Pleasure - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 40

Looking at our analyses for the three games above makes it obvious that agency
works in different ways for different applications domains:
• At an online shopping site we want to be in complete control; we want infor-
mation about products and payments, we want to be completely aware of the
payment process, where we are in it, and how safe our credit card details are.
• In Zork and the majority of other games there is a fi ne balance between how
much we are in control and how much we are at the mercy of the game' s
engine and any intelligent agents currently active. An appropriate sense of
agency—and an appropriate but also surprising mismatch between intention
and perceivable consequence—is of central importance to the success of
any game.
What does “control” mean? Navigational control? Control over the forces at
work within the game? In a text - adventure you will have the former but battle for
the latter. In a racing game you will have a bit of both. The better you get at
navigating—literally driving, in this case—the more control you have and this
increasing sense of skill and control is one of the pleasures of such games. As we
already pointed out, in an online shopping site you want to be in complete control
of both. Imagine a little thief sprite that ran up and stole your money and topics on
some random basis once you had entered your credit details. If this happened at
Amazon.com you would be rightly annoyed and stop using the site. If it happened
in a game such as Thief you might fi nd it an intriguing aspect of the gameplay and
seek ways to protect yourself and get your belongings back.
We believe narrative potential to be fundamental to games, but again, the types
of narrative potential appropriate to different genres might well determine the nature
or even possibility of stories that will arise for users through the exercise of agency.
The kind of stories you carry away from Spacewar or Zork will be very different.
In the former it will be a recounting of your successes and failures, in the latter it
will be a story, your story within all the possible stories that Zork offers.
As with narrative potential, transformation plays very different roles for differ-
ent genres and might seem effectively irrelevant to some—many puzzle games, for
instance. However, losing yourself, as many people do in puzzle games, is also a
very pleasurable form of transformation for those who want, for example, to enter
a very simple gameplay world that makes them forget the complexities and stresses
and strains of their everyday lives. The vast majority of games offer transformation
in some form or other.
It is interesting how early co-presence found its way into computer games. All
the games we have analyzed aesthetically in this chapter offer co-presence as a
contributing pleasure. Yet they do it in quite different ways and for different reasons.
In Spacewar, co-presence provides the active threat, the major disruption of your
intentions and thus the major source of pleasure for this type of game. In Pac-Man
co-presence, in the form of the ghosts, is only a possible confrontational pleasure;
you could actually get very far into Pac-Man's ever more frantic levels having
always just avoided the ghosts and collected points in other ways. In Zork, there is
the element of confrontation and at times confrontation is the only option, but Zork