Warcraft III begins with two short missions, 'Chasing Visions' and 'Departure'. They introduce the game as prologue, tutorial in the rudiments of Warcraft game mechanics, and first moments of play set in the narrative arc of the game. In Warcraft III, built-in spectator modes and replay capture, websites for distributing replays from Video on Demand and shoutcast commentaries of games fostered a player-spectator relationship around competitive game performance. Warcraft became more ambitious with each new version by this measure, whether in the continuity of the world history, the quality of cinematic cut-scenes or the charming 'pissed sounds' emitted when a player clicked repeatedly on unit avatars (Orc Grunt: 'It not easy being green'). Warcraft, in other words, exhibits a tension between the developer's notion of game story-lines, authored and continuous, and player-generated stories based on game performance and experience.

Understandings of videogame history are therefore progressive in tone, with arguments for how far and how fast things have moved supported by screenshots that show the development from the crude 2D sprites populating the flat landscapes of a couple of decades ago to the complex 3D worlds of the first decade of the twenty-first century. The videogame protagonist who is moved by the player through the vast 3D landscapes of today's flagship games is presented as always engaged in the revelation of the new and the previously unseen. Games are designed in such a way that the player is encouraged to develop their playing skills over time to become more effective agents in the game world. At the same time games seek to surprise, delight and challenge the player as a game's textual regimes unfold. Sometimes these factors converge and at other times they become separated and work in tension.

According to a widespread theory, videogames are goal-oriented, rule-based activities, where players find enjoyment in working towards the game goal. According to this theory, game goals provide a sense of direction and set up the challenges that the players face. San Andreas and Sims 2 are fundamentally similar in that they are top-selling, open and expressive games, games that let the player use them in many different ways, games that allow for many different playing styles, for players pursuing personal agendas. Cheat codes are designed to let the player circumvent the challenges of the game and rather set up a game world in the way the player likes. As such, cheat codes can be a way of making games more like languages where the player can combine the elements of the game in the way they want. Cheat codes make games less challenging and more expressive.

The designers of Second Life have built in an open source development model into the world. Players can develop apps (applications) and products inside the game; it is a great introduction to computer science for children and young people. Probably the most unique thing about games in Second Life is that residents retain all the intellectual property rights to their own creations. This means that game developers can charge admission, franchise their idea, become a scriptor for hire and trade Linden dollars on third party sites for real-world dollars. Several resident game developers have already exercised their rights to sell a cross-platform version of their in-world game to a real-world publisher, or rented out their in-world game settings for commercial use. This means that the best game in Second Life is the game of making money.

Emily Short's 2002 Savoir-Faire is a quintessential work of interactive fiction, an all-text adventure game that draws on the substantial history of the form but also contributes its share of innovations. Savoir-Faire is clearly the sort of program that asks to be understood as a game (a play experience), as a sort of puzzle or riddle (an experience of solving), and as a textual exchange that has literary qualities (a reading experience). The formal qualities of Savoir-Faire, which include being able to stop and think about what command to type next and being able to undo fatal mistakes, offer adequate space for play. There are lessons that Savoir-Faire has for other sorts of games. But, just as music is especially useful for rhythm games and graphics are useful for games involving spatial reasoning and manipulations, there are also some benefits of language, the medium of input and output for Savoir-Faire.

Specific games offer specific variations, and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, for example, adds wall-running to the mix but the player of one 3D platform game is likely to be able to transfer the understanding of movement through game space fairly easily from one game to another even when potentially more innovative controls are attempted, such as in the 2004 game Galleon. This chapter explores the significance of this potential for avatar death for any understanding of games in terms of the pleasures available to the player. It considers the player as someone who plays with the possibility of avatar death at any given moment, and who navigates not only a complex spatial architecture of ruined spaces, but a complex relationship between life and death and a past, present and future of ruined bodies as he or she moves intermittently through game space.

This chapter considers the ways in which female Quake players and female Quake clans have developed and enunciated a particular gaming identity and technical competence within a gaming culture that is heavily coded as masculine. It draws from a case study focusing on the consumption and production practices of individual female Quake players, female Quake-playing clans, and the ways in which they have separately and collectively represented themselves to the rest of the online game-playing community that has formed around Quake. Female Quake players, their creative practices and the community they have developed should be understood to be relevant to a technofeminist agenda that seeks to offer both new images of technologised embodiment and to foster an active engagement with technology amongst women. The female Quake playing community demonstrates a playful use of names to demarcate a specifically oppositional female identity within the online community.

This chapter provides an exploration of meaning, information and pleasure in Sid Meier's Civilization III. Various theorists, including Poblocki and Douglas have argued that games within the Civilization series perpetrate a reductive folk-history that positions Western-style technologically orientated progress as 'the only logical development' for humanity. In moving from a critique of the game's rules and the prejudicial bias that they house, to the continuity of myths within Western popular culture, and then to statements about the effect of the game on its users, these discussions stray across Salen and Zimmerman's three schema: evidence tends to be collected from two schemas (rules, culture), yet conclusions are drawn in a third (play). The trouble with such critique is that play is the schema of the experiential, and it involves the actualization, interpretation and configuration of the game in real-time by users.

Doom 3 is filled with graphical eye candy,' echoed PC Magazine. 'The use of bump-mapping and lighting effects provides an entirely eerie setting, and one that has never looked better. [But] the retro-styled game play is another story, and one that might leave you longing for much more. The actual plot is built around a far too linear quest that, while true to the original, feels dated.' Moreover, the competing forces in Doom 3 are crucial to understanding the experience of playing it - indeed, of playing any first person shooter - reliving the mingled terrors and pleasures of a traumatic stage in our avatarial relations. Early in Doom 3, the game seems to remark on its own heritage. On a computer terminal at the UAC research lab, players can access an informational clip on base security. The animation shows a cartoon maze from first-person perspective.

This chapter is based on a production case study undertaken in Pivotal Games' studios in Autumn 2003. It reconstructs the history of the video game in three modes; the voices of designers, the experiences of a player and through critical writing. By triangulating the designers' perspective with the direct experience of a player, the chapter exemplifies a way of writing about new media that is rooted in situated material practices rather than technophiliac abstraction. Vietnam is a tactical squad based shooter. The player commands a squad of four soldiers on a series of missions set in the period of the Tet offensive in the Vietnam war of 1968. Competition within the mainstream console games market has increased faster than its overall expansion; in 2001 there were 270 games available for the three main consoles. Vietnam almost inevitably emerges as a site for the next game in the Conflict series.

This chapter begins by explaining the title: what is the split condition of digital textuality? In literature, drama, and films, the magic formula for reaching the tourists of the Tropics has been traditional narrative structures, the magic formula for reaching those in love with the North Pole has often been the rejection, or what Alan Liu would call the creative destruction, of these structures, and the magic formula for reaching the population of the Temperate Zone has been the renewal of narrative. Most importantly, the fictional world should be adaptable, so that when the player returns to a site he has already visited, something will have changed, and different narrative possibilities will open themselves. In other words, he will not encounter the same character who says the same things every time he visits the same spot, as is too often the case in videogames.

SimCity clearly pays homage to the device of wonders of the past. It is the postmodern equivalent of these archaic visual machines, and it perfectly demonstrates the fluid boundaries between simulation and art, urban planning and literature, technology and entertainment. The evolution of SimCity has been characterized by a reduction of abstraction in the graphic depiction of urban and natural elements, to the point that some commentators such as Israels argued that the game displayed a sense of aesthetic perfection that only true works of art possess. Although SimCity was originally designed for a single-player, offline experience, since its inception it has always been a moderately massively online game. SimCity is one of the first computer games to be used for pedagogical and educational purposes. In SimCity, however, this desire is never satisfied. In a sense, the game is truly Bunuellian: pleasure is constantly postponed, delayed and deferred.

This chapter considers what it means to a play a game in a series like 'Street Fighter', and what kinds of pleasure are found in that moment of revelation as one executes a 'special move' - the super-powered secret techniques of a chosen player-character. It discusses what it means to be 'good' or 'bad' at this predominantly two-player game, and how this impacts on the shared experience of spectacle, since, as Guy Debord suggests, 'The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images'. By figuring the performing gamer into a critique of spectacle, the chapter foregrounds the spectacular potential of play. The chapter explores the relationship between the spectacular aesthetic and a sense of gratification associated with skilled gameplay, called the 'reward-spectacle'. The reward-spectacle is a textual motif of games design and play.

As an extension of the well-established Warcraft series, World of Warcraft is a subscription-based massively multiplayer role-playing game that came online in late 2004. Alongside an analysis of the game's specific stylistic and textural milieu, it is the way that this particular multiplayer game facilitates a balance between player agency and restriction and the relationship between interpellation and identity that provide the main focus of this chapter. In addition, a variety of issues around player identity arise because of the social context afforded by the game and it is a core contention of this essay that it is the complex interactions between text and player/s that breathe vitality and drama into this world. Assessing what impact playing a social and fantasy-based game like World of Warcraft has on personal identity is not easy, particularly as identity is performative and has playful aspects.