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The way in which video games are coded has been a foreign concept to me since I started playing video games. While I started playing video games when I was about 8 or 9 (MVP Baseball 2004 was my first), I never really thought about how the discs somehow allowed me to play the games until I was in high school. The technology was astounding to me then and it still is now.
Upon first opening “The Naked Game”, I did not read the instructions, and immediately started to look at the game play as well as the lines of code below the game. The code that goes into video games is so foreign to me that it never crossed my mind that these lines could be altered. I immediately assumed that the code was just simply showing how the designers developed the game rather than offering a chance for the user to mess around with the game.
To me, the fact that I was completely oblivious to the fact that the code could be tampered with before reading the instructions demonstrates just how foreign the idea of video game code is. My interaction with the code in “The Naked Game” was entirely unique for me in my experience playing video games over the past decade plus. I came to the conclusion that while being able to mess what appears to be the code (Mark Sample’s “Code” in Debugging Game History shows that users playing “The Naked Game” are actually interacting with a proxy for the code that is updated depending on the users), I enjoy more not knowing what is going on underneath the hood. To me, it seems that playing video games and analyzing the code that goes into video games should be separate. I enjoy playing video games because of the gameplay itself, not because of the work the developers did to put it together.
Posted from Digital Studies 101 Blog by Patrick G.