What, Why, Where but not How

Posted on | December 12, 2005 | No Comments

Following is the introduction to my third year Communication Design degree project (tweaked slightly to make more sense outside of my sketchbook). It provides a quick overview of my interest in videogames and sets the mood for my Videogames dissertation. It should be the first of a few articles I wrote during my dissertation, which should bide my time while I get back into writing some new ones.

Originally written in October 2002.

What, Why, Where but not How:

A brief summary of how my brain works

Obviously I’m a videogame fan. I like to play games. Not just video games; board games, sporty games, card games, even mind games. I don’t see it as a waste of time, maybe I just didn’t grow up. Maybe I don’t want to. Play is an integral part of my, and I believe, everyone’s life. We play to learn, we play to enjoy and we play to discover.

I grew up catching the start of the computer age. From tapping BASIC programs from magazines into my old Sinclair ZX81 to the Dual Processor Macintosh G4 (With my new Flat TFT screen) I’m typing this on now. I didn’t think ‘I must have a computer, I can do maths and word processing on it!’ I thought ‘Mmm, Games.’ Still do in fact. You could put it down to the fact I was a kid, but the truth is I wanted to play. And a computer let me do that.

Interactive was the buzzword. I acted, it gave a response. When my family were busy I could play with my new friend who never got tired or bored. This didn’t make it better than people, even today at parties and Christmas my family regale in retelling stories of my younger days where I spent weeks in a cardboard TV box pretending to be a vending machine. Yes, it’s true. But I enjoyed it, probably more than my computer. Yet I came back to my computer and I played, not just with games but with software and the hardware. I didn’t buy hundreds of pounds worth of books from Amazon; I explored through play. And I learnt. With each new piece of software or new computer I tinkered, I learnt what happens when I do this, and why doing that made it beep. No matter how serious what I was doing with the computer I was playing with it. Even today as I code HTML (see, I learnt that before Dreamweaver came out) or sort out that bloody array in my Flash ActionScript code that makes the soothing ambient music play like a techno rave, I tell people that I’ve been playing with my computer. The terms are synonymous to me.

Things changed one Christmas for me. Sony had this small grey box, I had admired it from afar, wishing that Christmas would come early. But eventually it came in December, like always, and with it a present that would literally change my life. I owned a PlayStation. From that moment, like a light switch, my computer was destined to be a backup games machine. I had a computer that was designed for games (granted I had owned a console or two before, but this was special). I played and played. My friends also got one of these magical boxes and we played together, vodka fuelled gaming nights brought games to my adulthood. (Fondly I can remember drunkenly beating my friend at V-Rally 3 using only my toes to drive, so I had free hands for the kebab I was eating.)

From here my world of play split, I played games on my Console and used my computer for ‘work’. Time directed my focus to art, and naturally my fondness for the digital brought me to computer design. From CAD, Photoshop, and 3D design to a crazy play at a knitting design machine thing.

I eventually became interested in web design. At this time Dreamweaver and GoLive were simply a glint in the eye of major software developers. We learnt HyperText Markup Language, and with that came JavaScript and Perl. Suddenly from my humble programming roots playing with BASIC on the ZX81 and Logo on the BBC Micro I played at scripting Unix Shell and CGI Scripts. I got quite good. Can’t remember any of it now though. Anyway, here began my love of interactivity and web design.

It was like games, you played with it and it played back, albeit by giving you different web pages or an image. So I learnt to program Perl scripts, making random insults appear each time you clicked a button on my webpage ( http://homepages.enterprise.net/threepwood/ if it’s still there, or try www.sonnet.co.uk/hilltop/ for an extremely old page) interactivity was like games. Then came Flash. All hail Macromedia for Flash 4. Programming was available rather than just animation, By Flash 5 a powerful scripting language allowed me to create games. This time hundreds of pounds was spent at Amazon, but I learnt. And I played. I made a game and I still love it. Ask me for a copy if you see me about. It’s got sheep in it.

Here; we’re almost at the present day and the point of this text. It was a sunny day the weekend before a Monday deadline at university. We’d had fun creating a website for the project – Well I had. Then in comes one of the group with an idea for a printed piece about the games exhibition on at the Barbican (Game On). When I saw this piece of paper I wanted to change the 4 weeks of work we had done. I wanted to re-design the entire site because I liked this work. (I compliment you Mark de la Rue). The main thing that hit me was a small corner on this work, in small rows resembling Space Invaders were little ‘M’s and little bullets seeming to move up to them, like the game. This, I thought, could really work on a website. They could move, the bullets could move. As I built this web page (yes I managed to convince them to scrap 4 weeks work, fools) I thought ‘why can’t the user shoot these M’s?’ so I made a little tank and scripted the code. Then I came to a point of ‘why?’ why are they shooting these moving M’s? to view more text of course! I’ll change the text each time they hit an ‘Invader’. Ben said let there be gameplay, and there was.

Soon after this came a debate. People wanted me to put instructions on the page. ‘Shoot the M’s to view more text’ or the like (similar to the argument they had when Pong was released, yet I won this one). No. Why have instructions? People will notice they can move the gun with the mouse and will see it shoots as they click. Anyone who’s played any kind of games will realise what you have to do. It’s so obvious to a gaming culture. They move = kill them. Well in a socially acceptable not-to-be-used-on-the-street kind of attitude.

This made me think. Why do people know what to do here? Because of the culture of games. The absorbed semiotics from years of exposure to gameplay. The way people know that the victim in a horror film will always leave doors unlocked, pick up the most useless weapon and just wont turn around when HE’S RIGHT THERE DAMNIT! Maybe it’s a cliché or maybe it’s gaming convention but people recognise it. Even non gamers know about many of these conventions. So why hasn’t it been used in an interactive or web environment? And if it has, why haven’t I noticed before?

Now we’re at the start of my project. You’ve heard the background. Now for the main plot: Recently after the barbican web site, I was contemplating doing my HTS essay on something to do with Video Games, and was on the lookout for any relevant texts or articles. And I bought my first Edge magazine. I’ve read it before of course – advantages of having a housemate doing a Computer Animation (for games) course – But I saw the title; ‘Video Games are pointless. Discuss’ horrifying visions of GCSE and A-Level English questions flooded back, I really hate questions that end in ‘discuss’. Maybe I feel you need more than one person to ‘discuss’ or is that ‘argue’??

Anyway, I bought the magazine and read it. And the rest, as they say, is history…

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