Introduction
- Video Games -
To play or not to play, that is the question.
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Not to get too out-of-this-worldly, but video games are simply real or imaginary games people play in make-believe contexts -- or pretend "worlds." The long and the short of it is, they are simulations. And they typically involve or depict environments that grow out of the imagination of designers and developers. For instance, they could be war games that take place on the planet Spiroo Agnoo, in the galaxy Andromeda, in the year of Prince Adelan. But they could be closer to home, say at the Detroit Piston's stadium, The Palace, at Auburn Hills, and your team, the Los Angeles Lakers, could be playing them.
The fact that they are figments of someone's imagination, though, doesn't in any way mean that anything goes in the depicted settings. On the contrary! Every context, real or imaginary, has to have its rules or mechanisms of behavior and its physical and physiological possibilities and limitations. (For instance, you can't have a cat swinging a tennis racket or hitting a baseball. And if a human jumps 20 feet straight up, there has to be an accounting for it.) Without the rules or physiological accounting, the game wouldn't have anything to recommend it. To be useful in any sense, whether as entertainment or science, the setup has to be "realistic," and there's no realism without rules of behavior the gamers are to accept.
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What you re simulating is a game. But the game has to be played in some context -- a context that befits the game. So you are really simulating the context. The context defines the geometry of the game. What does that mean?
Take tennis as an example. To understand what I mean by the geometry of tennis -- hence the geometry of video game spaces -- it helps to know what I mean by the context of tennis. The tennis court alone is not tennis. An empty court is just a slab of concrete (or some such material) with a net strung across its midsection. And if there are no people around, it's not even that much (a "court" is a human percept, so without perception there is no tennis).
To have tennis you need players, and you need tennis rackets and a tennis ball. Not just any racket is acceptable and not just any ball will do the trick. You wouldn't think of playing tennis with a squash racket, for instance, or with a baseball bat. And certainly not with a kitchen spoon -- even a large one. The squash racket is too light to hit a tennis ball properly over the net. A bat is entirely inappropriate. And a kitchen spoon is ridiculous. Nor would a baseball be a proper substitute for the tennis ball. And the peaches I just pulled off the tree, as hard as they are, would be no better than the baseball. (I gave the peaches to the local baseball team, but they sent them back after breaking two bats.) Less appropriate still would be to try to play the game with no racket at all, as in handball.
The point is, in any game the components of the context have to fit together and have to match the interpretation of the game. For tennis you need people using the rackets to hit the ball back and forth across the net in accordance with the written and unwritten rules of the game. The tennis context is the social entity that includes the court and the equipment and the rules and the players. It is an arrangement (like many others) created by us to engage in a specific form of recreation and competition. The context of tennis means nothing to your neighborhood cat or dog. It means nothing even to the cat lying asleep in the middle of the service zone. It matters only to those of us, humans alike, who wish to participate in this form of recreation and "friendly" competition.
Because of its inherent nature (as specified by us), the tennis context, like any other (real or imagined) arrangement, imposes various conditions on its participants - self-imposed, culturally acceptable conditions. The setting allows for a variety of tennis possibilities and also imposes constraints on what is allowed to occur. The size of the court, its shape and surface texture, and the size and shape of the net strung across its middle admit to only a certain kind of action. The size, shape, structure, and weight of the rackets and the ball contribute to the possibilities and constraints. And so too do the height, reach, and speed of each of the players, as well as the player's physiological structure (which cats or dogs don't share).