Machines for living
Video game design and engagement with reality
Emily Prechtl
Part I.
Introduction to Popular Video Games
Games are an escape from reality, often into a constructed world (or a simulation of our existing one) that lets us roleplay without consequence. The games industry is on par with its film counterpart when it comes to the sheer breadth of genres, stories, styles, and variations on a theme that are available to the player: For anywhere from five to over a hundred hours, you can live your life as a simple farmer, scraping together just enough gold to afford to upgrade your barn — or you can step into the shoes of the battle-weary space marine tasked with stopping an ancient AI from eradicating all sentient life.
Some games are meant to be played casually, over time...
Or only once, as a work of art...
While others encourage a quick race-to-the-top through rounds of cooperative and competitive play.
Video games can be sorted into fairly broad categories, each with their own distinctive qualities: role-playing games (RPGs), action (or action-adventure), simulation, strategy/puzzle, and sports. Different styles exist within each genre, such as open-world, sandbox, or linear. Many games have elements of several categories, or transcend them altogether.
RPGs
RPGs
Player assumes the role of a character in a set narrative and/or fictional setting. Player decisions regarding actions and dialogue can develop the character and affect the outcome of the narrative.
Action
Action
Player must contend with physical challenges, such as hand-eye coordination and reaction time, in an interactive story that also requires exploration and puzzle-solving.
Simulation
Simulation
Player is immersed in a virtual environment meant to closely resemble the "real" world, but the activities are gamified and there are often no defined goals.
Strategy
Strategy
Player must use their own decision-making skills and situational awareness to complete the objective.
Sports
Sports
Player switches between multiple characters in a hyper-real simulation of popular sports such as soccer, football, cricket, baseball, etc.
AAA Games
AAA (or “triple-A”) games, analogous to a “blockbuster” in the gaming industry, are games produced and distributed by a mid-sized or major publisher, such as Sony Interactive Entertainment, Microsoft, Ubisoft, Square Enix, Konami, Sega, Capcom, Electronic Arts, Bandai Namco, and Nintendo, each raking in billions of dollars of revenue each year (Pickell, 2019). The games that these publishers finance and market are considered to be top-tier, at least when it comes to the more technical aspects of the game: graphics, animation (often making use of motion-capture animation for realistic humanoid characters) and playability. Far more money is put into the game than what one would see from an “indie” studio, and as a result many creative decisions are influenced or curtailed by the publisher’s executives.
Because of aggressive marketing and designs meant to appeal to the widest possible audience, AAA games have the most name recognition and have had the biggest impact on Western popular culture.
Given the current global pandemic, there are tens of millions of players online at any given time. With the World Health Organization now prescribing video games to combat isolation brought on by prolonged stay-at-home orders (Snider 2020), and with bandwidth for video games and other Internet services threatening the bandwidth reserved for critical infrastructure required to combat COVID-19 (Kang 2020), more people are gaming than ever before.
Isn't that great?
A video game is a built environment that reinforces a certain way of being. A re-examination of case studies connecting built environments to the cultures they embody, as well as an exploration of specific design elements of AAA games through an anthropological lens, will give rise to the recognition of a
GAMER HABITUS
that affects how gamers engage with the "real world."