Activity - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 67

Chapter 3
Activity
In the last chapter we discussed the concept of computer and video game genre as
a very general defi nition of game types. Specifi cally, we used the idea of activity
types, or verbs, to characterize game genres and to help us think about the differ-
ences between these genres. What we actually did was develop a theory of computer
games. In this chapter we are going use this theory and develop it into a practical
model that we can use to analyze games. We will also discuss software we have
developed that allows us to use this model to investigate not only genres but any
meaningful set of games based on their activity profi les. In other words, this is where
we start putting theory into practice.
This software is able to automatically analyze thousands of games, in terms of
the activities the user performs while playing, and then it generates activity profi le
graphs to characterize each title. These profi les are accessed through a software
client tool, Game Invaders Live (GIL), which allows people to visualize the data.
In this chapter we are going to explain the way in which the game analysis process
works and the general principles that allow GIL to be used as a practical tool to
analyze individual games, groups of games, game genres and the whole range of
genre-related concepts we introduced in the previous chapter.
A tutorial explaining in detail how to use GIL can be found online. This chapter
simply acts as an introduction to the theoretical concepts that underlie GIL and their
practical use in investigating computer games.
THE STORY OF ACTIVITY GROUPS
The fi rst task in developing our software was to identify a basic set of activity groups
(AGs), which we could use to build our new, more subtle classifi cation of games.
Defi ning a game by activity alone was going to be problematic, if not controversial,
but we set about doing it anyway. So where did we start? We needed a working set
of games to analyze manually in order to build up a list of AGs we could test. To
make sure we had a representative group of games we chose to select them in equal
numbers from the main industry-defi ned genres.