Fiction

Summary

In Juul’s analysis of video games he discusses the worlds that games take place in and how they create the different game experiences. He begins by describing different types of fictional worlds in games. The first is Half-life, where not much can be inferred about the details of the world outside of what has been told or shown to the players. The second is incoherent, the game contradicts itself and frequently presents conflicting information about the in-game world. Abstract is a game like tetris where the game pieces have no individual meaning and do not represent anything else. Iconic games is where individual aspects of the games may have recognizable meanings, but may not be connected to one another. Coherent games are games where a world is layed out and details can be inferred and all pieces have meaning whilst connecting with one another. Game designers establish these worlds using a combination of graphics, sound, text, cut-scenes, haptics, and rules to create their desired worlds.

Example

Recently, a friend of mine has been encouraging me to play Smite with him. In Smite, you choose a god to play as and team up with other people to fight. In the version we often play, you have to take down the other team’s tower, phoenix, and titan to win. There are NPC characters, called minions, that are designed to defend you and help you to attack the other team. There are dozens of gods to choose from that have different specialties. They can specialize in magical or melee attacks and have special abilities based on what god they are and the religion they are associated with. You are also able to fight smaller monsters for power-ups within the game, but it is not necessary.

Connection

I thought of Smite while reading this article because of two reasons. One, it is one of the few video games I have actually played. Two, I feel it is a good example of an iconic game. The gods you can play as in the game are representations of real gods from mythology. However, most of them have no association to one another outside of the game. Based on the abilities they have you can make assumptions about their interactions with one another and form your own opinions about them, but there is little additional backstory given about why all these gods are fighting one another in an arena.