelief” coined by the poet Coleridge (1817) way back in the beginning of the
nineteenth century. He was talking about the power of poetry to conjure up images
and imaginary worlds but his words apply just as well to computer games.