History

At this point, let's consider an important historical observation: Computers gave gaming a big boost. Sure, there were plenty of games before computers came along, but with the advent of computers, games suddenly seized a much larger portion of our consciousness. Before computers, gaming was a petty industry, employing a few thousand people at most. In the twenty years since personal computers burst upon the scene, gaming has suddenly exploded into a major industry, rivaling Hollywood in sales and employees. Something about computers made a big, big difference in games. What was that magic element?

If you answered "video," you get twenty lashes with a wet noodle. Video entertainment has been around since 1910! And the same thing goes for sound, music, or even text; all those media have been around for long before the computer made its appearance.

The magic element that computers brought to the party was their processing power, their ability to crunch numbers. That processing power made games so much more compelling. But processing power is an internal trait of computers the user never directly experiences processing power. Instead, the user experiences processing power through the interactivity that the computer offers.

Consider the most common use of personal computers: word processing. What is it about word processing that is so damned useful? It's not the ability to print out text that's clean and neat we've had typewriters that could do that for nearly a century before word processing became available. Moreover, word processing made typewriters obsolete in a matter of a few years. Clearly, the ability to get clean, mechanically generated text is not the primary appeal of word processing.

The real power of word processing lies in its interactivity. You type something on your screen, and if you make a mistake, it takes only a second to hit the Delete key and correct the typo. If you misspell a word, your spell checker will flag the error for you and you can fix it. If you don't like the way a sentence reads, you can rewrite it. If you don't like the order of paragraphs, you can rearrange them with a simple cut and paste. It's the interactivity between user and computer that makes word processing so powerful. Take the interactivity out of a word processor, and all you've got left is a typewriter. Take the interactivity out of a spreadsheet, and all you've got left is a calculator.

Just as the schwerpunkt of computers is processing, so too the schwerpunkt of all software is interactivity and this goes double for games. The turbo-charged interactivity that computers brought to gaming transformed the medium from wimp to superhero. Graphics, animation, sound, and music are all necessary to gaming, and they're all important, but they're not the schwerpunkt. Interactivity (sometimes called "gameplay") is the real schwerpunkt of games.



Chris Crawford on Game Design
Chris Crawford on Game Design
ISBN: 0131460994
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 248

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