Dan's Response

From English 194 Wiki

In Salen and Zimmerman’s work “Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals”, the authors attempt to offer insight into the phenomenon of gaming and play. The title itself illuminates the main premise that game design is an element that is dependent on the larger interactive phenomenon of play.

Salen and Zimmerman’s work examines the act of play from many different perspectives. At the core, play can be seen as a break from reality, allowing those who are participating to enter a “magic circle”. In this "magic circle", certain actions may have a separate defined set of effects on the individual player in terms of their placement in the game and/or their personal psychology. Certain actions may have a sepparate set of effects on other players in the game in terms of their relation to one another spacialy or psychologically. A given action of a player in a game can also have a reactive effect on the construct of the game itself (i.e. moving a pawn from one end of the board to another in Chess and getting a new piece).

They stress that in designing a game, the creator is not designing a mere story or sequence of events, but rather a context within which a certain amount of free will can be enacted on the part of the player.

If one agrees with these premises, then one can ask: what is the relationship between the reality achieved by a game and the day to day reality of a given player? Is gaming really a way of leaving one realm of reality and entering another, or are we actively combining the two? What affects does this have on the reality of a gamer who is outside of the gaming world? What is gained from entering and exploring a fabricated context of a gaming world?

Also, I'd like to focus on Grand Theft Auto for a second.

• In this game you can snipe a gangster, and you can snipe an elderly woman or child.
• Does the game designer have a certain responsibility for the context of the gaming environment he creates for his gamers?
• Are there any effects that this has on the real world reality of a gamer if there are minimal consequences for bad deeds inside the gaming world?
  • (Many critics of GTA and other violent games (and artforms in general) attribute real world violence to the effects of these artforms.