I never consider myself a gamer,
and the concept of game of any type (computer, console, mobile etc.) has been
almost non-exist to me since my elementary school times. But this summer, because of my job as a QA
tester in a game production company, gaming took up at least 8 hours of my time
a day for two months. This job boosted my knowledge and exposure of games exponentially
and also altered my view of gaming industry overall. The game I tested/played
most is a remake of Microsoft Studios’ classic RPG, Fable: the Lost Chapters. While reading this article, I found a lot
of concepts applicable to Fable.
In a nutshell, Fable is a story about a boy (“Hero”) whose hometown is destroyed
by bandits in his childhood, and his mission is to find his lost families and
to fight a big evil boss behind all the disasters. The intriguing thing
about Fable, and the point that is relatable to the article, is that the operator/player
can make his own decisions about how and where the game goes. The operator can
choose to develop the main character into a noble angelic hero or a
cold-blooded devil, or somewhere in between. The main storyline remains the
same, which is the hero’s growth and revenge, but the side-plot varies significantly
based on the character’s kindness/evilness trait. As suggested in the Fable’s tagline,
“Every decision, a consequence”, the operator has almost but complete control
of the storyline. If placed in Galloway’s diagram, Fable should fall into the
first quadrant because of the significant flexibility the operator has and the
lesser effect of diegetic storytelling. In addition to being a gamer, my role
as a tester also gave me an alternative perspective to look at this game. To
ensure the quality of the game, we used quite a few cheats to test the
games. As pointed out in the article,
cheats or hacks are usually intentionally embedded in the games for debugging
or testing purposes only, but hardcore gamers could also discovers these tricks
while playing and that is seen a great achievement and entertainment by gamers.
As testers we also intentionally end the character’s life at various situations
to have the “Game Over” scene, which is probably the actual gamers’ nightmare, especially
if they failed to make saves copies. This nondiegetic action is essential to
testes’ job but probably disastrous to common players.
I think the author did a good job explaining the four moments in gaming
with some good examples, yet I am confused and curious about why the author
did not mention the platforms that games are played on, i.e. PC, console (PlayStation, Wii, XBOX), mobile,
web etc. It would be interesting to include some discussion about how the four moments are manifested on different platforms, because different
machines also give operators different level of
freedom and control, and that will vastly alter how the operator and machine interact
with each other, and how much diegetic and nondiegetic element can be shown in
the games.
Last but not least, the balance
between machines and operator, diegetic and nondigetic factors in games also reminds me the "order
v.s. chaos" theme we have been
discussing, because on one hand, the game producers need to limit the actions operator have in
the game to keep the story proceeding
in the pre-programmed direction, but on the other hand, it’s essential for
players to have enough amount of flexibility in the game to be entertained and
interested. Order and chaos is what makes a good game focused but entertaining at the same time.
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