Pleasure - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 27

Chapter 4
Pleasure
In the previous chapter we noted the close relationship between genre and activity
profi les and how this related to the pleasures to be gained by playing particular types
of games. Individuals' preferences for particular game genres are driven, to a large
extent, by their preferences for certain types of activity within games. But whatever
the genre or the activity profi le, we are talking about the basic pleasure of taking
action, of intervening, of affecting change in the environment in the particular ways
offered by the game. This pleasure is characteristic of computer games. All com-
munications media offer pleasures of one sort or another to those who make use of
them. Some of these pleasures are particular to the medium and some will also be
offered by other media. In this chapter we are going to build a model of the general
kinds of pleasures that people experience as a result of playing games.
Watching fi lms does not require physical activity nor does it offer any form of
interaction on our part. One of the great pleasures of feature fi lms is to lose oneself
in someone else's story. Other forms of storytelling offer similar pleasures. Film also
offers other pleasures of course: the pleasure of great characters and acting, of great
camera work, lighting, and sets, and so on. But pleasure is at the heart of our appre-
ciation of all communications media.
It is almost as if there are really three great generic pleasures offered by com-
munications media:
1. The pleasure of taking part.
2. The pleasure of being told a story.
3. The pleasure of losing oneself.
You can have 1 and 3, and you can have 2 and 3, but can you have 1, 2 and 3? In
this chapter we are mainly concerned with 1 and 3 but we will consider the combi-
nation of 1, 2 and 3 when we examine the classic text adventure game Zork.
The pleasures we gain from communications media come under the study of
aesthetics and this is going to be the basis for our next invasion of the computer
game world. We are of course primarily interested in the aesthetics of computer