Pleasure - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 30

When we play a computer game, whatever its genre, we will, if it is well
designed and coded, get so lost in playing it that we will forget about the rest of the
world around us; we will be so absorbed in the game that we will feel immersed; it
will provide the only stimuli that we are aware of. More than this, we will derive
great pleasure in this sense of losing ourselves in this artifi cial world.
One of the main contributing factors to this sense of immersion will be the sense
of agency we feel we have, the sense of control we are able to exercise over the
game world or, in most games, the battle for control. As we already said, complete
control does not, on the whole, make for an enjoyable game.
And fi nally, in Murray's aesthetics, we may well feel transformed: we may have
temporarily become someone else, another species, another creature, a machine, or
a normally inanimate object, for example. This sense of transformation may be more
subtle in that we are just ourselves but with extra powers or doing things we normally
wouldn't dream of doing. We have no intention of ever driving a getaway car for a
criminal gang but we're more than happy to do so in a game and more than happy
to feel totally immersed, take pleasure in the agency we can exercise in that game-
world and thoroughly enjoy this criminal transformation and breaking all the rules
of the road. Sometimes transformation is more than this. In Aliens vs. Predator, many
people like to play the alien and walk upside down on ceilings, spit hot acid at
people, and see all this through a sort of “fi sh eye lens” view of the world.
So, as a starting point in our bid to establish a general aesthetics of games we
have Murray's three aesthetic principles. But there are other people who have some-
thing to say on this matter. Doug Church, from the games industry, proposed a set
of Formal Abstract Design Tools (FADTs) (Church, 1999) which to all intents and
purposes are an aesthetic of computer games. His FADTs are:
• Intention
• Perceivable consequence
• Story
Story might seem fairly obvious, in that we all enjoy the pleasure of a good
story, but intention and perceivable consequence may be less so. What he is talking
about here is actually quite compatible with Murray's concept of agency. Intention
is the pleasure we feel in understanding the logic of a computer game and being
able to decide what action would be best to take next in order to make progress.
Perceivable consequence is the pleasure we gain from seeing the results of our
actions in the way the game world changes, maybe to our benefi t, maybe not. Agency
is not about always being right and always winning. That would make for a pretty
boring game. The pleasure of agency is this interplay between our intentions, what
we would like to happen, and the perceivable consequences of our actions, what
actually happens. This is the real pleasure of agency, at least in computer games.
We are less happy with story as an aesthetic pleasure of games. It is easy to
point out games that have no story and yet that have agency in abundance and are
highly immersive. Tetris is the best example we can think of. We've played it our-
selves for hours but it never occurred to us that it was a story of any sort. We could