Chapter 8

Big Bad Streets

Remember that ordinary day we were talking about? It’s not finished yet. We need to talk about your driving habits; at least, we need to talk about your driving habits in Driver.¹ We will consider Driver in terms of POs and then we can compare it to SinCity to see if we can learn anything in general about games.

Relating attractors to intentions and both of these to perceivable consequences and rewards is at the heart of gameplay and a good game should make this process so natural to the player that maybe the player never realizes how narrowly focused and cleverly designed the agency is. If Driver is a good game—and Clive is not alone in the world in thinking this—then how does it establish the intention-forming process in the mind of the player? Not unusually, Driver uses an introductory series of cut scenes to establish a back story that introduces the game; tells us who we, the player, are; suggests the kinds of situations we are likely to find ourselves in; and tells us what our allegiances are.

So, let’s start by considering Driver’s back story to see how it attempts to make clear to us the game’s particular genre characteristics. We will then go on to analyze Driver in terms of POs and see how the game directs our choices of attractors and formulation of intentions. From this we can build up an abstract model, based on POs, of Driver’s gameplay. We can then compare this to the model for SinCity and see where that gets us.

DRIVER SCHOOL

It’s pretty clear that Driver is a driver. But it should be pretty clear by now that driving is a metagenre that can be customized to a whole range of subgenres. Remember, Ernest Adams and Andrew Rollings use the metagenre VS (vehicle simulation), which can include spaceships and fighter planes and railway trains and anything else you could imaginably drive, pilot, sail, or ride. Remember, we call our version of this metagenre driving/piloting/crewing (DPC). So, we know that there are racing drivers, simulation drivers, war and fighting DPCs, and many more. Driver is one of those “many more.” In effect it belongs to a subgenre of DPCs in which we have to race against the clock to get our vehicle across difficult terrains in the face of various dangers, whether natural or sentient. Rally games fall into this subgenre. In the case of Driver the dangers are police cars, traffic, and street layouts rather than difficult off-road terrains. The back-story for Driver establishes this quite clearly.

The opening cut scenes establish not only that the player is a policeman but also one who has some sort of experience as a racing driver. Of course, we are now asked by our boss to go undercover and drive cars for criminal gangs robbing banks and doing just about anything else criminal that needs fast cars and driving on the edge. We are going to be a racing driver who, as a policeman undercover, is allowed to break the driving laws in order to find out what we can about the criminal gangs we work for. The role of transformation in this game is not difficult to determine.

One of the interesting things about this back story is that it is simply there to affect the way we prioritize attractors and formulate intentions. Never during the game are we actually asked to supply information to our police masters. This is not part of the game. It is just a justification for enjoying breaking the law. Perhaps simply playing a driver for a criminal gang didn’t sit too well with the game’s publishers, who feared a moral backlash from indignant parents. We don’t know. The fact of the matter is that the back-story sets the scene and gives us clear guidance on high level gameplay but the rationale for the back story, a policeman working undercover, does not figure in the narrative potential we are to be offered.

Back-stories are often like that; take Star Trek: Voyager, for instance. We know from the back-story that Voyager has accidentally been transported millions of light years across the galaxy and it will take the crew some eighty years to get home. This is just a narrative context, as most of the episodic stories make (if any) only a passing reference to this. The back story establishes a context in which all sorts of unknown species and physical phenomena can be encountered and, as importantly, all the species and histories of the species in other Star Trek series can be discarded. That is what Driver’s back story does for us, the player.

We are not finished yet with Driver’s back story and its scene-setting, intention-forming exercise. Having absorbed the opening cut scenes we are required to prove our driving skills to someone who organizes “jobs.” To do this we have to complete an opening level which requires us to perform a series of highs speed maneuvers, handbrake turns, and so on, in the confines of an underground car park. This level is cleverly done because it not only acts as a training level for the controls but also reinforces the back-story and in particular its effects on agency.

The person we meet is a cool, black dude—we guess this solely from his voice, for we never see him—who is only too happy to make very pointed remarks about our driving skills and in particular the lack of them. We not only learn to use the simple yet deep controls (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990)—you only need six fingers—and the range of maneuvers they can enable but, most importantly, we have met our first criminal. We have become part of the criminal underworld. The guy testing us is not concerned about damage to other people’s cars; he’s only concerned about his own car, the one we are driving— “Mind the paintwork!”—and our usefulness to him. You do not lose points by damaging other cars but you do fail if your car gets too damaged to continue. You can be as reckless as you like as long as you complete the mission. Our intentions should now be clear.

SURETIES

Now on to our experiences of Driver, the experiences Driver offers us. First of all, we will make a few brief notes on sureties. Street furniture, building fronts, parking meters, trees, pedestrians, and much, much more all give realistic sensations of speed. Buildings at a distance and people and vehicles at various relative distances give scale sureties. Distance is a little more problematic. We only see a few blocks into the distance because the city at any one moment only exists for a few hundred meters around us; buildings appear out of the “mist” as we speed toward them. This is obviously to allow the game engine to run more efficiently and achieve an acceptable frame rate. Although there are recurrent shocks in Driver, this is not one of them. The magical appearance of buildings—we never see them disappear—seems to focus our attentions on the near and middle ground, the particular task at hand. There is a lot of detail in the city: buildings, moving cars and people, gas stations, underground car parks, and so on, all of which generate good levels of perceptual noise.

There is also good self-image. Clive, for instance, always chooses the third person point of view so he can see the car he is driving and see that it behaves very realistically, with wheels that turn to steer, suspension, collision damage, and so on. Car horns sounding at him and cars stopping and trying to get out of his way gives a good sense of other people around in addition to the pedestrians. Sureties for the past are provided by crashed vehicles, skid marks in grass verges, and the remaining damage to your car and the police car. In terms of physics sureties you can crash through tables, chairs, and parking meters but not streetlight poles or trees. It is very easy to leave the ground going over humps and bumps but this is fun, so it still provides good sureties. The car appears to behave very realistically in terms of maintaining and losing grip on the road. All in all we see a rich set of sureties. There is plenty to keep the unconscious mind occupied.

Before taking a look at surprises we might just mention shocks, as there are some in Driver. Crashes often result in not only damage to cars, but also loss of polygons, resulting in “see-through” body panels and so on. Cars also often seem to defy the laws of physics when they hit bridges or hills. Flying police cars are a fairly common sight in Driver and are also very funny, which would seem to suggest a level of exaggeration at least bordering on shock; such flying cops do not constitute a shock, however, because of their contribution to the game’s aesthetics. We need to add humor to our list of aesthetic concepts that need to be accounted for.

A true shock occurs in Driver when you have completed a mission or a section of a mission and people run from a bank, for instance, and get into the car you are driving, or they run from your car to the door of a building. Doors are never opened in these situations. Instead the people seem to fade through to where they are going in a most unnatural way. This is an amusing shock that is not severe but nonetheless reminds us of the mediated nature of this game world.

On the whole, Driver is shock-free. There are other content items that could be considered shock-inducing—such as the tens of identical Chinese restaurants in Chinatown in Los Angeles—but because they are intended to contribute to overall surety and not the intense gameplay they barely register unless, like us, you are scrutinizing the game intensely.

SURPRISES

We now move on to surprises: what we actually do in Driver and how we can use POs to model an abstraction of this in order to gain insights into the fundamental nature of the game and its gameplay in particular. First of all we will describe a typical mission and some subjective thoughts about it. We will then represent these more directly as a Table of Surprises.

We’re in Miami staying in a small, seedy motel in the south of the city. We get a call to go and collect some Kalashnikovs that have been smuggled into the port. As we pull out of the motel’s little car park into the city we check the on-board dynamic map that shows a few blocks of the city street plan immediately around our current position. We do not know where the port is but there is a gray triangle whose furthest point indicates its direction. We cannot see that far yet; we only see the general direction we have to go in. We drive off across the city not bothering too much about the laws of the road but trying to avoid damage to our car. It is also a good idea to stick to the rules when we see police cars out on patrol. If we break the law that will register as a felony, the police will chase us, and that will make the mission difficult and maybe impossible.

Eventually we get to a narrow and very busy road that leads out to the port. We overtake when we shouldn’t, drive on the wrong side of the road, and generally annoy other road users. We look out for police patrols all the time. Getting into a chase here would be very difficult to get out of successfully. With a little luck and hopefully not too much damage, we get to the right place in the port and stop under a giant red arrow, floating in the air and pointing downwards. We stop under it and in response a message is overwritten on the screen, “Get the rifles back to the motel!”

We turn and race back to the narrow road that we have to renegotiate. Police messages sound in our ears, “suspect heading north, suspect heading west.” They’re on to us but we’ll have to tough it out. If we can make them crash in the port area they won’t be able to chase us down that narrow road. With skill and a little luck, that is what happens and we make it off the narrow causeway road and back into the city proper. Now we have to get across town back to the motel. It is not so crowded here and we have a choice of routes, but as we get close to the motel, “suspect heading south,” sounds in our ears. We’ve got a tail. As we get close to the motel we see a large, red exclamation mark floating in the air above the entrance to the motel car park. We have to drive around the block and lose the police chasing us. If we can make a couple of turns quick enough they might lose sight of us; and we will hear, “we’ve lost him,” on the police radio. Then we will be able to get back to the motel and complete the mission. Driving on the edge is the name of the game.

This is a typical Driver mission but there are others. Sometimes you have to follow people in other cars or traveling in the overhead mass transit system. Sometimes you have to find shops around the city and destroy them by driving into them. The police are a constant nuisance and the streets are busy and awkward.

Table 8.1 is a Table of Surprises that captures the main patterns of attractors and rewards that you might encounter in a typical Driver mission. Notice that we have now split rewards into perceivable consequence (PC) and reward (R), sometimes two for each attractor. In fact, it captures just about every important situation you are likely to encounter.

Table 8.1 Table of Surprises for Driver

Attractors	Connectors	Rewards
A1 Pointer on dynamic 2D map (desire, mystery) Intention: find out where in the city its pointing to NB. Sets up the top level intention for the mission	Roads and junctions on the map plus road, junctions, and traffic ahead of you on the street Activity: driving, avoiding, route finding	(local) PC: driving in direction of goal R: starting to achieve mission
A2 Junction (active, complex mystery, fear) Intention: cross junction, avoid damage to car	Basic navigation controls, dynamic 2D map Activity: careful driving through heavy traffic	(dynamic) PC1: crash R1: mini-mission, try to extricate yourself from crash situation with as little damage as possible PC2: clear junction R2: move closer to objective
A3 Junction (active, complex mystery, fear) Intention: make left/right turn, avoid damage to car	Basic navigation controls, dynamic 2D map Activity: careful driving through heavy traffic	(dynamic) PC1: crash R1: mini-mission, try to extricate yourself from crash situation with as little damage as possible PC2: turn and clear junction R2: move closer to resolving main intention
A4 Police radio message: “suspect heading…” (sensational, fear) Intention: avoid confrontation with police NB: this attractor also serves to heighten tension	Rear view mirror, road ahead, dynamic 2D map Activity: check all connectors for whereabouts of police	PC: detect number and positions of police, R: the pleasure of the unpredictable, mini-mission to lose police
A5 Police radio message: “we’ve lost him” (sensational, desire) Intention: return to the mission	Rear view mirror, road ahead, dynamic 2D map Activity: normal driving	PC: no police detectable R: successful completion of mini-mission, move closer to resolving main intention
A6 Police in rearview mirror (active, fear) Intention: get rid of police tail	Traffic, street lights and trees, side turns Activity: swerving to get police to crash into vehicles or street furniture behind you, speeding and taking side turns to get away from a collision situation	(dynamic) PC1: police crash or lose you R1: continue with mission PC2: rammed by police R2: mini-mission, escape crash situation
A7 Police patrol visible and felony at zero (fear) Intention: avoid being noticed	Basic navigation controls Activity: drive within the law	(dynamic) PC1: go unnoticed R1: continue with mission PC2: traffic violation noticed, police radio message R2: mini-mission, police give chase
A8 Police roadblock ahead (awesome, fear) Intention: get through road block, avoid damage	Basic navigation controls Activity: find largest gap in the road block	(dynamic) PC1: clear roadblock R1: continue with mission PC2: crash R2: mini-mission, how to get out/get through
A9 Police roadblock ahead (local, fear) Intention: avoid road block, avoid damage	Basic navigation controls Activity: 180 degree handbrake turn	(dynamic) PC: facing in opposite direction R: find another route to achieve mission
A10 Police roadblock ahead and police in rearview mirror (local, fear) Intention: get through road block, avoid damage	Basic navigation controls Activity: find largest gap in the road block	(dynamic) PC1: clear roadblock R1: continue with mission PC2: crash, rammed by police R2: fail mission
A11 Damage indicator high (fear) Intention: sustain no more damage	Basic navigation controls Activity: careful driving	(dynamic) PC: police catch you up R: more difficult to finish mission
A12 Clock running down (fear) Intention: try to finish level faster	Basic navigation controls Activity: take more risks	(dynamic) PC1: make faster progress R1: perhaps succeed in level PC2: crash R2: restart level
A13 Large floating red arrow, static (alien, desire) Intention: complete level NB: this attractor can also mark the end of a section of a mission	Basic navigation controls Activity: park under arrow	(static) PC: “well done” message R: completion of mission or subsection of mission
A14 Large floating red arrow, moving (alien, active, mystery) Intention: follow what is being pointed at	Basic navigation controls Activity: driving and looking at moving red arrow	(dynamic) PC1: keep subject in view R1: closer to completing mission PC2: lose subject R2: fail mission
A15 Large floating, static red full stop, “you’re too early” (alien, fear) Intention: use up more time	Basic navigation controls Activity: drive around some more	(static) PC: the time counter tick down R: you can still finish, you know where to go
A16 Large, static floating red exclamation mark, “lose police tail” (Alien, fear) Intention: lose police tail	Basic navigation controls, street layout, other traffic Activity: outrun police car or make it crash Uses traffic, street lights and trees, side turns	(dynamic) PC1: lose police tail R1: can now complete mission PC2: rammed by police R2: mini-mission, escape police attack
A17 Pedestrians (desire) Intention: run them over	Basic navigation controls Activity: drive toward them	(dynamic) PC: miss R: a false attractor, always failure, they always get out of the way, killing pedestrians is not part of the game
A18 Cafe furniture, park benches, cones, parking meters, garden fences, etc. (desire) Intention: drive through it		PC: variously flattened and/or knocked out of the way (local) R: destruction, amusement (doesn’t further the mission)

Let’s now look at the larger perceptual structures we can identify from the Table of Surprises. First of all, choice points; there are major choice points that arise at junctions which are complex attractors offering us the possibility to continue our current direction of travel or change it. There is far more to junctions than this as entries A2 and A3 make clear. Changing direction is a matter of intention but the complexities of moving traffic complicate the matter, and we have a number of choices as how to negotiate traffic crossing or about crossing the junction in a number of directions. Junctions therefore present choice points of two distinct types: a choice between intentions and a choice as to how to achieve the chosen intention. Choice points also arise when moving through traffic between junctions. We are constantly asked to choose between which side to pass traffic on, which side of the road to drive on, to drive on the road or sidewalk, and so on.

Another major choice point arises with A8 and A9 when we encounter a police road block and we are not already being tailed. In this situation we have the choice of finding a way through the road block—there is usually a way—or making a 180° handbrake turn and finding another way to achieve the main intention of the level. Notice that A10, where the road block is visible but we are also being tailed, invalidates the choice point as in the act of making the handbrake turn we will most likely be rammed and thus embroiled in a whole mini-mission we could have avoided.

Routes in Driver are comprised of a series of major junctions and landmarks; open spaces, for instance. We construct routes as we learn how to get to the destination that will mark the completion of the mission or a section of the mission. Routes might not necessarily be the shortest route between the start and finish points but might be chosen because they avoid difficult places to drive or known concentrations of police.

Challenge points in Driver usually relate to sections of the city that are difficult to negotiate because they are narrow and crowded. They are particularly challenging when a turn, for instance, is required and police are present. The narrow causeway road to the port in Miami is a good example. A15 also introduces a different form of challenge point, as we have no alternative but to lose the police tail. A4 and A6 might also be considered in the same light.

There are a number of generic retainers (mini-missions) in Driver but mostly these are dynamic in that they can occur anywhere in the city. The first involves being noticed as a felon by a patrolling police car which then gives chase; the challenge point discussed in the previous paragraph which, in turn, gives rise to a retainer to resolve it. This leads first of all to a chase retainer in which we, the felon, attempt to lose the police car by either swerving in and out of traffic and other solid obstructions in order to make it crash or by making a series of turns at junctions and losing it in that way. This retainer also often occurs at the end of a level if we approach the alien attractor with police already on our tail. A minor form of this also occurs when we arrive at the end of mission sign too early and have to drive around to waste time.

If we do not lose the police car we will almost certainly end up being rammed and forced into a crash retainer where we must try to find a way out with as little damage as possible. “Threading” a police road block is another generic retainer. There is usually a way through if you drive very accurately. Similar, though not nearly so catastrophic, retainers might occur when we inadvertently crash into nonpolice traffic on the road. This might result in some serious efforts to “get back on track.” We sustain damage, waste time and may well attract the attention of the police.

Chase missions—usually involving A13—may be considered to be retainers in themselves, much in the way we observed many early games to be in the previous chapter. In a chase mission we have to follow a vehicle, identified by a dynamic red arrow, the end-of-mission marker, to some point where it stops or where we can ram and destroy it.

Other things to look for include the range of intentions a player holds at any one time. How many sources of information is the player offered for monitoring at any one time? Where and how is such information presented? For instance, are they abstractly represented in the HUD or are they directly presented in the main game display? How does all this affect the nature of the gameplay? We will answer these questions in the next section by way of a comparison with SinCity, which we analyzed in the previous chapter.

DRIVER AND SINCITY COMPARISONS

If we compare the Tables of Surprises for SinCity with that for Driver we see that, despite their differing genres and the fact that we are comparing a DM level with a complete single-player game, POs and POs organized into tables of surprises do capture the essence of the gameplays of the two games. This is because we are dealing here with the underlying dynamics of gameplay. We can see now that the two original situations described in the opening paragraphs of the previous chapter were actually examples of attractor/connector/reward triples. Despite their superficial differences, the POs do identify them as having certain similar structures. Furthermore, comparison of the two tables highlights a number of interesting things. The actual sizes of the tables are not significant as we can never be sure we have all possible entries nor can we be sure we are identifying attractors at exactly the same level of granularity. Remember, complex attractors are composed of any number of attractors including other complex attractors. Size does not help us.

The attractors for SinCity display an even balance of objects of desire and objects of fear. This indicates that reward and risk can balance out. In Driver the attractors are almost exclusively objects of fear with a few being objects of both desire and fear. There are five objects of desire in Driver:

A1: main intention
A5: losing a police tail
A13: end of mission
A17: pedestrians, a false attractor
A18: street furniture, cafe furniture, motorway cones, road work signs, etc.: pointless destruction

Only the first three of these make any contribution to eventual success. Altogether this indicates that there is an unremitting level of risk in Driver.

Both games use alien attractors, though in different ways. In SinCity all guns, ammo, health, and power-ups are essentially alien because of the way they float just above ground. Health is directly connotative in that the object “health” represents a concept, the individual’s physical well being. In Driver the three end-of-level markers are all alien, but appropriately so. This is because it would be difficult to find a specific building or location at the best of times but when trying to complete a level in a damaged car pursued by psychotic police cars it would be nearly impossible. Also the added tension of almost but not quite having completed a level, A15, adds to the excitement of the game.

If we look at rewards, we see that the rewards in SinCity are concerned with both high level objectives such as increasing the frag count but also lower level objectives such as increasing health, weapons, and ammo. The rewards in Driver are all focused on the overall objective of reaching the specified location to complete the level. There are no rewards that decrease damage or give the player extra time. From this, and the observations on attractors above, we can see that Driver is a game of attrition and requires more or less a complete focus on the main objective. SinCity is very much about rising and declining fortunes and the player’s control over them.

This brings us to the patterns of intention setting and planning in the two games. In SinCity it is the normal pattern of gameplay to have a number of intentions and their connectors, plans, and so forth active at any one time. There are always the overall objectives of ambushing opponents and keeping a lookout for opponents looking to do the same. However, players will also have lower level intentions, which they will operate concurrently, to get more ammo, weapons, and health. They will switch intentions quickly if a lower level one becomes obtainable. Attaining a lower level intention does not remove it from the current list. In such games players will keep many such intentions active so they can satisfy them pragmatically as the opportunity arises.

In Driver the high level intention, the level’s mission, runs concurrently with the lower level intention which supports it and is to do with the current situation on the street. When the latter is satisfied, a new lower level intention is identified to do with the next street situation on the way to the main intention. This pattern is only interrupted by the arrival of police on the scene, A4, at which point other short term intentions to do with immediate survival come into play and temporarily replace both the high level intention and its current lower level supporter. However, although the patterns of intention setting and holding may be simpler for Driver than SinCity, the manner in which we arrive at those intentions is not at all simple.

If we look at the Table of Surprises for Driver we can see a lot of sources of information via an array of connectors that support the main view into the current cityscape. Driver is not as straightforward a first/third person game as it might seem; in fact, we have the following competing for our direct attention:

The viewing frustum: The 3D view into the current cityscape.
The rear view mirror: Another 3D view into what is currently behind us, not just an aid to safe driving but a vital tool when engaged in a retainer to lose police tails.
The 2D dynamic map: This not only shows us where we are and the general direction of the location we have to find, it also shows us where police cars are in the vicinity, but not necessarily visible in either of the two 3D views above.
The police radio messages we are listening in to: These tell us if we have been spotted and if we have lost a tail.

There are also some more traditional connectors:

Damage: Indicates how much damage our car has sustained and thus how close we are to failure.
Felony: How wanted we are by the police, this in turn affects the amount of attention the police pay us.
Time: Which might be time taken or time left.

We need to be aware of and make use of all seven to be successful in a Driver mission. The Driver worldview is multifaceted, multimodal, and changes in real time. By contrast a typical FPS such as SinCity uses a single coherent worldview, the viewing frustum supported by traditional connectors giving indications for health, guns, and ammo. We suspect this is one of the reasons for Driver’s original success. The game, the intentions we must form and resolve, is not simply “in the screen.” It is distributed in various forms in both sound and vision in the game space. The player has to work hard to form a coherent mental model of what is actually going on. This has other implications for the game.

As in a typical stealth game, there are various ways to complete a mission. We can simply take the shortest route and attempt to outrun the police or we can plan a route to avoid the current positions of the police and give ourselves less hassle; we can go for “all twitch” or we can go for “twitch and stealth.” On the whole you can’t escape the twitch factor entirely in Driver. This is due mostly to the ever present and ever vigilant police who never seem to miss a suspect. The police cars—or rather their behavior—constitute a major unrealism even by U.S. standards. The city appears “real” but the psychotic police cars, always willing to sacrifice themselves to ram suspects and anyone else that gets in the way, are not at all realistic. In terms of behavior the police cars do not so much follow the suspect as match the car’s movements moment by moment; it is thus quite possible to make them crash into other traffic by swerving in and out and thus lose them. All in all, the police cars are the very connotation of menace. The game is thus an intriguing contradiction between the visually real and the behaviorally unreal. No accident, we suspect (pun intended).

We can thus see that POs and their perceptual maps can tell us much about the underlying structure of games and allow us to see something of why games are as they are. For instance, we should point out the power of alien attractors to emphasize particular features: a common and useful design feature. This analysis also highlights the importance of understanding the connotative nature of even everyday objects in games.

SUMMARY

Comparative content analysis is an excellent means of coming to understand games in a more fundamental way. The underlying structure of games—as revealed by POs and perceptual mapping—reinforces the insight we derived from the investigations of Part I; but the examination of games in terms of genre, activity, and aesthetics can, if we are not careful, mask the complexity and variety inherent in games that may at first appear similar.

In this chapter we have concentrated on the way POs reveal gameplay structure. Perceptual mapping, Tables of Surprises in this case, make clear however just how interconnected are POs and aesthetics, particularly agency. We have not gone on to discuss the relationship between other aspects of aesthetics, such as narrative potential and transformation, although it should be clear from our discussions of Driver that they definitely arise out of the exercise of the agency on offer. The mission-based nature of the game, the fact that the missions all have names, and the breakdown of many of these missions into a series of subgoals, emphasizes narrative potential. The patterns of choice points, routes, challenge points, and retainers (mini-missions) adds a further level of support by allowing us to complete our own version of the narrative; we realize the level’s narrative potential through our exercise of agency. We already alluded to transformation earlier in this chapter. For our part, we find the possibility of playing a criminal driving, in whatever way we have, to be a major transformative pleasure; particularly as we can walk away from it when we wish. In many ways we have already discussed co-presence. It is a major aesthetic pleasure of the game; Driver would not work without it. But consider for a moment the way “others” are manifest in this world. The only people you actually see are the pedestrians and you do not effectively interact with them; you can make them jump out of the way, but that is all. The people you can interact with are all inside cars and you never see them. Would you be quite so happy to ram other cars and cause major crashes if you could see frightened and injured people and the associated blood and severed limbs? This was the case with Grand Theft Auto, but with Driver we are very much in the world and not dislocated observers looking down from above.

Many of the important connotations we derive from the game’s content and which provide a vital context for its success have not actually been analyzed in this chapter, although their importance has been noted. We are thinking particularly about the way the criminal underworld is connoted. The relationships between such connotation and the intentions we form and prioritize have been discussed in some detail but the way in which we arrive at such connotations has not. What we are actually doing here is confronting the interface between the world of computer games and the real world; the way in which we understand and make meanings in general. We bring our knowledge of the criminal world, however secondhand that may be for most of us, to bear when we interpret undercover investigation, seedy hotel rooms, mysterious messages on answering machines, and so on, as a license to break the law. To what extent do we need to bother ourselves about this process? The question will arise again in the next chapter.

DRIVER SCHOOL

SURETIES

SURPRISES

DRIVER AND SINCITY COMPARISONS

SUMMARY

FURTHER READING AND TASKS