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1. #Video games involving warped reality drivers#
2. #Video games involving warped reality manual#
3. #Video games involving warped reality full#
4. #Video games involving warped reality series#

So, for instance, the SimCity 2000 manual will tell you that placing a police station reduces crime in the surrounding neighborhood but will not tell you how the computer calculates the precise amount that crime will tick down at a given spot on the map. Hiding game rules doesn’t mean denying players any knowledge of how they work, but rather describing the rules instead of enumerating them. The ability to hide game rules sets video games apart from other games that humans play. By discarding those trappings, I was able to build larger, richer cities than players like my teacher, who focused on playing in the game reality instead of in the hidden rules that governed it.

I, on the other hand, ignored the presentation of the game: the city sounds and little two dimensional buildings only served as window dressing for the underlying systems that governed how the game worked. The game presented itself as a city-building simulation and so she built cities she would like to live in.

Compare that to the cities that my grade school teacher built: quiet villages on hill-tops overlooking the coast. As actual cities, they would have been barely livable-as game constructs, they maximized population per area and tax revenue per capita.

#Video games involving warped reality full#

I played it when I was ten years-old my metropoleis were utilitarian street grids full of bustling factories and soaring tenements. The simulation is reasonably robust: it tracks crime and pollution in the city, as well as education and health services, all of which influence the wealth and happiness of the residents, which determine their ability and willingness to pay taxes, which set the income for the city to provide services. As an example, consider SimCity 2000, in which the player was the god/mayor of a simulated town. The second level of gameplay is ignoring the game’s self-presentation and playing with the abstract rules that undergird the game reality.

#Video games involving warped reality series#

In fact, a major criticism of the latest game in the series was that players felt too burdened by the demands of their simulated friends–the game reality was getting too close to the physical reality that players were trying to escape. The game reality “feels alive” because its simulation of the autonomous behavior of the actors in it (traffic stopping at street lights, pedestrians diving out of the way of errant cars, etc.) matches what is expected of such actors in physical reality.

#Video games involving warped reality drivers#

The Grand Theft Auto series is an example of games that seek to create immersive game realities by providing simulacra of physical reality: players joyride around a detailed city map, as the game models the behavior of other drivers and (more or less) appropriate police responses. Immersion doesn’t necessarily mean wearing some goofy virtual reality headset rather, immersion in the game reality occurs when the game responds to the player’s actions in a way that the player finds intuitive and appropriate. The Holy Grail of video games is a game reality that is sufficiently robust to totally immerse a player. Let’s call this the game reality–it’s the reality that the game offers as a substitute for physical reality. The most obvious is playing in the game’s presentation of itself: the player is shooting aliens the player is ordering the cavalry to charge the player is jumping onto the next platform. Video game players are playing on three different levels. The way we play video games shows the ambivalence we have toward our use of rules to systematically hide reality from ourselves. At the same time, hiding away from reality produces a counter-acting impulse: the desire to pierce the illusions that the games provide and uncover the chaos that has been so carefully hidden away. Players seek out video games in order to escape a messy, chaotic reality. Life may not be fair, but video games are. Video games represent a manifestation of a particular dream of humanity–realities consistently governed by the impartial application of straight-forward rules. That’s the idea, at least, and that’s the attraction. Even so, most people play games in a way that's informed by the rules but not necessarily governed by them who among us doesn’t use house rules to play Monopoly? But video games are based on rules in an unavoidable way: the computers running the game do so by blindly following a program. This is what makes an activity a game as opposed to just horsing around.