You Are the One - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 6

structures or functions within the human brain—although there is some evidence to
support this (e.g., Damasio, 1994). Nonetheless, semiotic analysis of communica-
tions artifacts—texts to semioticians—is a very valuable and general technique for
gaining insights into the way in which humans communicate and make meaning
using a whole range of media. Semiotics and, in particular, the semiotics of computer
games is the subject of Part II of this topic.
What kinds of theories and models might be useful to us in trying to investigate
the fundamental nature of computer games? Many computer games already make
use of some pretty heavy theory. The game engine for a driving game, for instance,
will make use of various theories from physics in order to make the behavior of the
vehicles appear as realistic as necessary. The math for friction, torque, suspension
systems, acceleration, deceleration, and much more will all be embedded into the
program code. We have already noted the role economic theory plays in SimCity
and it is fairly obvious the roles ballistics and models of explosions play in the
much - maligned fi rst - person shooter . (In the rest of the topic genres will be written
in italics, as in beat - ' em - up .)
Many of the very early games were in fact models of a particular theory: inertial
physics for early space games, dynamics for the bouncing balls in Pong and Break-
out, and basic artifi cial intelligence theories for nonplayable characters as diverse as
the Ghosts in PacMan and the people that Ryo Hazuki meets in Shenmue. Such
theories are at the heart of just about every game you could think of. Even Tetris
has a simplistic notion of gravity coupled with a basic theory of the way right-angled
objects fi t together.
But these are not the kinds of theory we need to use to investigate games.
Understanding how the theory of gravity works in a game doesn't help you under-
stand why the game does or doesn't work for its players. We need to understand the
very nature of gameplay, the kinds of pleasures people experience in playing games,
the reasons why people recognize a bunch of fl ickering pixels and digitized sounds
as a realistic world in which we can get frightened or feel elated, and, most impor-
tantly, why we are so willing to devote so many hours of our lives to such artifi cial
deceptions.
So there are theories we program into games. More importantly for us, are there
also theories that can help us to probe into the nature of games, which will allow us
to establish general principles of games? The answer is yes and no. There are such
theories but computer games are developing so quickly that our fundamental under-
standing of them lags behind our ability to build them. Coming to understand com-
puter games is very much a research topic. Much of what is in this topic is based
on current or recent research. Contemporary computer games are also very complex
entities and no single, simple theory is going to describe them. Not even a whole
bunch of theories is going to do that. Despite this we are going to try to do just that.
Let us say a few words about our approach to theory. All the theories in this
topic are holistic in the sense that they all apply to the whole game and not bits and
pieces of it. We won't just study the game's internal economy or the interface; we' ll
study the game as whole. In the early chapters our theories won't be that deep but
they will be useful. As the topic develops the theories will get more complex, but