Game Invaders E-Book

Clive Fencott

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 457

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Presenting a holistic and thoroughly practical investigation of the true nature of computer games that arms readers with a small yet powerful set of theories for developing unique approaches to understanding games. Game Invaders fully integrates genre theory, new media aesthetics, perceptual opportunities, and semiotics into a practical DIY toolkit for games analysis--offering detailed guidance for how to conduct in-depth critiques of game content and gameplay. Featuring an informal and witty writing style, the book devotes a number of chapters to specific games from all eras, clearly demonstrating the practical application of the theories to modern, large-scale computer games. Readers will find: * Suggestions on how to apply the DIY package to major issues central to understanding computer games and their design * Coverage of the semiotics of video games, laying the foundation for such topics as the role of agency and virtual storytelling * Tasks and solutions for readers wishing to practice techniques introduced in the book * A companion website featuring access to an app that enables the reader to conduct their own activity profiling of games An important resource for those wishing to dig deeper into the games they design, Game Invaders gives game designers the skills they need to stand out from the crowd. It is also a valuable guide for anyone wishing to learn more about computer games, virtual reality, and new media.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Press Operating Committee

Title page

Copyright page

Preface

Abbreviations

Part I: Why Do People Play Games?

Chapter 1 You Are the One

TOOLS TO THINK WITH

GETTING STARTED

SUMMARY

Chapter 2 Genre

WHAT ARE GENRES?

WHAT ARE GENRES FOR?

GENRE MAPS

COMPUTER GAME GENRES

A THEORY OF COMPUTER GAME GENRES

SUMMARY

FURTHER READING AND TASKS

Chapter 3 Activity

THE STORY OF ACTIVITY GROUPS

AN OVERVIEW OF ACTIVITY PROFILES

THREE DRIVING GAMES

CALCULATING GENRES

SUMMARY

TASKS

Chapter 4 Pleasure

AESTHETICS AND COMPUTER GAMES

SPACEWAR

ZORK

PAC-MAN

COMPARATIVE AESTHETICS

SUMMARY

TASKS

Chapter 5 Two Rail-Shooters

STAR FOX AND REZ

ACTIVITY PROFILING AND GENRE THEORY

APPLYING AESTHETIC THEORY

THE METHOD OF GAME ANALYSIS

TETSUYA MIZUGUCHI, REZ, AND BEYOND

SUMMARY

FURTHER READING AND TASKS

Chapter 6 Why Don’t People Play Games

WHAT DO WE MEAN BY GAMES?

RESIDENT EVIL

WHY NOT ASK THE PLAYERS?

EMOTIONAL MODELS OF PLAY

PLAYER TYPES

DEMOGRAPHIC RESEARCH

WHY DON’T PEOPLE PLAY GAMES?

CONCLUSIONS

Part II: What Is a Game?

Chapter 7 Just an Ordinary Day

THE GLASS VIAL

UNREALISMS

PERCEPTUAL OPPORTUNITIES

SURETIES

SURPRISES

ATTRACTORS

CONNECTORS

REWARDS

GETTING IT ALL TOGETHER IN SINCITY

PERCEPTUAL MAPPING IN SINCITY

AS-OCEANFLOOR

SUMMARY

FURTHER READING AND TASKS

Chapter 8 Big Bad Streets

DRIVER SCHOOL

SURETIES

SURPRISES

DRIVER AND SINCITY COMPARISONS

SUMMARY

FURTHER READING AND TASKS

Chapter 9 Time to Visit Yokosuka

SHENMUE

GENRE AND ACTIVITY PROFILE

AESTHETICS

SHENMUE POs

PSAS AND CUT SCENES

INTERACTIVE STORYTELLING?

AND ON WITH GENERAL AESTHETICS

SUMMARY

FURTHER READING AND TASKS

Chapter 10 Meaning What?

SEMIOTICS AND SIGNS

PAC-MAN’S SIGNS

ICONS, INDEXES, AND SYMBOLS

DENOTATION, CONNOTATION, AND MYTH

SYNTAGMS AND PARADIGMS

CODES

MAKING UP PAC-MAN

FILLING GAPS

SUMMARY

FURTHER READING AND TASKS

Chapter 11 All Work and Play

THE WORK OF MEANING

SIGNS OF INTERACTION

THE MECHANICS OF INTERACTION

THE INSIDE-OUT CODE

WHERE IS THE PLAYER?

SUMMARY

FURTHER READING AND TASKS

Chapter 12 Big Game Hunting

SEMIOSPHERE

THE CODE OF INTERACTION

THE MYTH OF INTERACTION

WHAT IS A GAME?

HOW DO YOU GET OUT OF HERE?

BIG GAME HUNTING

Glossary

List of Games

Bibliography

Index

Press Operating Committee

Chair

James W. Cortada

IBM Institute for Business Value

Board Members

Mark J. Christensen, Independent Consultant

Richard E. (Dick) Fairley, Founder and Principal Associate, Software Engineering Management Associates (SEMA)

Cecilia Metra, Associate Professor of Electronics, University of Bologna

Linda Shafer, former Director, Software Quality Institute, The University of Texas at Austin

Evan Butterfield, Director of Products and Services

Kate Guillemette, Product Development Editor, CS Press

IEEE Computer Society Publications

The world-renowned IEEE Computer Society publishes, promotes, and distributes a wide variety of authoritative computer science and engineering texts. These books are available from most retail outlets. Visit the CS Store at http://computer.org/store for a list of products.

IEEE Computer Society/Wiley Partnership

The IEEE Computer Society and Wiley partnership allows the CS Press authored book program to produce a number of exciting new titles in areas of computer science, computing and networking with a special focus on software engineering. IEEE Computer Society members continue to receive a 15% discount on these titles when purchased through Wiley or at wiley.com/ieeecs.

To submit questions about the program or send proposals please e-mail [email protected] or write to Books, IEEE Computer Society, 10662 Los Vaqueros Circle, Los Alamitos, CA 90720-1314. Telephone [phone].

Additional information regarding the Computer Society authored book program can also be accessed from our web site athttp://computer.org/cspress.

Copyright © 2012 by IEEE. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400, fax [phone], or on the web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, [phone], fax [phone].

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.

For general information on our other products and services please contact our Customer Care Department within the U.S. at 877-762-2974, outside the U.S. at 317-572-3993 or fax [phone].

Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print, however, may not be available in electronic format.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Game invaders : the theory and understanding of computer games / Clive Fencott ... [et al.].

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

 ISBN 978-0-470-59718-7 (pbk.)

1. Computer games. 2. Computer games–Design. 3. Video games 4. Video games–Design. I. Fencott, P. C.

 GV1469.3.G365 2012

 794.8–dc23

2012002566

Preface

Game Invaders and Game Invaders Live (GIL) have interesting histories, and it is worth a few words to outline them, as they do to some extent explain why both are as they are.

Degrees in games—video games, as they used to be called—have been around for about 15 years at the University of Teesside and a few others. When they began there was very little theoretical and/or analytical material with which to establish game courses at an appropriate academic level. In the mid-1990s Clive went in search of suitable theory, found some, found he had to invent some, and began to put this together in his teaching: a final year undergraduate course called Game Futures. The idea was that students thought about the future of games rather than Clive telling them what that future would be. This was just as well, as Clive didn’t know the future of games and would have wanted a lot more money to tell anyone who wanted to know if he did. The history of what would become this book and GIL had begun.

Games people wrote about how to develop games, how to design them, and what the industry expected, and gradually the academic community got its act together and suitable theory and analytics began to appear.

In 2003 Clive started writing a book based on what is now much of the book you now have in your hands. And a publisher got interested and all was going well until the publisher, or rather the editor Clive was talking to, stopped talking. The idea of a book was put on hold because at about that time, Teesside University put out a call for staff who were interested in developing their entrepreneurial sides. Clive was fed up being messed around by the publishing world and decided that there might be a business opportunity in selling analysis data on games to game developers and the like. The university and a regional “Proof of Concept” fund agreed with him, and in 2004 a company called Strange Agency was set up. Jo Clay was its first, and for a while only, employee while Clive continued with the day job and the company, which was also a day job. Mike and Paul got involved as software and database experts respectively and along with Clive, Jo, the university, and the Proof of Concept Fund became shareholders and board members.

The idea was that the analysis data should be automatically generated and made available through a software system that accessed data from the company’s web server. The desktop software worked well and data on thousands of games were collected and made available. People in the games industry were quite interested and the team demonstrated at trade shows such as E3 and tried to drum up business. But sales were hard, very hard, to come by and eventually after many trials and tribulations Strange Agency was wound up in 2009.

Rather than let it all go to the wall, Clive, Mike, Jo, and Paul decided to return to the original idea of publishing a book. Mike completely rewrote the software so it ran wholly on the web as a Silverlight application, and the book was rewritten to incorporate all that they had learned about games analysis. GIL meant that students and teachers could undertake their own analyses to support the theory and examples in the book. The current book, web app, and website, a truly multi-media publication, came into being.

So this book and GIL are the products of people who have worked and researched in the games industry and taught and researched in academia. This is a truly informed offering and we hope you find it useful.

CLIVE FENCOTTMIKE LOCKYERJO CLAYPAUL MASSEY

Abbreviations

AG

–

Activity Group

CBS

–

Computer Based Signs

DM Level

–

Death Match level

DPC

–

Driving/Piloting/Crewing

, in GIL mapping of known genres

DS

–

Ninitento handheld game console

FADT

–

Formal Abstract Design Tools

FPS

–

First Person Shooter, game genre

GI

–

Game Invaders

GIL

–

Game Invaders Live

GIS

–

Generalized Interaction Sequence

HUD

–

Heads up Display

IGN

–

Games review web site

IS

–

Interaction Sequence

MMORPG

–

Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Game

MOO

–

MUD Object Oriented, see MUD

MUD

–

Multi-user Dungeons and Dragons

NPC

–

Non Playable Character

PDP-1

–

very early mini-computer from the 1960s: huge by today’s standards

POs

–

Perceptual opportunities

PRS

–

Pre-rendered sequences

PSAS

–

Pre-scripted action sequences

QTE

–

Quick Timer Events as in Shenmue and

RPG

–

Role-playing game

RTS

–

Real time strategy game

SNES

–

Super Nintendo Entertainment System

VE

–

Virtual Environment

VR

–

Virtual Reality

Wii

–

Ninendo game console with motions tracking etc.

Xbox

–

Microsoft game console

XML

–

Extensible Markup Language

Part I Why Do People Play Games?

Chapter 1

You Are the One

Games are about creativity! Right? Games are about great gameplay ideas translated into great graphics and sound! Right? And because they’re creative there is no place for science and experiments and all that measurement stuff that comes with them. Games should be purely about creativity! Right? Wrong! They can’t be. Games are probably the most technological, most science-based entertainment medium there is. There are aspects of physics and rag dolls and collision detection and a whole lot of other stuff involved, not to mention math and programming. Games are where creativity and technology meet head on. That’s what makes them so fascinating to study.

This book is an investigation into the nature of computer games. It’s an invasion that gets below the pixelated surface and digitized sound the player sees and hears; that gives designers and producers and publishers tools to gain their own insights into how existing games work, to get some clues as to where games are going and, maybe, to give the investigator an edge in a hugely competitive world. There’s bound to be a few maybes here; games are too big and complex and there are too many of them for there not to be a few maybes.

This book offers you some very practical tools to work with in analyzing games; they are also tools to think and invent with. It’s all based on a module Clive ran in the School of Computing at Teesside University in the North East of England. The module was called “Games Futures” and was mostly taken by students in their final year of the BSc Computer Games Design degree. It was designed to make students think about computer games in a more fundamental way. By their very nature, computer games are designed to deceive. They are designed so that the player is deceived into believing that the flickering pixels and digitized sounds amount to something real: a planet in the far future, a steampunk city, a football game, a Formula One Grand Prix, and so on. Of course the player is more than willing to go along with this deception if he or she possibly can. Most of us want to be deceived by computer games. That is when the fun starts. Hence the term “willing suspension of disbelief” coined by the poet Coleridge (1817) way back in the beginning of the nineteenth century. He was talking about the power of poetry to conjure up images and imaginary worlds but his words apply just as well to computer games.