You Are the One - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 7

because we're using holistic theories we can put them all together to form an inte-
grated DIY analysis kit that looks at games from a variety of levels and from a
variety of viewpoints; but they'll still all work together.
We can do several useful things with this DIY package. For one thing, we can
go big game hunting! We can look at big games like Shenmue and SimCity and see
how they tick. No game will be too big for us. We can also use the package to try
and defi ne games more clearly. At the beginning of the topic the only defi nition I
use for computer game is that they are things that people call games that are played
on computers, consoles, handhelds, arcade machines, and so on. That's a really
sloppy defi nition but it makes sure we don't exclude anything because we used the
wrong defi nition. We'll return to this toward the end of the topic. Another thing we
can do is to use our package to think about game design and the creation of new
gameplay ideas. There will also be a lot of tasks for you to do to practice your
mastery of all this as the topic progresses.
GETTING STARTED
Despite their having been around for some forty years or so, computer games are
still an emerging art form. This means of course that what we are trying to understand
keeps changing, keeps diversifying, keeps evolving before our eyes. Janet Murray
discusses the implications of this in her excellent topic on using interactive digital
media, such as computer games and the World Wide Web, to create interactive stories
(Murray, 1997). It is worth noting some of her observations on the emergence of
new media in general. She identifi es three stages in the emergence of a new medium.
1. The Embryonic Medium . People anticipate the new medium prior to the
technology itself being available to support it.
2. The Incunabula Medium . The technology becomes available, in part at
least, but people are still learning how to create specifi cally for it.
3. The Fully Fledged Medium . New forms arise that are specifi c to the
medium and make best use of its capabilities.
Interactive digital media are mostly in the incunabula stage. We have the tech-
nology and have had it for some years now. We are still very much in the process
of learning how to use it for what it is and creating specifi cally for it. It could well
be argued that computer games are moving to being a fully fl edged medium because
of the fact that we have forms specifi c to the medium and some of these forms are
quite mature. The fi rst - person shooter could be considered a mature form. There are
other genres which are still at the incunabula stage and others that have still to
emerge, if indeed they ever do. Virtual storytelling—using computer games to tell
stories—is currently the subject of much research and debate: it is most defi nitely
incunabula but might never become fully fl edged.
This highlights one of the problems. The fact that interactive media, such as
computer games, are mostly still in their incunabula stage means we can't yet see
exactly what we are trying to characterize and understand. Murray sees this as the