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Page 1: ...Free your purchased eBook form adhesion DRM DRM Digtal Rights Management...

Page 2: ...Trigger Happy VIDEOGAMES AND THE ENTERTAINMENT REVOLUTION by Steven Poole...

Page 3: ...N OF SPECIES 35 Beginnings 35 Art types 45 Happiness is a warm gun 46 In my mind and in my car 51 Might as well jump 56 Sometimes you kick 61 Heaven in here 66 Two tribes 69 Running up that hill 72 It...

Page 4: ...ind 176 Cracked actors 181 Talking it over 187 The play s the thing 192 Tie me up tie me down 195 6 SOLID GEOMETRY 199 Vector class 199 The art of the new 204 Pushing the boundaries 206 Points of view...

Page 5: ...ime gentlemen please 322 Say something else 330 Information overlord 339 Drawing you in 345 10 THE PROMETHEUS ENGINE 351 God s gift 351 Burn this 354 Bad company 356 Genesis 364 The final frontier 367...

Page 6: ...ason Thompson phlegmatically suffered innumerable defeats at Tekken 3 and Gran Turismo but turned the tables in Bushido Blade He and Kate Barker also made constructive comments on the text Dr Mark Gri...

Page 7: ...in for their work on the U S edition Trigger Happy owes much to the incisive attentions of its editor Andy Miller il miglior fabbro Any infelicities or errors that remain I acknowledge mine Readers ar...

Page 8: ...life Formed in knotty binary strings each node representing information by its state of on or off and its place in the series the code grew adept at replicating in ever more complex structures Eventua...

Page 9: ...pleasure to a parasitic human during the reproductive act the chances of its offspring surviving were enhanced Obviously videogames were programmed by Nature to be as promiscuous as possible the more...

Page 10: ...pes There seems to be no final goal to the random machinations of Nature Some species of game for example turned at certain points down evolutionary blind alleys and failed to develop concentrating in...

Page 11: ...c and chess That s not unusual For most of my generation videogames are just part of the cultural furniture In particular videogames among people all over the world are a social pleasure The after hou...

Page 12: ...ze of a modern PC keyboard and it plugged into a normal television It was black with little gray squidgy keys and a rainbow stripe over one corner Tiny blocky characters would move around blocky lands...

Page 13: ...my ax heroics home computers the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 as well as a later more powerful generation comprising the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga were gradually being supplanted by home videogame...

Page 14: ...mplex and adventurous with ever larger profits to be made the hardware companies realized that technology had to keep pace with the designers ambitions The seemingly unassailable Nintendo having seen...

Page 15: ...oftware developers The landscape of power had irrevocably shifted while my back was turned Apart from the odd blast in an arcade I hadn t thought about videogames again Then one summer I was staying i...

Page 16: ...acing and Crash Bandicoot marsupial wrangling My research had to be dutifully wide ranging didn t it Soon I also bought the Nintendo 64 which slotted neatly on to my shelves with Super Mario 64 and 10...

Page 17: ...an watch TV or go to the movies According to the European Leisure Software Publishers Association the British videogame market already grosses 60 percent more than total movie box office receipts and...

Page 18: ...rs of the PlayStation the unassuming gray box that reinvigorated my own interest and that of so many others The last time they counted Sony had sold five million PlayStations in the UK alone The focus...

Page 19: ...uring another soundtrack cleverly poised between cutting edge and mass appeal dance music Sony targeted the youth market with intelligent aggression During the 1995 Glastonbury Festival they distribut...

Page 20: ...devotional tome Lara s Book the Germans have a monthly magazine dedicated to her In the summer of 1999 Lara could be seen hanging from the back of buses all over London and six months later a bus and...

Page 21: ...osterone dripping digital hero of humorous shoot the aliens games He sports a blond crop and mirrored shades and uses arch catchphrases such as It s time to chew gum and kick ass Bandai claimed to hav...

Page 22: ...rst experience of the PlayStation WipEout 2097 featured neon advertisements for Diesel jeans and Red Bull caffeine drinks that flashed by as you sped around its virtual racecourses Stockholm company A...

Page 23: ...the soundtrack for Quake CDs of specially written videogame music now regularly enter the pop charts in Japan and videogame scores are now eligible for three categories of soundtrack music in the ann...

Page 24: ...e released Final Fantasy The Spirits Within an 80 million computer generated feature film based on its enormously successful Final Fantasy games with voices provided by Hollywood stars Steve Buscemi J...

Page 25: ...nufacturers meanwhile have epic ambitions for their little lumps of extruded plastic Consoles aim to be not just gaming machines but the one stop entertainment center in the homes of millions One Sony...

Page 26: ...deogame console the Xbox which is also a domestic DVD player Consoles today can offer more different types of entertainment than ever before Can anything stop this fun juggernaut Research from U S ana...

Page 27: ...yet so progressive But videogames clearly have the potential to become an art form even if they are not there yet Here s why A videogame is put together by highly talented artists and graphic designe...

Page 28: ...meaning of aesthetics refers to things that are perceived by the senses Modern videogames dynamic and interactive fusions of colorful graphic representation sound effects music speed and movement are...

Page 29: ...ritten about videogames it was written seventy years ago by French novelist Georges Duhamel about the movies Yet today few people would argue that filmmaking is not an art form An art form that is dep...

Page 30: ...painting literature and so on But there s one critical difference that we need to bear in mind and it throws a huge spanner in the works of any easy equation between videogames and traditional art for...

Page 31: ...eculiar nature of videogames gives the old question several intriguing and novel digital spins The problem of mimesis in this context the virtual representation of realities informs the inner life of...

Page 32: ...with painting Where do videogames fit in the development of leisure technologies of perspectival representation of the narrative arts Where do videogames fit in the history of play Playing videogames...

Page 33: ...Kennedy had just promised that America would get to the moon within the decade Six months earlier Digital Equipment Corporation had delivered a hulking new mainframe computer a model PDP 1 to MIT s el...

Page 34: ...e An analogue computer showed the trajectories of bouncing balls drawn as ghostly blips on an oscilloscope controlled by a button and a knob It was a smash hit with the visitors for two years But owin...

Page 35: ...icker tape or punchcards and were strictly for esoteric mathematical applications But the new fangled circular dedicated VDU screen and keyboard of the PDP 1 tempted programmer Steve Russell and his f...

Page 36: ...possible a new sort of experience The photons fizzing from the screen were conceived as manipulable packets of pleasure in themselves rather than simply a fancy way for the computer to tell its user t...

Page 37: ...aft governed by inertial physics and the sensual buzz of playing with animated patterns of light The game is remarkably similar to Asteroids an arcade machine that appeared some seventeen years later...

Page 38: ...n years for cheap computer chip technology to make possible its wider distribution Meanwhile throughout the 1960s the small community of mainframe programmers produced other highly influential game te...

Page 39: ...sh puzzles But the world at large remained ignorant of the myriad charms of these proto videogames It was a closed community a priesthood without a parish Most people assume that coin operated arcade...

Page 40: ...y feasible and Bushnell joined pinball company Nutting Associates to develop a mass market version of Spacewar In 1971 1 500 units of Computer Space the first arcade game were produced The project bom...

Page 41: ...n Bushnell s apartment was set up in Andy Capp s Tavern a California pool bar It was soon collecting 300 a week in quarters six times as much as the neighboring pinball machine Amazed at the game s su...

Page 42: ...these Pong style games were direct descendants of the lost oscilloscope program by Willy Higinbotham who never made a penny Rip offs of home tennis and multi player arcade versions of tennis or hockey...

Page 43: ...broad church I m using the term videogames to encompass arcade games homeconsole games and computer games The bewildering array of different forms and styles could lead a casual observer to think that...

Page 44: ...een Farther up a phalanx of fifty five evil aliens tramps across the screen in a smug dance of death When they reach one side of the screen they all descend one space and go back the other way Your ta...

Page 45: ...away but then another reappears in its place lower down and more bomb happy The eerie bass thumping of the invaders progress increases in tempo along with your heartbeat Just how long will you last s...

Page 46: ...rly and engagingly enthusiastic book on videogames Invasion of the Space Invaders To appear on the Great Score sheet is a powerful incentive in space game praxis a yearning perhaps connected with scho...

Page 47: ...the reason why for a few years the shoot em up expanded the possibilities of videogame action more than any other type of game Throughout the 1980s shoot em ups boasted ever more dazzling lightshows...

Page 48: ...k game Battlezone 1980 ousted its two dimensional counterparts as king of the hill at the same time adding rudimentary quest and object manipulation requirements which especially as environments and p...

Page 49: ...s where you used to be Earth s last hope you are now a member of a U S government SWAT team protecting the interests of national security But the purism and simplicity of the gameplay shows that the g...

Page 50: ...and speed are part of the feel Every increase in technological power enhances the genre s unique pleasure the feeling of hurling a vehicle around a realistic environment at suicidal velocities Conver...

Page 51: ...Racer Type 4 prettier faster better 1999 Namco Ltd all rights reserved Early two dimensional racing games with a flat road scrolling up the screen were little more than simple dodge games or with gun...

Page 52: ...o throw their cars into powerslides with abandon and not to worry too much about hitting other competitors these vehicles might look like racing cars but they act like dodgems This is not true however...

Page 53: ...again It sounds rather like driving doesn t it Unlike Space Invaders et al racing games offer the perfect opportunity for competitive two person action either with two arcade cabinets linked together...

Page 54: ...s about who won and who lost You were just too slow Might as well jump Around 1981 a young Nintendo apprentice designer Shigeru Miyamoto was asked to write something to replace the innards of Radarsco...

Page 55: ...rother Luigi along with another paradigm of platform gaming that stuck for years enemies are destroyed not by means of projectile weapons but by the cartoonish method of jumping into platforms underne...

Page 56: ...r boss battle at the end of every level Fig 3 Donkey Kong get him over a barrel 1981 Nintendo Throughout its history the platform game has built the most purely fantastical sort of gameworlds In the M...

Page 57: ...men wielding sledgehammers But now the very term platform game is somewhat outdated perhaps more appropriate is exploration game which has been the defining point of platformers since Super Mario Bro...

Page 58: ...levels there are very few platforms Its major influence is in fact the racing game with a dynamic obstacle course rather than figure out complicated routes in a vertically oriented environment you mus...

Page 59: ...you Fighting games allow players to battle each other s characters onscreen with an array of absurdly exaggerated martial arts moves with fists and feet or with swords and flame Of all the videogame...

Page 60: ...s is the player s ability to choose to play as any one of numerous different characters each with his or her own strengths and weaknesses but all lusciously pictured and animated Do you want to be a b...

Page 61: ...at em ups are nothing if not politically inclusive it is much more common for European men to play as women or as Korean jujitsu experts than as digital avatars of their own ethnic origins It doesn t...

Page 62: ...the joystick and baffling combinations of button hits and circular shapes made with the stick unleashing ever more spectacular and lethal activity on screen These preset special moves also known as co...

Page 63: ...oysticks one to move one to fire Simple But with those tools there is a huge tactical potential of feints misdirections and apocalyptic vengeance The excessively deterministic combinatorial template h...

Page 64: ...he course of thousands of years send them out to colonize the land discover ironwork sailing and electricity Play Civilization Compete against other gods in a polytheistic mythology Populous There are...

Page 65: ...initely chaotic and messy real world As J C Herz tartly observes in Joystick Nation You can build something that looks like Detroit without building in racial tension But what they do offer by virtue...

Page 66: ...method by which God games model dynamic processes that they are not primarily about cities or tribes or any of the putative content They are process toys Time is transformed from prison to Play Doh P...

Page 67: ...must then carry out certain missions by issuing commands to numerous small troop units on the battlefield The player clicks on a certain unit and for instance tells it to move somewhere to attack anot...

Page 68: ...As we noted of simulation though as games become ever more complex and hybridized the essential elements of realtime strategy control of multiple game pieces and tactical calculus may crop up in sever...

Page 69: ...at one point on its 1998 launch weekend had thirty thousand players connected simultaneously Earth is truly humming as you are reading this with the smoke and crackle of imaginary warfare The cognitiv...

Page 70: ...the Pong engine claimed to simulate soccer with four paddles and two sets of goalposts but the games were unconvincing Chris Crawford understandably claimed in 1984 I suspect sports games will not at...

Page 71: ...ne moments most notably the wonderful Speedball a violent sci fi kind of taghockey that is still considered by many to be the best sports game ever made But the unbeatable advantage of real football s...

Page 72: ...events and slow motion replays from multiple angles allow the repeated savoring of a goal Sports games have grown up but in the process they have almost defected to another medium Of course soccer vid...

Page 73: ...ards treasure trolls and spells Yes it s the role playing game RPG the synthesis of classic text based games like ADVENT and the 1970s teenage male leisure phenomenon Dungeons Dragons fantasy boardgam...

Page 74: ...RPGs and that of God games If God games hold out the opportunity of transcending one s individuality RPGs offer the player a chance to be fully individual in a world where an individual has real power...

Page 75: ...riors to save the world The systems of magic and fighting grew more and more complex with each sequel until Final Fantasy VII 1997 not only offered sumptuous movieistic scenes to advance the plot but...

Page 76: ...e storytelling of which more later Donkey Kong designer Shigeru Miyamoto s Zelda games are all RPGs Even his phenomenal Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time 1998 is one although on the surface it is a semi...

Page 77: ...our performance and reveals his or her own fictional preoccupations And ever more complex roleplaying games will be possible with the increased storage and visual capacities of future hardware Sega s...

Page 78: ...performed directly You must therefore find the intermediate steps and execute them in the right order Puzzle elements abound in all sorts of game genres As we mentioned earlier Tomb Raider is in one s...

Page 79: ...o fire bubbles at them in such a way that three of the same color meet they then burst and take any others that they were supporting with them But really to understand puzzle games you only need one w...

Page 80: ...that eventually the blocks will descend so quickly that the screen will be filled with a hideous jumble Still you try for maybe this time you will do just a bit better Herein lies the demonic power s...

Page 81: ...ing sub games of different styles within them as a reward for completing certain sections Sonic Adventure 1999 lets you play pinball or go snowboarding Ape Escape 1999 has a mini boxing game locked aw...

Page 82: ...ne or wood But how closely can certain videogames ever hope to recreate something from the real world and how does another sort of videogame one that is built around a purely fantastic world persuade...

Page 83: ...uisers with scarred gray hulls detailed planet surfaces with moving weather systems accurately mapped constellations and galactic dust clouds floating serenely by in the distant void This must be the...

Page 84: ...ighting spacecraft are never more than a mile or two apart lasers will take about a millionth of a second or less to hit home It has been demonstrated that the human mind cannot perceive as separate e...

Page 85: ...s Unfortunately your lasers arrive at precisely the same time As soon as he sees you fire he s dead 14 And thanks to Einstein s theory of special relativity one of whose principles is that light appea...

Page 86: ...intermingled clouds of dry ice and cigarette smoke However anyone who tried to smoke a cigarette in the interstellar void would have his brains sucked out through his face in fact he wouldn t be able...

Page 87: ...ogames is one in which certain aspects of reality can be modeled in a realistic fashion while others are deliberately skewed their effects caricatured or dampened according to the game s requirements...

Page 88: ...f what made the game so enjoyably challenging Now processor speeds are such that ever more tiny variables can be computed on the fly near instantaneously as and when required to give the player a sens...

Page 89: ...interaction of fundamental parts and so allows a theoretically infinite range of character movement Other Mathengine demonstrations include a ball bouncing onto a slatted rope bridge whose resonant s...

Page 90: ...oriously create something that approximated to realistic behavior physical modeling makes it all happen as behavior emerging from a simple set of definitions And this process directly affects the vide...

Page 91: ...namics and gameplay pleasure A game that is more physically realistic is thereby Topping says more aesthetically pleasing because the properly modeled game enables us pleasurably to exercise our physi...

Page 92: ...the car because of the gulf between controllability and visual feedback And an ordinary player would find the game merely boring and frustrating So Topping explains You re gonna fake the physics Incr...

Page 93: ...modern videogames whose increasing complexity in terms of space action and tasks clearly places a greater strain on the designer s duty to create a rock solid underlying structure Videogame incoherenc...

Page 94: ...nce of function is more serious In many games one encounters single use objects such as a magic book that only works in a particular location or a cigarette lighter that can only be used to illuminate...

Page 95: ...warp to a different place in the gameworld or cheer up a miserable rock eating king Link s hoverboots can be used in several different places for several different results The bow and arrow might be u...

Page 96: ...t at a certain stage in the game Lara finds herself at the end of a low tunnel giving out onto a corridor Try as the player might it is impossible to get Lara out into that corridor owing to the game...

Page 97: ...is applied universally This is easy to verify if you consider the situation in other types of game chess for instance Garry Kasparov would be profoundly glaringly unimpressed if his opponent sought t...

Page 98: ...but their introduction poses other problems of design that must be attended to In Zelda 64 for instance Link s inability to punch or kick is never an issue for by the time he is first in danger he alr...

Page 99: ...pily irrealist principles that videogames have amassed over their history Death in a videogame is multimodal it means one thing for your enemies another thing for certain other types of enemies yet an...

Page 100: ...same individual It is instant reincarnation though reincarnation in a body indistinguishable from the original It is instant expiation for the sin of failure The standard number of lives granted at th...

Page 101: ...w existence in order to suffer anew But whereas Buddhism s final aim is to jump off the exhausting carousel of constant reincarnation and to be no more life in a videogame is always a good thing and k...

Page 102: ...e that of health Whereas in Space Invaders or Asteroids the player s ship is destroyed by contact with one bomb bullet or rock later games further subdivide a life with a colored bar representing heal...

Page 103: ...libur for instance only takes off a fraction of your health Yet it is a causally incoherent system as well a punch to the face does the same damage as a kick to the shin although in real life it would...

Page 104: ...ards will call for reinforcements and quickly go in for a kill The gameplay necessarily becomes stealthy guards and security cameras must be avoided wherever possible In the game the player controls a...

Page 105: ...choose creatively among them and string them together in a strategy This is the basic difference if operating at a far less complex level that we touched on in the last chapter between beat emups whic...

Page 106: ...d pit filled with spikes or barbed wire she can avoid injury by walking carefully but to get out of the pit she is forced to jump and therefore lacerate her legs Most games featuring a health bar also...

Page 107: ...meet the next enemy onslaught In their instantaneous and nakedly magical effect power ups partake of a totally different ontology from anything else on the screen Their mode and effect is purely relat...

Page 108: ...et most games are still controlled with curiously alienating devices a standard joystick or joypad or a computer mouse and keyboard We saw one way in which this can hobble gameplay in the last chapter...

Page 109: ...e player must now press two buttons alternately at very high speed But Sony s present day controller for the PlayStation the Dual Shock pad with two thumbcontrolled analogue joysticks has so far been...

Page 110: ...ing that software companies do not so far implement it generally The first and so far only use of the idea occurs in the splendid gadget festooned exploration game Ape Escape 1999 in which the player...

Page 111: ...e use of this extra mode of information it even simulates the thumping of the main character s heartbeat when he is looking through the scope of his sniper rifle the rhythmical jittering of the contro...

Page 112: ...p up later in another context No one needs to learn how to stamp on the floor just as no one needs to learn how to turn a steering wheel or shoot a play gun In general cybernetic developments will alw...

Page 113: ...lex but it s intuitive But more than that according to Darling Thrust was also cybernetically clever The control system is deep in that anyone can pick it up and play it you ve got a thrust button and...

Page 114: ...s Glasstron monitors motionsensitive data gloves and so on will enable the player to become totally immersed in a game just as the science fiction movies have been telling us for decades Will this th...

Page 115: ...the dynamically exaggerated and physically perilous moves yourself it would be exhausting and painful Remember you don t want boring invisible lasers you don t want a Formula One car that takes years...

Page 116: ...ent we want to know just what kind of industry buzzes behind those imposing towers Is this a city of words a modern Alexandria or a city of images a virtual Hollywood Look over on that street corner a...

Page 117: ...n the summer 1999 release of Silent Hill a horror videogame in which you play the character of a man searching a deserted American town for his missing daughter one journalist claimed that this game f...

Page 118: ...t makes Silent Hill like a film Well it has an impressive introductory video sequence prerendered with high quality computer graphics workstations which tells the story of how your character suffers a...

Page 119: ...grating noise making you jump and increasing your nervousness The same sort of atmospheric virtue is present in the Resident Evil series of zombie videogames which themselves are the subject of intere...

Page 120: ...e things videogames find very difficult to deal with The fact is that Silent Hill and Resident Evil resemble each other far more than they resemble any film you care to name But will this necessarily...

Page 121: ...ub bass rumblings and eldritch alien buzzings offset by the heroic almost melodic sound of your ship s weapon fending off the vicious hordes Purely abstract sonic invention such as Defender s was part...

Page 122: ...fantasy world can justifiably be accompanied by fantasy sound all manner of lovingly crafted blips and whooshes An instance of particularly good contemporary work is in the otherwise rather shallow s...

Page 123: ...ut our environment is constantly flooding into our ears videogames ought perhaps to think of cleverer ways to let us use this gift in their imaginary worlds After all a videogame player unlike someone...

Page 124: ...y on in the game the player s character is given a radio that seems to be broken but it emits a nerve fraying fortissimo jangling noise whenever a monster is approaching The evocation of fear is delic...

Page 125: ...he sounds he used The star of this era was the musician Rob Hubbard whose excellent soundtracks for old games with their airbrushed joyfully artificial aesthetic that mixed robotic beats with hummable...

Page 126: ...ot interactive A film score is written to accompany a predetermined and unchanging visual story So it is recorded once and cast in stone But videogames can change from one moment to the next depending...

Page 127: ...e In these games music s appearance is much rarer than it is in your average film and when the speakers burst into a fast cello motif or a clatter of electronic percussion you know that something exci...

Page 128: ...ve lovingly appropriated set piece forms from the cinematic milieux of horror action and science fiction the enormous monster the car chase the space dogfight while films have stolen ever more brazenl...

Page 129: ...film of its kind The shallow primary color fable about a gameplaying wunderkind beamed into cyberspace to do battle with an evil programmer was based around live action interpretations of existing vi...

Page 130: ...ghter The Movie starring sex symbol Jean Claude Van Damme and renowned pugilist Kylie Minogue Mortal Kombat was not much better and Bob Hoskins displayed rather less animation than his pixellated coun...

Page 131: ...ust one person over a period of a few months The graphics design gameplay design and programming were all done by the same red eyed multitasker and some of them Matthew Smith Andrew Braybrook Geoff Cr...

Page 132: ...rs which is Hollywood blockbuster money And the rewards can be equally impressive Meanwhile Japanese videogame giant Square moved the other way making an entirely digital feature film based on its bes...

Page 133: ...lationship with technology The abomination that is The Lawnmower Man typifies Hollywood s prurient fascination with the oxymoronic and irremediably adolescent concept of virtual sex More thoughtful is...

Page 134: ...in g nie or evil demon which exactly like the computers in The Matrix caused him to have the thoughts and perceptions he ordinarily believed to be signs of a real external world The primary influence...

Page 135: ...look of certain types of videogame The first great film tie in still only one of a handful today was the videogame Star Wars 1983 a threedimensional space shoot em up that abstracted elements from ce...

Page 136: ...ar style of futuristic technoir but for videogames it has also had until the current generation of extremely powerful machines a technological payoff For the vision of neon soaked streets at night in...

Page 137: ...f the production designers on Blade Runner has said that his work was inspired by the cabinet art on what else an arcade videogame But while creative aesthetic interpollination between films and video...

Page 138: ...fference works the other way even Bob Hoskins in a padded suit is not as lovably squat as the real Mario Yet even if you make your film entirely digitally along the lines of Toy Story or A Bug s Life...

Page 139: ...film itself is best at doing Videogames in fact have the better of this strange relationship in that they are able to suck into themselves more aspects of the filmic art without compromising their ra...

Page 140: ...d intervallic episodes but in the thick of videogame play itself Camera obscura When videogames were flat two dimensional affairs the player was furnished with a God like objective viewpoint The gamew...

Page 141: ...drawn perspectivally from one moment to the next depending on the camera settings the player has chosen Videogame cameras cams for short have fairly recently settled into a group of standardized view...

Page 142: ...4 where you can look through Mario s eyes to line up a tricky narrow path or a shoulder cam as in Tomb Raider The latter is a curious invention that provides a viewpoint that is very near to the chara...

Page 143: ...re asked by an eccentric scientist to play a game of snooker wearing a VDU headset wired so that your point of view was situated on the ceiling looking straight down onto the table It would be a compl...

Page 144: ...course we don t encounter these sorts of problems in real life because our eyes are sensible prescient Nature hard wired into our bodies It is only the creative alienation of videogames which transla...

Page 145: ...letting you see everything When the detective mounts the staircase of the Bates Motel in Psycho Hitchcock deliberately chooses a very tight shot on his hand moving up the banister inducing tension thr...

Page 146: ...overhead shot is the only perspective you ll get And this shows how a purely filmic notion of camerawork cannot work in a videogame context Film manipulates the viewer but a game depends on being man...

Page 147: ...y standard television commercial A car turns a corner coming toward the viewer seen from a helicopter s altitude in the next shot our eyes are at fender level and a car is moving away Because we are c...

Page 148: ...You re going to crash nastily Sometimes videogame camera positions change automatically rather than at the player s behest even so when they do they are not performing traditional montage but trying...

Page 149: ...ckry but it is nothing like an interactive movie Most of the work done by automatic videogame cameras indeed is largely modeled on a different medium altogether and this brings us to the second aesthe...

Page 150: ...l understanding of the action Here however the term replay is particularly misleading Play is still primary what comes next is not a replay a playing again but a watching The carnival of camera angles...

Page 151: ...rk it is by creating a completely different experience that branches off from the same scenario as its parent movie Goldeneye 007 1997 for instance is a firstperson shooter that casts the player as Ja...

Page 152: ...than excuses for the action of the next mission to move elsewhere But Goldeneye s strength is that it manages to cut and paste all its filmic influences the faces of actors Sean Bean Robbie Coltrane...

Page 153: ...e rightly derided by the videogame cognoscenti for having tediously simplistic gameplay properties yet they sold in their millions precisely because they are rather beautifully pure exploration games...

Page 154: ...nd is an activity Watching someone else with a videogame to non players is terribly boring And even watching the most cinematic of videogames is still like watching a really bad low resolution film A...

Page 155: ...to cleverer examples like Ape Escape Donkey Kong 64 or Spyro 2 in terms of sheer visual splendor Crash 3 is particularly successful in replicating and extending the tradition of humorous cartoon death...

Page 156: ...imilar to that of the traditional cartoon with the added killer ingredient of control animated cartoons themselves have changed in order to survive Cartoons such as South Park or The Simpsons no longe...

Page 157: ...ng an inferior type of film are something different altogether The comparison between the forms initially so inviting because they both look like they are doing similar things is in the final analysis...

Page 158: ...of course far more deeply ambivalent about the desirability of such a detonation And there is more to say about the negative interpretation of such destruction in videogames For the moment I should p...

Page 159: ...drive any distance more than ten yards but you re not allowed to smoke a cigarette In fact thanks to designer Will Wright s inbuilt bias toward public transport it wouldn t actually be possible to bu...

Page 160: ...e images of Star Wars Episode I Pod Racer onto yes a cinema sized screen while a room given over to Perfect Dark features helpful blond women gliding among the gamers dressed in black PVC and white jo...

Page 161: ...ground Many of them suck hungrily on cigarettes with an expression of bliss peculiar to the Californian tobacco aficionado everywhere hounded by the law I notice this of course because that s where I...

Page 162: ...cinema have all become expert in their different ways at the craft of telling a story Why should videogames then be any different Modern videogames have plots they use voice actors for different char...

Page 163: ...w They see in the unique quality of videogames a potential revolution a liberation from the shackles of old linear storytelling How Well according to a speculative essay by Chris Crawford because the...

Page 164: ...the wrong place Still interactive storytelling sounds like a fascinating idea That disyllable active in particular makes us feel very modern Intrapassive storylistening doesn t sound like half so muc...

Page 165: ...ronic story an ongoing narrative constituted by the player s actions and decisions in real time 21 Now synchronic and diachronic modes of story in other media are very often combined in the same narra...

Page 166: ...t does this mean for videogames Well it turns out that the delicate balance of story types is skewed in videogames it is very heavily weighted toward the diachronic Perhaps surprisingly videogames hav...

Page 167: ...o one of a handful of simple formulae They are highly plot driven and predicated on strong actions what there is of a purely literary character can be readily stripped away That s ideal for computers...

Page 168: ...achronic story of a videogame however complex is merely an excuse for the meat the videogame action while the synchronic story as a story is virtually nonexistent This is not a criticism of videogames...

Page 169: ...it is too The same thing occurs in Metal Gear Solid23 where the highly entertaining plot is as tightly scripted and twisty as most Hollywood action movies in Zelda 64 and to a lesser extent in the Tom...

Page 170: ...exterity and spatial thought Why arbitrarily Well it is as if you were reading a novel and forced by some jocund imp at the end of each chapter to win a game of table tennis before being allowed to ge...

Page 171: ...n two directions at any given point and there are only a handful of possible endings to the saga depending on the player s overall skill One reason for this is that it would be prohibitively expensive...

Page 172: ...rk that hard and I ll choke on my Martini If you begin to adulterate this hyper purist concept though and allow the different story paths to cross each other or converge so that they can share chapter...

Page 173: ...n meanwhile was involved in the design of God game supremo Peter Molyneux s Black and White 2000 Now these books are entertaining children s pastimes but as examples of interactive storytelling they t...

Page 174: ...g experience A very similar sort of situation obtains in the sort of videogames that reward the wrong choice with instant death You get killed in Tomb Raider you reload the game and this time you don...

Page 175: ...y ever after If Raskolnikov were able to undo his murders there would be nothing for Dostoyevsky to write about The argument is of course equally true of farce If Basil Fawlty had surreptitiously bank...

Page 176: ...real life situation for behatted and whipped adventurers it is merely frustrating and boring in a videogame The Tomb Raider games are admirable examples in this respect as the level designers have al...

Page 177: ...eal Kokiri elf is potentially poignant only insofar as the player can do nothing about it Such storytelling as so far exists in videogames then is not really very interactive The player may interact w...

Page 178: ...rse shoot enemies with very big guns Masclef enthuses that such a game should ideally be like being thrown into a big exotic movie The appeal of this sort of epic videogame is to be an action movie he...

Page 179: ...hrow in a preplanned event that changes things in a certain way Generally the story is scripted and possibilities are locked in time This then is the traditional solution thus far in videogame history...

Page 180: ...putational mountain It is a problem of AI of artificial intelligence how do you make the computergenerated characters behave in a convincingly lifelike fashion Masclef s solution was found in the AI t...

Page 181: ...ke this is not In order to regain your friends trust after such an aberration Outcast sentences you to the equivalent of community service giving money to beggars for instance or helping with agricult...

Page 182: ...aws of behavior for his creatures and then lets the processor do all the calculation to create the actual behavior at any given point in the game Algorithmic processes solve our problem of storytellin...

Page 183: ...s complexity leads to very rich and varied possibilities of behavior We may have written the game a programmer insists with amazed pride at his creation but we don t know what s going to happen These...

Page 184: ...of good game design Some simplifications however are more impoverishing than others And as much as the behavioral possibilities of videogame NPCs whether flesh fish or fowl are increasing dramatic int...

Page 185: ...er or computed in real time by the processor is irrelevant The fact remains that the player still cannot do something that the game is not prepared to allow Talking it over How could such freedom even...

Page 186: ...he time when the classic text based adventure game was replaced by versions with pictures alone and no typing required This move was made for two largely commercial reasons firstly videogame manufactu...

Page 187: ...e parsing engines of adventure games had reached a higher level of sophistication able to respond accurately to prepositional and pronoun constructions and inviting simple speech exchanges with NPCs P...

Page 188: ...ticated great strides could have been made toward in corporating more fluent language engines in games and even steering them toward something approaching true conversation But that evolutionary path...

Page 189: ...e of the ways in which each game executes aspects of a story Adventure games on first sight seem to be very close to traditional stories They were after all in the same medium text And their descripti...

Page 190: ...The text adventure therefore is dead as a dodo But future games will probably start to incorporate accurate voice recognition and eventually no doubt sophisticated language parsing so that you can act...

Page 191: ...a wonderfully rich form of interaction But I don t think it will achieve the dream of interactive narrative What it will revolutionize instead is Olivier Masclef s ambition of a dramatically interesti...

Page 192: ...ong AI There are heuristic story writing programs already but their output although impressive in its syntactical sophistication is worthless in literary terms There is as yet no reason to think that...

Page 193: ...tinuing to try to beat the system A well scripted game such as Metal Gear Solid keeps you playing because fundamentally as E M Forster remarked of the primary appeal of the novel you just want to know...

Page 194: ...has a lot of freedom in the gameplay itself where many different creative solutions can be found to the game s problems The unique pleasure of a videogame after all the one that no other medium can o...

Page 195: ...ed story scenes can enhance this feeling of involvement then they serve a useful purpose If we can further choose to do certain things and so see certain episodes of the story in a different order the...

Page 196: ...was informative Developments in Los Angeles and elsewhere show a new pragmatism among videogame designers concentrating on what they alone can provide rather than chasing the fashionable dream of inte...

Page 197: ...as the other tanks on the battlefield seek to destroy you It s kill or be killed It s a dream of perfect destruction You re playing Battlezone This arcade game released by Atari in 1980 in which the p...

Page 198: ...ill felt even in the most modern games of the new millennium The ghostly images of enemy tanks and flying saucers were drawn in vector graphics Whereas a television screen or a modern computer monitor...

Page 199: ...reframe graphics whose apotheosis coincided with the last days of vector displays but persisted after they had gone as raster monitors now had sufficient pixel resolution to draw pretty straight looki...

Page 200: ...Battlezone s defining aesthetic owing in part to technical limitations at the time on the other hand and in contrast to pop art is one of purely imaginary surfaces Where pop art glories in colorful f...

Page 201: ...ose familiar schoolroom objects polygons and in that it prefigured the firework geometries of cutting edge games in the late 1990s and beyond Battlezone was at once fantastically complex in the demand...

Page 202: ...graphics engineers was a system of true three dimensional action a virtual space that the player could inhabit The problem of representing three dimensions on a flat plane in this case the television...

Page 203: ...Escher s unsettling distortions of it And scientific perspective is the kind on which most modern 3D videogames are constructed In games such as Doom where the screen supposedly shows the player s po...

Page 204: ...l problem is this you can t see behind you Of course you can t in real life either but then in real life you don t often find yourself piloting an arrow shaped spaceship and blasting big rocks The lat...

Page 205: ...and It was a pure dream of unhindered movement and harmonious action More modern games have diluted this primal passion in a mania of hyper representation Certainly it is clear that as soon as more ad...

Page 206: ...ial arrangement of Asteroids though it looked flat was actually equivalent to the surface of a torus a doughnut with a hole in the middle While this curvature afforded the player greater freedoms of m...

Page 207: ...nd fighting enemies along the way But most revolutionary was a type of space delineated by the combination of horizontal scrolling with a variation on the wraparound concept This idea in fact featured...

Page 208: ...cks can be planned and threatened humans rescued The arrangement of space on the primary screen is rather as if we found ourselves in the center of a large circular strip onto which is projected the b...

Page 209: ...nterior Defender marries the endless wraparound vista of the Cyclorama with the flickering animation of the Kinematoscope although the vista itself is different in purpose It is not the visual depicti...

Page 210: ...screen background now acquires several different flat planes so that objects in the foreground plane sweep by more quickly than objects in the middle distance plane which in turn pass more quickly th...

Page 211: ...perspective was still only one of many competing modes of representation available to the videogame designer Games continued to perform on two dimensional planes scrolling in one or more directions f...

Page 212: ...ree sides of an object rather than just one And now crucially the game screen was not just a neutral arena it had become an environment By means of simple jagged lines Defender had created an illusion...

Page 213: ...could also explode if it crashed into any of the numerous barrels pylons and buildings poking up out of the ground Movement was now nearly in three dimensions with the introduction of controls to vary...

Page 214: ...ated means of building a 3D world for example on games such as Ant Attack Highway Encounter and Knight Lore for the ZX Spectrum Foreshortening implies a subjective individual viewpoint so its absence...

Page 215: ...a functional counter in the gameplay defined solely by its use and potential Scientific perspective is not just one alternative mode of representation among others it is not just an arbitrary artisti...

Page 216: ...a beautifully terrifying experience for any nine year old of the day me for instance ran in a mere 16 kilobytes of code which wouldn t be nearly enough to run even the joystick drivers for modern game...

Page 217: ...pointing into the screen This was a clever effort to try to cross the barrier between onscreen action and the player s physical situation those are my hands so my head must be in this world too and th...

Page 218: ...further enhanced the illusion of a solid environment with solid polygonal monsters Suddenly videogame space was inhabited occupied by the enemy And it was all done with geometry The triangles and oblo...

Page 219: ...e an icosahedron they are all polygons Easy to draw Easy with a powerful chip to draw an awful lot of them The bloody rotting zombies in House of the Dead 2 see fig 11 are constructed from many differ...

Page 220: ...he demonic form is defined as a mathematical solid and then the computing engine can calculate all the shading and foreshortening automatically Fig 11 House of the Dead 2 be afraid of geometry Sega 19...

Page 221: ...apt phrase to know the mind of God In the thirteenth century Roger Bacon praised the religious power of the developing tradition of geometric figuring in painting making the figures in religious scene...

Page 222: ...illusionistic construction on the other hand they have revolutionized it Because these polygons move Every videogame you see constructs not only a space but a space time All 3D games are in this sens...

Page 223: ...en rocky outcrops sure but also lakes blazing torches grass even snow And games no longer have the chunky android look of those in the polygonal vanguard like Virtua Fighter 2 Usefully the more sides...

Page 224: ...geny voxels non uniform rational B splines and other computational flora33 they still need to make use of tricks and misdirections borrowed from painting in order to achieve the dream of fooling the p...

Page 225: ...fact that we routinely rely on cues other than the direct perception of depth is easy to demonstrate if you close one eye and look at people a hundred yards away You don t immediately think they are m...

Page 226: ...also familiarly the case that distant objects do not appear so sharply defined in outline Once videogames then had learned to render distant mountain ranges castles bridges and so on in a bluish fuzz...

Page 227: ...ideogames or traditional art inevitably involves some choices and compromises about how to display visual information One of the well attested problems of representation in scientific perspective is t...

Page 228: ...angle than a sphere directly in front of us but it has a larger plane projection According to true perspective therefore it should have an elliptical not a circular outline This is how we see but it w...

Page 229: ...points especially in large canvases or keeping the angle of vision relatively narrow The reason such discrepancies occur is that in real life we never actually keep our viewpoint fixed in one place fo...

Page 230: ...ep the angle of vision artificially narrow But this has the side effect of removing from the player s arsenal one of his most valuable real life abilities in a hunting or evasion situation that is to...

Page 231: ...ntrolling a robot or a dune buggy or an orange marsupial can be fun and interesting in itself but this is a large obstacle to greater immersion of the player in the virtual world Only coin op arcade g...

Page 232: ...e caves The player can choose to zoom in to a point just behind her shoulder nearly sharing her point of view in order to guide her more accurately across a chasm but she remains oblivious Tomb Raider...

Page 233: ...ic is very often more desirable in gameplay terms than the fashionable firstperson view Just as old school blasters like Asteroids or Defender are only playable games in two dimensions because the pla...

Page 234: ...gn Limited all rights reserved Brave new worlds This brief history of the construction of space in videogames has suggested two things One is that videogames have to some degree repeated histories of...

Page 235: ...nce a far more ambitious game along the lines of Tomb Raider in which adventures in different times and places would be rendered in the appropriate style Tomb raiding among the freshly built pyramids...

Page 236: ...the cubist level would imply more of an abstract puzzle game And this is one of the main ways in which videogame representation differs from that in painting No artist would now deliberately draw in t...

Page 237: ...up intimately with the question of what kind of game the designers intend to make One result of the increasing detail and color available with newer technologies is that this decision is becoming inc...

Page 238: ...e always going somewhere else Usually to the south to Makuhari Japan s own vision of the future now Makuhari is a coastal district reclaimed from the sea and built from scratch within a decade lowerin...

Page 239: ...an flower in its full sci fi glory It was this district of Chiba that led William Gibson in his Sprawl novels to posit the city as his physical setting for the tales of corporate cyber rapacity coexis...

Page 240: ...as its own stand in the enormous roaring halls all competing with their neighbors to attract the gamers attention with gigantic neon signs hundred strong ranks of TV monitors with consoles lined up un...

Page 241: ...here In fact game characters are everywhere For the Tokyo Game Show also features a contest for visitors come dressed as your favorite videogame idol Young Japanese men and women wander round as black...

Page 242: ...getting The star of a videogame though at least of that type of videogame that incorporates characters at all is invented built completely from the ground up A false idol indeed Yet in another way a h...

Page 243: ...and tiny torsos In the early days of videogames technological considerations more or less forced designers into exactly the same style The most influential early game to feature a fully humanoid anima...

Page 244: ...l parts of the physique Videogame characters thus grew up megalocephalic with big heads and short bodies This was also useful in terms of rich gameplay because most games of the era that featured char...

Page 245: ...anaging director of British developers Core Design confides that feedback from the Japanese audience suggested that they wanted Lara Croft virtual idol extraordinaire of the Tomb Raider series and the...

Page 246: ...girlfriends and dating videogames in which the almost always male player tries to woo a deformed anime style female character with massively enhanced breasts eyes and legs Several of these games whic...

Page 247: ...al pop singer who was created in 1997 by software engineers collaborating with Japan s leading modeling agency Horipro It sounded like a great idea But Date s first CD failed to meet sales expectation...

Page 248: ...all you are getting is realistic movement far better to watch an actual human dancer Humans will always be much better at that sort of thing And it is just not what videogames or computer representati...

Page 249: ...t to which Japan is leading the West in terms of videogames status as a mainstream entertainment medium is shown by a poll of 6 000 people of whom more than a third 35 percent currently played videoga...

Page 250: ...d ten times as many men as women enjoyed the horse racing simulation Derby Stallion games 8 6 percent versus 0 8 percent which are straight ahead recreations of televised horse racing complete with vi...

Page 251: ...s preferred games are also notable for having relatively simple initial skill set requirements Tetris especially can be picked up in a matter of seconds But of course simple controls and rules do not...

Page 252: ...t of the Easy Bake oven 38 There is probably some kernel of truth in the claim that since until recently almost all videogame designers have been men the products will have appealed more to men than t...

Page 253: ...n Bushnell suggested to me that the game for women is in fact the chat rooms As a percentage of connected people women dominate the conversation of the Internet That might miss the bigger picture of v...

Page 254: ...en men and women The informational arrow is pointing the other way it tells us about the commercial success of certain aesthetic decisions made by game designers themselves A game with good characters...

Page 255: ...nversation in a videogame context rather than learn a complex and hermetic set of rules that applies to one game or one genre only But dissatisfaction with current videogame abilities isn t monopolize...

Page 256: ...why are good characters desirable in a game How does a false idol induce real worship It is a commercial fact that successful game characters really do shift units especially those like Mario that pop...

Page 257: ...ccess of British publisher Eidos is largely thanks to Lara Croft The first videogame character of all was Pac Man 1980 Before this epoch making game the player controlled spaceships gun turrets or oth...

Page 258: ...Croft a beautiful abstraction and Core Design Limited all rights reserved Now at first sight there is a world of difference between Pac Man and a modern videogame character such as Lara Croft see fig...

Page 259: ...painstaking digital animation These are both examples one ancient one modern of how characters give us videogaming pleasure through a joyously exaggerated sense of control or amplification of input Al...

Page 260: ...when frozen in time For a start characters such as Crash Bandicoot or Sonic see fig 15 obviously borrow very heavily from the cartoon styles of Warner Bros and others Sonic was allegedly created afte...

Page 261: ...id Snake from Metal Gear Solid work on this purely static visual dimension in a slightly different way in that they borrow from cinematic conventions of costume and coolness It is almost certainly no...

Page 262: ...And so a good character as well as being aesthetically pleasing constitutes one very strong motivation for playing the videogame well you want Mario to overcome his surreal obstacles you want Lara to...

Page 263: ...maginatively sadistic machines The lemmings are only about fifteen pixels high but the way their hair is bouncily animated and their naive faith in a safe world mean you ve got to save them This prote...

Page 264: ...some of that feel for her for how she is now With PlayStation2 technology we ll be able to smooth her off without changing the aesthetics that work We can give her great facial expressions and we ll b...

Page 265: ...ees offers this observation The Japanese do not make the distinction between form and content that we do in the West How so Teruichi Aono a professional Shogi a board game also known as Japanese chess...

Page 266: ...iosyncratic Japanese approach to concepts of simulation Videogame simulations in the West as we saw in Chapter 2 are generally highly complex games of combat flight or Grand Prix driving They simulate...

Page 267: ...ks and becomes a master chef or a climbing game in which the user tries to reach the summit On the way rivers valleys birds and little animals appear Now this looks a little weird to be sure but just...

Page 268: ...game becomes an ever more accurate analogue to the form of the real activity with our provisos about playability that is a better and better consolation The gallimaufry of Japanese simulation games ar...

Page 269: ...ctronics In the West we have slot machines built around spinning wheels inscribed with cherries and numbers In Japan they have Pachinko a simple yet intriguing game played with tiny silver balls It ap...

Page 270: ...cking of small objects or the crackling of fire The game is set up vertically behind a covering pane of glass hundreds of small pins are set perpendicularly into a board When the knob is turned a stre...

Page 271: ...ash But this is strictly speaking illegal for in Japan Pachinko is not officially regarded as a gambling game The final monetary exchange is cleverly disguised mediated by the tiny silver balls But th...

Page 272: ...h other s piles of balls They are fixated on their own machines seemingly hypnotized This hypnotic effect of Pachinko is in part caused by the startling beauty of the showers of silver balls bouncing...

Page 273: ...stic but a feeling of randomness is generated by our imperfect knowledge We may have written the game but we don t know what s going to happen You re never sure what s coming next which is partly why...

Page 274: ...r in games like Super Mario Bros Thirdly and again as with videogames Pachinko assaults the player s senses with the balls clacking constant electronic music and a dazing miscellany of colored blinkin...

Page 275: ...y in America where they boasted coinoperated phonograph machines candy dispensers kinetoscopes and even X ray machines the latter were phased out as public amusements after it was shown that repeated...

Page 276: ...rooms are furnished with a television video recorder and hi fi system not to mention in twenty million European homes a PlayStation whose very name continues the proselytizing argument it is the antit...

Page 277: ...ly through the air The whole running shoe industry is predicated on a promise that an extra air pocket say will somehow make you run faster And serious running is now itself in part a game of numbers...

Page 278: ...So too are fairground rides in a different way for they offer a very convincing illusion of danger on a rollercoaster you feel you must be plummeting to your death but you know it is safe Shigeru Miya...

Page 279: ...you can play chess with bits of mud or soccer with scrunched up newspaper and a few sweaters you cannot play a modern videogame except by means of a machine It can be argued that all art forms are de...

Page 280: ...e so far looked back a mere century and considered videogames place in a technological history But one would expect that some or other aspect of play is represented in game forms throughout civilized...

Page 281: ...decide which piece to play next or where to put the counter Over time these simple forms of game seem to have evolved gradually so as to make more long term cognitive demands of the player Skill is t...

Page 282: ...itual act will allow of performance by a substitute Also the regulations concerning the choice of weapons and the peculiar handicaps designed to give equal chances to unequal antagonists as when a man...

Page 283: ...uch forms still induce pleasure when played as videogames today seems to demonstrate that though they initially grew out of practical concerns ancient games could never have been wholly functional exe...

Page 284: ...traveling Again Shigeru Miyamoto has said that he draws his inspiration from childhood memories of exploring the Kansai countryside around his home finding caves and hidden paths through the woods Hi...

Page 285: ...spellbound But games rather than being a wasteful offshoot are central to the formation of culture Huizinga believes that play underpins all forms of ritual and even religion itself Ancient Greek myth...

Page 286: ...ht even be a cause for optimism Videogames allow for are often specifically built for a form of social play activity Indeed a great many gamers including me find videogaming at its most pleasurable in...

Page 287: ...the board and an increased focus of attention on the players themselves from the totally board dependent games like chess and checkers to games such as Monopoly or Risk where a lot of the action allia...

Page 288: ...sc in turn it on and choose multiplayer automatic connection to the network Everything will be easy to choose and set up and you can just play against other people And although they re other people wh...

Page 289: ...each borrowing is accompanied by a radical transmutation From dominoes to pentominoes to Tetris from spearthrowing to Time Crisis from whist parties to thirty thousand people logged onto the Internet...

Page 290: ...ugh on the face of it each activity was markedly different all his subjects must be having the same sort of experience which he termed flow In this state action follows upon action according to an int...

Page 291: ...ter than you is not much fun either because you just get stomped on you are made painfully aware of the inadequacy of your abilities So pleasure seems subjectively to be optimal when the demands of th...

Page 292: ...than I feel confident of being able to deliver and a large part of the game s pleasure lies in overcoming these regular challenges Now what about the feelings of complete control that are said to acco...

Page 293: ...ded when the player has so thoroughly learned the music that she does not consciously think about where to put her hands next People also call this getting the music under your fingers It is only now...

Page 294: ...of a well designed fast moving action game such as Robotron Gran Turismo 2000 or Time Crisis 2 one of the reasons you feel so fluidly involved is that your muscle memory has taken over the mechanical...

Page 295: ...ry yet they also share two components of pleasure with other common activities such as piano playing that are not usually considered games at all The videogame combines aspects of play and performance...

Page 296: ...e psychotherapists only at a smaller cost and with more quantifiable fun Eliza as we have seen did actually take the role of a therapist in a text based conversation with the player The game is extrem...

Page 297: ...rd The rat gets crunchy food while the videogame player gets higher scores and free games explain the authors of Mind at Play an early book on videogame psychology But such rewards must be balanced Vi...

Page 298: ...ong time ago you had Space Invaders where basically you move from one level to the next level and you re very excited because you ve achieved the next level In fact the next level was exactly the same...

Page 299: ...m is you see when you release a game like that you get some people phoning up or writing in saying Why didn t I have the Lister Storm a model of racecar in Codemasters TOCA 2 from the beginning I ve p...

Page 300: ...y available if you ve chosen the expert level of difficulty But at least somebody who s choosing the standard level can actually feel they ve completed the game There are more cunning methods of doing...

Page 301: ...t is optimally challenging and satisfying to all Darling regrets for instance that TOCA 2 probably appealed only to the upper 50 percent of gameplayers in skill terms and that a novice who had just bo...

Page 302: ...ain acts so as to reduce the conflict Videogames take your money and give you nothing tangible in return they must really be fun But whereas chess or football remains the same kind of game no matter h...

Page 303: ...ent of such visual dynamic and cybernetic rewards is another higher level game in itself A well designed videogame such as Zelda 64 can approach the condition of a work of art simply by virtue of the...

Page 304: ...appy 306 interact with videogames So what exactly are the nuts and bolts of this process When we talk to videogames and they talk to us what language is this conversation in By its signs shall you kno...

Page 305: ...enough industrially produced goods he will attain this state of perfect selfhood perfect roundness But it can never happen He is doomed forever to metaphysical emptiness It is a tragic fable in primar...

Page 306: ...a novel or a film does it is untranslatable like music Our scrutiny should instead be focused on the fast moving low level meanings that enable us to understand the videogame system We have seen how v...

Page 307: ...player s control He doesn t look like a man he looks like something you d stick on the rim of your glass of gin and tonic Toru Iwatani in fact as we learned was inspired by partially eaten pizza Neve...

Page 309: ...simply by imitating them The third type of sign that we need to know about is the index Imagine if Pac Man s maze were a schematic map of an actual maze In that case it would be an index basically a...

Page 310: ...e character s creator has noted simply represents the personification of eating And indeed Pac Man is a game about eating The dots littering his world are so perfectly symbolic as not to represent any...

Page 311: ...Man has no eyes at all but the jellyfish blobs which are according to the game actually ghosts have eyeballs with mobile pupils Now the ghosts are actually some of the most semiotically advanced item...

Page 312: ...isks is congruent with or points to the number of tries a player has left There is a similar mix in the large dots one might even call them blobs near the corners of the maze Like their smaller brothe...

Page 313: ...paradigm in film especially in science fiction cinema For example during the finale of the film Aliens Ripley gets into a mechanical exoskeleton in the ship s loading bay in order to fight the beast m...

Page 314: ...cherries to appear in the center because they will then operate symbolically as a power up giving you an extra life In that situation the cherries signaling below the maze would be a third order sign...

Page 315: ...an is twenty years old We have seen how videogames have progressed since those days We might expect then as videogames have increasingly enjoyed the power to build ever more convincing cities of the u...

Page 316: ...ip just exploded he says I died So might it be true that we cannot relate to characters who are pictorially too well defined J C Herz thinks so Characters in Mortal Kombat have fingers and stubble You...

Page 317: ...do not stimulate the imagination at all Of course they do or can But there is a difference in the faculty exercised Looking at a photograph one may invent a story around the scene give the subjects in...

Page 318: ...nd the rules of the semiotic system presented and act as if those rules and not the rules of the real world applied to oneself The requirement is to project the active rather than just the spectating...

Page 319: ...become so closely identified with the PlayStation and PlayStation2 hardware that Sony can release advertisements that identify themselves as such only by having the four symbols somewhere on the page...

Page 320: ...poral interaction As we saw earlier Konami s Dance Dance Revolution shows combinations of four arrows floating down the screen when they reach the bottom line the player must step on the corresponding...

Page 321: ...ime with symbols All these games show funny colorful digital animations on their screens pulsating cartoon embryos for a rave track anime heroes performing six string heroics but these icons are compl...

Page 322: ...er s basic ability to use tactical timing by which I mean pressing a certain button to produce an action at exactly the right time Many old platform games such as Miyamoto s own Super Mario Bros for i...

Page 323: ...bol corresponding to one of the console buttons will flash on the screen if the player fails to hit the corresponding control very quickly his character will trip over a cart of tomatoes and thus lose...

Page 324: ...utifully balanced beat em up game Bushido Blade 2 Unlike most of its genre this game incorporates one hit kills understandably a well aimed sledgehammer blow to your opponent s head will result in a p...

Page 325: ...e ten or twenty minutes that it lasts However Tomb Raider III or Zelda 64 which can be played without restarting for hours on end need to afford the player some breathing space at intervals where ther...

Page 326: ...renaline events such as a vicious dog monster crashing through a window see fig 18 Tempo in this game relies on creative alternations of suspense not giving you what you expect holding back and shock...

Page 327: ...s from jerky animation in that there are too few frames to the second the player s absorption into the temporally based semiotic conversation will be injured it is analogous to having a conversation w...

Page 328: ...rate should never be sacrificed to visual detail Say something else Modern videogames adore the icon They draw ever more beautifully detailed worlds and characters But they are not necessarily any les...

Page 329: ...as a symbol for pushable the player knows that Lara is able to push the block out of the way in order to climb up onto it or to uncover a hidden passage The medikits that Lara finds scattered around...

Page 330: ...e acrobatic moves must be strung together with exquisite tactical timing to move her around the environments in which she operates But a game such as Zelda 64 historically a contemporary of Tomb Raide...

Page 331: ...g on the wall The player s task is to move the blocks around within a strict time limit so that their arrangement recreates the painting at which point the ghost is drawn into the open to be fought So...

Page 332: ...d to be certain causal mechanisms in the gameworld This idea of a magical musical language is immensely intriguing The Pied Piper of Hamelin of course had the same gift as did Orpheus charming the dol...

Page 333: ...to use a new gadget and thus expand her semiotic conversation with the game the longer the game will be refreshing and surprising delivering a sense of childlike discovery The brilliant yet underrated...

Page 334: ...olled car after all doesn t really exist It is racing round a virtual world and an anime styled orange haired punkboy is holding the car s controller box on screen That s alienation without the pain I...

Page 335: ...e detail when viewed telescopically is naturally more convincing than one which only works on one informational scale The exception to the rule that more gadgets are better is the bad case of the sing...

Page 336: ...time you can choose to battle her with the sniper rifle or throw gallantry to the wind and fire off some Nikita guided missiles instead If your aim is shaky you can pop a tranquilizer or smoke a cigar...

Page 337: ...craft In visual terms this highly iconic construction is far closer to the film Blade Runner than it is to the videogame Pac Man But arrayed around the edges of the screen are ghostly transparent figu...

Page 338: ...notes the health of your gunship when it reaches zero the craft is destroyed Similarly the words at bottom right are symbols for the available weapons But most of the gameplayer s information is also...

Page 339: ...er that rises and falls Top center is the player s radar which works as a triumvirate of all three semiotic modes symbolically because each green or red dot is agreed to stand for a civilian or enemy...

Page 340: ...n indexical speedometer an arrow pointing to a certain point on a circular dial A bald numerical display such as that used by the odometer is simply not instantaneous enough in its communication of cr...

Page 341: ...tween the map screen and the gameworld By contrast the dinosaur hunting first person shooter Turok 2 intelligently enables the level map to be overlaid on to the iconically constructed environment as...

Page 342: ...n a metallic quasisolid sheen by the old effect of bas relief which renders the illusion of raised and hollowed surfaces with simple lines of highlight and shadow The effect of all this is deliberatel...

Page 343: ...action seem even more novel and exciting Drawing you in Modern videogames as we have seen glory in their graphic richness spacecraft with scarred hulls fighters with stubble trees with individually s...

Page 344: ...ch as Sonic or Lara can vastly increase our enjoyment of the game So how can these two apparently contradictory claims be reconciled on the one hand that iconicism is irrelevant to gameplay and on the...

Page 345: ...th the symbols Good videogame characters please us visually and thus function as our motivation for continuing the struggle They catch our interest simply because we like them and would prefer to see...

Page 346: ...argely unfulfilled to deliver a richer overall experience to the player The history of videogames iconic powers their increasing ability to draw a pretty world has opened up new potential for semiotic...

Page 347: ...ou imagine the possibilities that that s going to open up It s going to give you a depth of field that s so huge it s just like opening up a whole new door into gaming Games are gonna have great depth...

Page 348: ...of signs We should not find that so surprising because man after all is the symbolic animal And this is exactly what videogames celebrate challenge and feed It s no dumb accident that they appeared on...

Page 349: ...itan Kronos married his sister Rhea but he knew that he was fated to be supplanted by one of his children In order to protect himself he hit upon the strategy of eating them all one by one as they wer...

Page 350: ...trategic talent Zeus won He and his brothers and sisters took their thrones on Mount Olympus The rest of the Titans defeated were consigned to the hell of Tartarus while Prometheus s half brother Atla...

Page 351: ...Athenian drama usually attributed to Aeschylus Prometheus Bound the immortally pain racked hero sums up his story I gave a gift to mortals and in that giving yoked myself to fate to this I filled a h...

Page 352: ...onto the ceiling for what seemed like hours The quality of light just before the batteries ran out was my favorite a barely visible golden specter loopingly scrawling its message in a hieroglyphic ton...

Page 353: ...ryone was to have their horizons expanded their minds cultivated their hopes nurtured That didn t last The fire became not an illuminating flame but a cauterizing one dulling the nerves You can shout...

Page 354: ...l Dr C Everett Koop declared that videogames were evil entities that produced aberrations in childhood behavior Then videogames were abstract pixellated contests of timing and skill but now they offer...

Page 355: ...tific consensus there is a rising level of moral concern that parallels the outcry over video nasties in the 1980s Questions were asked in the British Parliament on the 1993 release of _______________...

Page 356: ...ading many to blame videogames directly for childhood violence In spring 1999 Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold two Columbine High School teenagers in Littleton Colorado shot twelve students and a teacher...

Page 357: ...al life destruction Atari was commissioned to build an enhanced version of Battlezone for the American Defense Department s Advanced Research Project Agency DARPA as a simulator for real tank drivers...

Page 358: ...k limbs off my classmates with a few swashbuckling moves There is no doubt that my potential capability to kill was enhanced by my fencing activities But that had no causal motivational effect of the...

Page 359: ...erfect Dark my intent is not to kill For there is nothing to kill there are only patterns of light on the screen Similarly the consequences of my actions have no moral content either because no one di...

Page 360: ...seems far more likely that they would simply have picked another wardrobe statement off the rack from television or the cinema Modern media including videogames offer a vast library of imagery But the...

Page 361: ...of Rockstar Games which published Grand Theft Auto 2 in 1999 quotes the New York Police Department as happily approving of the joyriding and cop killing in his notorious product We d rather they did...

Page 362: ...ocess of making it an explorable environment As in many things ontogeny the development of an individual recapitulates or mirrors phylogeny the evolution of a type At its early stages the human fetus...

Page 363: ...a geometrical skeleton painstakingly animated through hundreds of frames and then skinned not flayed but given a skin a colorful cartoon cowhide that is wrapped over the wireframe model Now the worldb...

Page 364: ...ntelligent life forms such as ourselves to observe it We are the whole point of creation In videogames the Strong Anthropic Principle is not speculation but fact As Lara Croft s creator has explained...

Page 365: ...g are straight from Alien steel catwalks and pools of orange molten metal ring that Terminator bell Cute unthreatening worlds in primary colors come straight from animated cartoons hardly surprising t...

Page 366: ...erately ambiguous worryingly off key As Ernst Gombrich asks in Art and Illusion The rope hanging from the pulley where does it lead How is the drawbridge tied up What is the angle of the bannister nea...

Page 367: ...r their power on a single point of view deliberately chosen to maximize the illusion With a moving point of view such as a videogame provides designers would need to write very clever algorithms to ad...

Page 368: ...Trigger Happy 370 Fig 21 Piranesi s Carceri d invenzione a dungeon master s perspective on the unreal Rosenwald Collection photograph 1999 Board of Trustees National Gallery of Art Washington...

Page 369: ...n a real part of Venice TOCA 2 however lets you drive sporty sedans around accurate models of British racing circuits like Brands Hatch or Silverstone Metropolis Street Racer 2000 following the lead s...

Page 370: ...t surface You could not go into a shop or shin up the drainpipe Providing a fully functional rendering of such a hugely complex environment as a real city is still beyond current videogame abilities E...

Page 371: ...ole I should be able to curl up and squeeze through it instead of banging my head on the rocky outcrop And forget about causal incoherence too If you re going to give me massive weaponry to fight muta...

Page 372: ...kate and Destroy 1999 in this way All the levels in the game are based on real world locations The testers saw one level and said Wow that s China Banks which is a big place in San Francisco which is...

Page 373: ...once familiar and strange see fig 22 There is a great deal of visual and spatial invention in this game but it consists of clever combination not of imagining a world anew from the ground up Videogame...

Page 374: ...s it is different from other types of media so we need to concentrate on those differences In this instance that means recognizing that whereas film at least naturalistic live action film is tied down...

Page 376: ...What impressed me about Tomb Raider was the breadth of the scenery and the claustrophobia the sense that you were really there And what does he want from the videogames of the future Simple really Giv...

Page 377: ...the third person game for instance Tomb Raider Metal Gear Solid or Zelda 64 has the edge over the first person game such as Quake III which shows a perspectival viewpoint as if you were actually in t...

Page 378: ...system where you just stand there hoping to hit the enemy while Zelda 64 enables you perhaps too easily to lock on to a monster and swings the camera right behind the player s character These example...

Page 379: ...king supermarket shelves Such unfair challenges are purely the result of laziness and lack of imagination it s a very easy way to make the game harder Similarly many levels in Tomb Raider II were made...

Page 380: ...videogame should be just like pausing a videotape The save crystal or in Resident Evil the typewriter ribbon is also an unwarranted extra rip in the fabric of the game universe For this power up does...

Page 381: ...ou live with the consequences of your actions Take Goldeneye The game s mission structure is rather artificially limited if you accidentally or deliberately allow your Russian hacker babe sidekick Nat...

Page 382: ...simply requires the player to rebuild his or her reputation after an act of foolish violence so mistakes can in effect be erased Enriching this idea if attempted will not be a trivial design task It w...

Page 383: ...er comes to care about them as ends in themselves rather than just selfishly regretting their demise because it spoils the game The Final Fantasy series of role playing games while not to everyone s t...

Page 384: ...le the new story based games don t even evoke true regret in the first place More emotionally involving is the brilliantly manipulative Metal Gear Solid which slyly made me feel guilty for killing a w...

Page 385: ...e To begin to guess how videogames might become more sophisticated in the future remember what they are already really good at Games will never be as good as films at telling stories visually They ll...

Page 386: ...edsit playing games to being a completely accepted culture of life You can watch videos listen to music or play a videogame and at the moment I think playing videogames is top of the list Ashes to ash...

Page 387: ...is revolutionary type of videogame certainly provokes and feeds the imagination Meanwhile of course we may still wonder at the spaces designed by others Personally I have found some of the breathtakin...

Page 388: ...ally a secular instinct providing the motivation for empirical scientific investigation 58 Wonder has always been a spur to action whether creative or pious Our wonder at the alien potency of fire onc...

Page 389: ...ecome painters architects animators or videogame designers themselves That is the good news the utopian possible future But here is the bad news the embryonic dystopia how videogames might darken our...

Page 390: ...n generals of Desert Storm showing off their smart missile videotapes or of the television commentators on the bombing of Belgrade cooing over grainy film images of tracer bullets and explosions for a...

Page 391: ...ead up display is an ugly mess of fire and blood But he s just playing a game This constitutes a lethal failure of imagination And it is in this way that I do think videogames must have a type of mora...

Page 392: ...a very dull game And in each of these cases the aesthetic judgement is also an ethical one All this is not to say that we can t still want destructive fun to blow things asunder in beautiful showers...

Page 393: ...down packed motorways at 200 mph feels the need to remind the player that it is only a digital fantasy it s not real after all Videogames will become more interesting artistically if they abandon tho...

Page 394: ...rlds Prometheus gave man the tools of creation In an alternative version of the Prometheus myth Zeus takes his revenge on the god by persuading Hephaestus to fashion a woman Pandora who lets fly the w...

Page 395: ...t of people in general Which is why it is so important for videogames to continue aiming at creative revolution in any number of wonderful and strange directions The story of the inner life of videoga...

Page 396: ...fter the death of Sega s Dreamcast console in the spring when the venerable Japanese hardware giant cut its losses and reinvented itself as exclusively a software designer 2001 became notable mostly f...

Page 397: ...the Pok mon games nonetheless managed to fascinate an enormous number of people in a way that any number of cutting edge 3D engines failed to do This is entirely attributable to two virtues of good g...

Page 398: ...ith the added attraction that you can meddle directly with the environment As an openended process toy that attempts to simulate complex social interactions and affords the player great freedom in her...

Page 399: ...d out by the assumptions buried deep in its structure This will for the forseeable future continue to be the case Even in the splendidly ambitious Republic a forthcoming game that promises to simulate...

Page 400: ...d of artificial stupidity Given that a silicon chip can perform precise calculations far faster than a human can it ought always to beat a human player in games requiring quick accurate responses So i...

Page 401: ...in Some gamers found indeed that the designers had failed to make being an evil god sufficiently interesting most eventually chose the path of good after toying with wickedness That also testifies how...

Page 402: ...the success of videogames and such imaginative new control engines can open up novel gameplay possibilities There was a certain disappointment then as Nintendo unveiled the controllers for its new Gam...

Page 403: ...fering internet connectivity it is only going to get larger Professional gamers leagues are in place in Britain and America as well as much of Asia Far sighted individuals such as Edward Watson manage...

Page 404: ...r to point out the potential for such an eventual blossoming It is clear however that so far videogames are still struggling to emerge from their arrested adolescence Over the last eighteen months the...

Page 405: ...s the lazy sci fi fetishism of its character design in PVC clad heroine Joanna Dark was a blatant and doomed attempt to steal the thunder of Lara Croft incoherencies of function and space abounded and...

Page 406: ...ments are built in standard realistic polygonal fashion the lovable teen tearaway characters are given heavy black outlines to resemble hand drawn cartoon figures This cel shading technique as it beca...

Page 407: ...n real time in a riotous blaze of semiotic play With the advent of the next generation of hardware videogame designers have in principle at least a broader canvas to work on But they could easily cont...

Page 408: ...tyle and expanding the player s tactical freedom even further But the relative rarity of such aesthetic invention by the end of 2001 only served to emphasize that the innovators and artists in this cr...

Page 409: ...of gameplay set pieces that were engineered with extraordinary inventiveness and attention to detail for example nearly every surface in the gameplay environment was represented sonically as well as v...

Page 410: ...ng on the horizon in a bluish haze the game constituted the best example yet for the emotional impact of architecture the invocation of aesthetic wonder And then on a wave of controversy came Grand Th...

Page 411: ...g able to take time off to play a subgame of collecting fruit can be read on this analysis as a cunning subterfuge to keep the masses happy after all they are still caught within the system In the ove...

Page 412: ...wake of the attacks of September 11 2001 there was a surge of jingoistic online gamers on servers for games such as the squad based shooter Counter Strike dressing themselves up as digital versions o...

Page 413: ...he US and the gamer was enjoined to enter the store and shoot the proprietor In response she developed a series of provocatively pacifist graphical spray paints which can be used as graffiti on Counte...

Page 414: ...dor and Walter Benjamin The Complete Correspondence 1928 1940 Edited by Henri Lonitz Translated by Nicholas Walker Cambridge Harvard University Press 1999 Amis Martin Invasion of the Space Invaders Lo...

Page 415: ...nder and Computer Games Cambridge MIT Press 1998 Crawford Chris The Art of Computer Game Design At http vancouver wsu edu fac peabody gamebook Coverpage html Csikszentmihalyi Mihaly Flow The Psycholog...

Page 416: ...riffiths Mark Video Games and Children s Behaviour T Charlton and K David eds Elusive Links Television Video Games and Children s Behavior Cheltenham Park Published Papers 1997 Hamilton Robert Virtual...

Page 417: ...e New York State University of New York Press 1995 Kinder Marsha Playing with Power in Movies Television and Video Games from Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Berkeley and Los Angeles Uni...

Page 418: ...ge University Press 1998 Parlett David The Oxford History of Board Games Oxford Oxford University Press 1999 Peirce C S The Essential Peirce Selected Philosophical Writings Volume 1 1867 1893 Edited b...

Page 419: ...the Industrial Revolution Lessons for the Computer Age New York Perseus Press 1996 Sat Ikuya Kamikaze Biker Parody and Anomy in Affluent Japan Chicago University of Chicago Press 1991 Schwarz Frederi...

Page 420: ...y 417 Wittgenstein Ludwig Tractatus Logico Philosophicus London Routledge Kegan Paul 1995 Zielinski Siegfried Audiovisions Cinema and Television as Entr actes in History Amsterdam Amsterdam University...

Page 421: ...low and use the Search or Find feature of your eBook reader You can also use this feature for any word even if it is not listed below 1080 Snowboarding 3D Monster Maze Adorno Theodor ADVENT Aeschylus...

Page 422: ...ury examples of architecture pleasure of investigating videogames as new form of Aristotle artificial intelligence Asteroids Atari atmosphere borrowed from horror movies creation through fog of creati...

Page 423: ...anese cartoons Castle Wolfenstein 3D chance ancient games of in evolution in role playing games characters criteria for the attractiveness of digitizing of ethnic choice of inflatable models of non pl...

Page 424: ...y theories of cows happily roaming digital pastures as offensive weapons Crash Bandicoot series Crawford Chris Croft Lara Cronenberg David Csikszentmihalyi Mihalyi cybernetics Daley Thompson s Decathl...

Page 425: ...finition iconicism of rules for reversibility of fairground games Fawlty Basil fencing fetish two dimensional Fighting Fantasy gamebooks Final Fantasy series fishing freedom desirable gift of limits o...

Page 426: ...Higinbotham William A Hobbit The House of the Dead Houser Sam Hubbard Rob Huizinga Johann imagination types of exercised by videogames incoherence definitions of reasons for avoiding interactive story...

Page 427: ...Mario birth of Mario 64 Marxism cryptic message of in Pac Man Masclef Olivier Mathengine The Matrix Metal Gear Solid Metropolis Street Racer Microsoft military links with videogames Minogue Kylie use...

Page 428: ...ventor of Tetris parallax effect Peirce C S Perfect Dark perspective aerial artistic limitations of development in art and videogames of first person isometric marginal distortion in third person phys...

Page 429: ...r ups in Classical mythology as gadgets ontology of semiotics of various functions of Pratchett Terry Prince of Persia prostheticization of play psychology puzzle games Quake series racing games radar...

Page 430: ...ng games RPGs Romero Jon Roy Sujoy R Type scrolling Seaman The Forbidden Pet Sega semiotics Sentinel Sheff David Shelley P B Shenmue Shogi Japanese chess shoot em ups Silent Hill Silent Scope SimCity...

Page 431: ...y Spector Warren sports games Star Wars stories Strong Anthropic Principle Super Mario Bros Tamagotchi Tekken series Tempest Tetris Thrasher Skate and Destroy Thrill Drive Thrust time in videogames rh...

Page 432: ...Uridium Vanguard vector graphics violence nature in videogames of Virtua Fighter V Rally WipEout series wireframe graphics Wittgenstein Ludwig gnomic utterances of Wolfenstein 3D Wright Will Xbox Zax...

Page 433: ...UT THE AUTHOR Steven Poole Steven Poole is a journalist and writer who has contributed articles to the Guardian the Independent and the Times Literary Supplement and has worked as a composer for telev...

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