Activity - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 70

Figure 3.1 Activity profi les for Final Fantasy X and Sacred. (See color insert.)

These activity profi les are a bit like the activity profi les for the set of genres we
developed in the previous chapter and for Adams and Rollings' general genres,
except:

• there is one for each game; and
• instead of someone guessing what activities have what importance they are
calculated from professional reviewers' assessments of games.

An example of activity profi les for two RPGs, Final Fantasy X and Sacred,
can be found in Figure 3.1. You'll see that 18 AGs are needed to represent the two
games. Of these, 15 were shared by both games and three are found only in Final
Fantasy X.
Because both games are RPGs you would expect them to share a lot of AGs in
common. In particular, the highest scoring activity—the longest horizontal bar on
the chart, confronting—is common to both and gets the highest score for both.
However, as we go down through the lower scoring AGs we see that the overall
profi le for each game is somewhat different. FFX has four other AGs scoring over
5, while Sacred has only one. The only one they share at this level of importance is
attacking, a very “ twitchy ” AG. We 'll use the term “twitchy” to refer to AGs requir-
ing fast refl ex responses from the player as opposed to slower, more measured
activities. Twitch factor (defi ned below) measures how twitchy a game is overall.
FFX also has high scores for three other AGs: skill enhancement, story, and
music, which are three non-twitchy AGs. Thus already we can see that Sacred is a
more twitchy game than FFX and this is refl ected in the twitch factor pie charts and
the overall twitch factors of 1.16 and 0.55 respectively.