5. The Ontology of Video games
What, then, is the artifactual basis of videogames that allows for this ontological peculiarity? There are a couple of false leads to avoid. First and most obviously, the relevant artifact is not the disk or digital file that is used in the distribution of the game. Physically, the playing of a game begins with acts, such as placing a disk in a drive or downloading a file from a server, and then starting it. Increasingly, games also involve online activity, so that the origin of much of the game content derives from a location distal to its physical playing. Some online games, such as RuneScape, are played directly on internet browsers, employing graphical applications such as Java. The disk, digital file, or internet application is not the game but merely a means of distributing the game, and thus is a key part of the technology that lends support to the concept of videogames being mass arts.
Digitally encoded disks and downloads are means of distributing the game program, and hence it might be thought that the game itself is the program that is distributed by these means. This cannot be correct, however, because a single game can be given different program instantiations, as often happens when a game is designed to run on different hardware platforms. Moving a game from one platform to another, common since at least the 1970s, is called “porting the game,” though for commercial reasons video game releases are increasingly cross-platform at the outset. Grand Theft Auto IV can be run on PlayStation 3, X-Box 360, and a PC, and the different platform instantiations involve different programs. The differences between the varied program instantiations of the game are driven by the differing hardware and software demands of the various game platforms, both at the developer and user ends of the process.[23]
A very obvious example of the variation in hardware demands is the differences in control peripherals between different gaming platforms. On PlayStation 3, the program running Grand Theft Auto IV must specify the use of a game pad; on a personal computer, the program specifies a keyboard and mouse. But in either case, these control variations do not affect the videogame that is being played; rather they are ascribed to the varied programs running the game. In fact, there can be perceptible differences in single videogames as generated by different platforms. For example, a common, critical practice is the comparison of the graphics of a single game from one hardware platform to the next, comparing, for example, the graphics on Grand Theft Auto IV run on PlayStation 3 and X-Box 360.
As such, there must be something shared between programs that establishes game identity and hence the ontology of games. It is here that I call on Dominic Lopes’ theory that games and computer art works—and video games, which share aspects of both—are ontologically grounded in algorithms.[24] Grand Theft Auto IV, like chess, has a game algorithm, but where the algorithm of chess specifies the movement of pieces on a board, Grand Theft Auto IV involves events in a fiction.[25] An algorithm is here defined as a functional item, and as such it is useful for capturing game ontology because by being substrate independent, the functional analysis allows us to see how a game type can have multiple instantiations and can exist in different media. Moreover, algorithms can be implemented in different computer programs, thus providing an explanation for the problem noted above of how a single game might find different program instantiations across different platforms. What is shared by all is a single game algorithm.
Does this ontological posit of a game algorithm actually resemble anything that games designers would recognize in the programs they design? In fact, this broadly functional use of the term ‘algorithm’ does not seem to be typical of the use of the term in game design. Games designers might speak of an algorithm involved in a graphical shader, for example, but in this use they would be referring quite specifically to the transformations that allow the shader to perform its particular task in rendering the graphics, such as adding volumetric detail to a texture. Thus conceived, algorithms solve computational problems. Furthermore, algorithms are typically defined as having terminations, but the objects being invoked here can often be run indefinitely because there is no set problem that they are meant to solve. Rather their function is to generate an ongoing display drawing on the inputs of an interactor (or even without the player’s input); this is often referred to as the “game loop.” Thus the use of ‘algorithm’ as a game algorithm is applied much more grandiosely than in many technical uses, and in all likelihood would prove jarring to most game designers. It is, however, aimed at solving ontological issues, and it is not clear that games designers typically have any interest in these sorts of concerns.
Perhaps closer to this sense of algorithm is the term ’game mechanic,’ which is used in game design to refer to the functional components of gameplay. But even this does not quite fit the broad sense desired here because designers typically speak of a game mechanic in a singular sense, as a unit of game design specifiable in isolation from other game mechanics, and that might find its way into a single game or be shared between different games. The use I intend for ‘game algorithm’ obviously refers to the conjunction of such game mechanics that combine to form a whole game. In a game like Grand Theft Auto IV, this collection of game mechanics is extensive.