Assignment 2 - Spatial Analysis

Play one of each of the following groups of games for at least 2 hours:

* Adventure (on the NMR CD) or Zork (available here - PC only, or in the EGL)
* Myst (in the EGL)
* Grand Theft Auto III/Vice City/San Andreas or The Legend of Zelda (NES version) or Zelda: Wind Waker (GameCube) (in the EGL)

What legacy and computational effects make these virtual space feel real? How do you know where you are? How do you know the relationship of your current location to your previous location? What objects and possible events do you expect to find in these spaces? Analyze how space was traversed in the game. How was space organized, what kind of options for movement did you have? What aspects/objects provided a path or desire to follow a certain direction.

Grand Theft Auto III (GTA3) uses a variety of different methods to create a virtual space and make it feel real. First off, detail. Everything from shadows on everything, cars making tire skid marks, blood splattering from people, car explosions causing debris, bullet shells being ejected from guns, rain droplets hitting the screen, to cars rocking from intimate activity. Millions of ideas went into the making of this game and nothing was left out. As the time in the game advances, so does the sun. The weather changes causing rain, fog, and clear skies in the day and night. Secondly, interaction with other people is possible. You can answer a pay phone, ride the train/subway, fight/shoot people, and drive cars/airplanes. You can manage a taxi, ambulance, police car, fire truck, and over 25 other everyday cars, trucks, and SUVs. You can put out fires, kill criminals, help people get to the hospital, and many other things. Different types of people, cars, buildings, and roads make the game mirror real life events. Also, size plays a major role in the feel of the game. To get from one point to another, you have to walk, run, drive, ride, or fly. To get from one edge of the game to the other could literally take anywhere from 30 minutes to 5 minutes depending which mode of transportation you use and which route. The game's boundaries kept you from going away from the three islands and made sure that you stayed within the realm of things to do. The boundaries changed during the game also. Once you got to a certain level, you gained access to other islands and more things to do. This makes you feel more like you are progressing through the game, rather than just moving to a different level like say in Super Mario Bros. And you are able to go anywhere that you have access to at that time. You aren't prohibited from going back to the first island say once you gain access to the second one. But it is easy to get lost. Thank goodness for the map.

There are variety of ways for you to know where you are in the game. There is a large map in the start menu, and there is also an in-game map that is always on the screen. It is a small circle that displays your position, direction, the city streets in your immediate area, and icons representing important places to you at any given moment during the game. A few places on the map might be your hide-out and your next mission. It is easy to assosiate where things are in relation to other things. For example, I know that if you face the police station on the first island, the hospital is directly to the left of it. Different areas of the game have different feels as well. If you enter the Mafia's territory, you will most likely see a man wearing a dark black suit every 4 seconds carrying a shotgun. If you enter the Triad's territory, you will see a lot of light blue trucks and hear people yelling certain phrases with a distinguishable accent.

Getting lost in the game is a big problem, especially if you haven't played it much and aren't familiar with the layout. Knowing where you are also helps you relate to where you want to go and where you have already been. Landmarks will help you know where to turn while driving down a street, knowing what lies at the end and beginning of a road can tell you if you are going in the correct direction towards something, and even looking at the map to see which cardinal direction you are traveling in can help you a great deal.

As you use the map to travel through the game, there are a million and one things to do. There are a variety of ways to earn money for yourself. You can drive a taxi, extinguish fires, save lives in the ambulance, steal money off cadavers, carry out missions, find hidden packages, complete unique jumps, and end the lives of fleeing criminals. All the while, you are interacting with other people on the streets and trying not to lose your health points or get arrested. When you go to a certain area, you expect to find things related to it. Like boats at the port and beaches, black cars and suits around the Mafia, and fast cars around the stadium. You might find fights near the gang borders and airplanes in the hangers at the airport. Pretty much nothing out of the ordinary. You will find things that you would find in real life if say you went to the beach or the football game.

There are many ways to move around in the game. As the main character, you can look in every direction just like a human would be able to. You can run and walk and drive cars just as you would in real life. The game is set up just like a city. Downtown has many blocks, buildings with parking lots, parking decks, and maybe a park. To travel by car, you would most likely have to steal one, and be quick to get out of sight if a police officer was near by. Flying an airplane, going off a ramp in a car, and climbing up stairs let you move up and down rather than just left, right, forwards, and backwards. Rules like gravity are always in effect and are not out of the ordinary. If you run into a building, you stop. If you jump off a building, you lose health points. If you go off a ramp in a car, you come back down. Traveling in a plane might be faster if you were traveling from the third island to the first to meet your employer, because you could move in a straight line from one place to the other. If you were to make the journey by car, you would have to maneuver through the city streets making lots of turns.

Your main motivation for continuing to seek out employers is the cash reward you receive after successfully completing a mission. As the game progress, the rewards increase. Having more money allows you to buy bigger and better weapons which in turn makes the harder missions easier to complete. The hidden packages and hidden unique jumps give the player the option of taking a break from the stroy line and making the decisions about where to travel to.
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