This is Not a Software Industry - The Video Game Industry: Formation, Present State, and Future - page 12

THE VIDEO GAME USER/PLAYER
Users of popular software packages are rarely referred to as “players,” as
is almost universally the practice for those participating in the execution
of a video game. Players of games come to construct complex relationships
with a game's characters, narratives, music and mechanics. Even at a sur-
face level, games present users with very dif erent experiences. Users rarely
experience a unifi ed user interface from one game to the next. Controls can
dif er substantially from one game to the next.
When people make use of software packages, they often make assump-
tions about the functionality of those tools. If a software package deviates
from those expectations, it often does so at its own peril. Video games,
on the other hand, continually retrain the player and make no assump-
tion about consistency. Players can be moulded to perform the actions of
a game. Indeed, players often expect learning curves and even enjoy the
challenge of meeting a new game's mechanics and game systems as part of
what makes playing “fun.”
Cheating is a function that dif ers from that of software industries.
Software is often viewed as a tool to be used in certain ways. Games, on
the other hand, construct a virtual world for the player that often makes
assumptions about how the player ought to interact with the underlying
systems and other players. Whereas software may encourage one particular
use over another, “incorrect” use does not often result in one being labelled
as a cheater or capable of being ejected from the use of the software. Games
and the communities that surround them, on the other hand, take “proper
usage” very seriously and may often police those boundaries above and
beyond the rules of the game itself (Consalvo 2007).
Game players make no assumptions about the movement of player data
from one game to the next, as users of software may make about the abil-
ity to import, export or copy and paste information from one context to
the next. A game is a defi ned universal space outside of the ordinary, and
it is not expected to work alongside the other software of another player.
Rather, most games take over the screen of the user, transporting them to a
virtual space separate from their typical computer “desktop.”
Players too expect something dif erent from a video game than they do
from software. Software is often viewed as a tool to provide a desired util-
ity or functionality. Video games, on the other hand, are expected to con-
tain content. This is what separates a massively multiplayer online game
(MMOG) like World of Warcraft (WoW) from a virtual world like Second
Life . Second Life was software where users were expected to create the
content. WoW, on the other hand, was expected (and most certainly did) to
contain a massive amount of content, quests, missions and other elements.
Often this made Second Life perplexing to people accustomed to virtual
worlds as created by game developers. Users/players expected things to be
there, they had not been expected to create. Even in more recent examples