Pleasure - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 41

is also a social space where people live and can be talked to and can give you infor-
mation. In Zork you are co-present in a whole variety of ways.
In many ways, aesthetics are fundamental to good game design. Aesthetics talks
about general characteristics of communications media and the particular but general
pleasures which are the end result of interacting with a particular game.
The underlying architectural features of games, procedural, participatory,
spatial, and encyclopedic, help us to understand why particular games perhaps do
not work aesthetically as well as they might: the game is not encyclopedic enough;
it is not spatial enough, it is procedural but there are not enough rules and/or the
rules are naive or just plain wrong. They are actually general properties of game
content, the actual stimuli that the game engine delivers through its interface tech-
nologies. If a game does work then these features can help us. They can be very
useful in “fault diagnoses.” We could do more if we had a more detailed theory
of game content to work with. That is the subject of Part II of this topic, “ What Is
a Game?”
SUMMARY
We can observe a common characteristic of all three of the games analyzed in this
chapter. In terms of content, they are all abstractions of the worlds they seek to
simulate. Even later, apparently more realistic games rely on such abstractions. One
of the prime arts of game design is to get the abstractions right. Aesthetics tells us
where to look for those abstractions, where we cannot afford to make cuts. Content
should be developed to enable agency fi rst of all. For it is from agency that all other
aesthetic pleasures of games fl ow.
The aesthetics we are working with do not tell us exactly what meanings people
derive from games but, importantly, they do point to the pleasures people derive
from playing them. At the beginning of this chapter we made the distinction between
the pleasure of taking part, the pleasure of being told a story, and the pleasure of
losing oneself.
The contrast between fi lm and interactive media such as games makes this
quite clear:
• Film has a strong potential for narrative, rather than narrative potential, and
presence and co-presence; a lesser potential for transformation; and no poten-
tial for agency.
• Games have strong potential for agency; narrative potential, rather than nar-
rative; co-presence is often very strong; and presence and a strong potential
for transformation are important.
We are dealing here with both ends of the media spectrum: being told a story and
being part of a story. Both are pleasurable experiences if well done, but the doing
and taking part of that is at the heart of games and the way this affects meaning is
very much the subject of Part II of this topic. Before that, the next chapter looks at
two more modern games in some detail and makes use of all the theories studied