Pleasure - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 29

particular, we would like some general principles concerning computer game aes-
thetics that we can then use to compare and contrast games we know well. In the
next chapter we will compare our studies of aesthetics with the studies from the
previous chapters to see how they all fi t together. But fi rst we need to build up our
model of computer game aesthetics.
AESTHETICS AND COMPUTER GAMES
A number of people have written about the aesthetics of computer games and inter-
active digital media in general. In this section we are going to review some of these
and use them to assemble a general aesthetics for computer games.
In the introduction to this topic we mentioned some observations on the emer-
gence of new media by Janet Murray (1997) in her excellent topic, Hamlet on the
Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace . We are going to return to that
topic, as she also characterizes the enabling features that are required of the archi-
tecture of digital environments to support interactive digital media, computer games
in our case. We noted a specifi c instance of this with respect to Spacewar above.
She sees successful digital environments as having to be:
• Procedural: They make use of rules and rule-based descriptions of places,
people, objects, and so on.
• Participatory: In order to appreciate the particular pleasures of digital environ-
ments, users have to take part.
• Spatial: In the sense that they are able to portray navigable space; this does
not mean just 3D space, but the navigable space of the WWW, of conversa-
tions, and so on.
• Encyclopedic: Digital environments offer the potential for information spaces
that are simply too big to be comprehended by the human mind.
Murray suggests these are the enabling properties that allow computer games
to offer aesthetic pleasures for the player to experience and are what the creative
person has to work with at an architectural level in order to create a successful game.
We can see these as a high level theory of computer game architecture. When we
have developed our aesthetics of computer games we can use the characterization
above to fi nd out why a game does or does not deliver on its aesthetic promises. In
other words, we can identify the strength or weakness of each of the four features
to support the aesthetic pleasures, or lack thereof, that a game exhibits.
We move on to the aesthetics themselves now but will stay with Janet Murray
for a moment. She suggests an aesthetic for digital interactive media with three basic
components:
• Immersion: Be able to become lost in the story/game.
• Agency: To feel some degree of control over what is happening.
• Transformation: To be enhanced with extra powers, to become someone else
or something else.