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Choice Molecules
[The designers of Spacewar!, the first computer game] identified action as the key ingredient and conceived Spacewar! as a game that could provide a good balance between thinking and doing for its players. They regarded the computer as a machine naturally suited for representing things that you could see, control, and play with. Its interesting potential lay not in its ability to perform calculations but in its capacity to represent action in which humans could participate.-Brenda Laurel, Computers as Theater
The capacity for games to "represent action in which players participate" forms the basis of our concept of "choice." If we consider that every choice has an outcome, then it follows that this action > outcome unit is the vehicle through which meaning in a game emerges. Although games can generate meaning in many ways (such as through image, text, sound, etc.), to understand the interactive nature of meaningful play, we focus on the kinds of meaning that grow from player interaction. At the heart of interactive meaning is the action > outcome unit, the molecule out of which larger interactive structures are built.In order to examine this concept more closely we look at the classic arcade game Asteroids, a direct descendent of Spacewar!. In Asteroids, a player uses buttons to maneuver a tiny spaceship on the screen, avoiding moving asteroids and UFOs and destroying them by shooting projectiles.The action > outcome interactive units of Asteroids are manipulated through a series of five player commands, each one of them a button on the arcade game's control panel: rotate left, rotate right, thrust, fire, and hyperspace. Within the scope of an individual game, possible player actions map to the five buttons:
Press rotate right button: spaceship rotates right
Press rotate left button: spaceship rotates left
Press thrust button: spaceship accelerates in the direction it is facing
Press fire button: spaceship fires projectile (up to four on the screen at a time)
Press hyperspace button: spaceship disappears and reappears in a different location (and occasionally perishes as a result)
Action on the screen is affected through the subtle (and not so subtle!) orchestration of these five controls. As the game progresses, each new moment of choice is a response to the situation onscreen, which is the result of a previous string of action > outcome units. The seamless flow that emerges is one of the reasons why Asteroids is so much fun to play. Rarely are players aware of the hundreds of choices they make each minute as they dodge space rocks and do battle with enemy ships- they perceive only their excitement and participation inside the game.
