Digital Games: A New Territory for the Imagination, by Lee Jeong-yeop

In my last semester at university, I sent out applications and gave serious thought to using the time I had spent playing games as a starting point for working in the industry.

Looking at studio jobs gave me a reason to read books about games. Lee Jeong-yeop’s was one of the ones I found then.

Between entertainment and art

Lee uses narrative theory to compare the point of view in games with that in other art forms. He begins by considering how a novel reaches its reader and how a film arranges the material its audience sees.

A film can combine several camera positions without assigning its story to one narrator as neatly as a novel might. The audience makes a whole out of what the camera lets it see.

The view from a first-person shooter

Lee discusses the first-person perspective popularized by games such as Doom. In his reading, it creates an effect close to second-person narration: the scene addresses the player as someone who can act inside it.

He takes Half-Life 2 as an example of how far that approach could go. Valve used its Source engine to render detailed surroundings and characters that seemed to be responding to the player in real time.

The storytelling is part of that effect. The game makes it feel as though someone is speaking to you, rather than showing you how a separate protagonist reacted.

From seeing the field to playing a position

A change of viewpoint can also change a sports game. In a title such as HardBall!, the player manages the action for a team. The Jikkyō Powerful Pro Yakyū series offered modes that let players experience baseball through the career of a single athlete.

A similar shift appeared in basketball. FreeStyle lets someone play as an individual, in contrast with modes that put the player in charge of the team. That choice changes how the player reads the court.

Where Guild Wars took online storytelling

In the middle of the book, Lee uses Guild Wars to think about ways an online role-playing game could make room for a story.

One limitation he saw in games such as Lineage was that advancement could take so much repetition that it came to dominate the time a player spent in the world.

Guild Wars uses missions and quests to organize an adventure with an overall shape. Completing one part of the story leads to the next, giving the quests a place in something larger.

Giving the story a reason to continue

Lee reads the story in Guild Wars with an eye for devices familiar from Shakespeare, including reversals that keep a player curious about what comes next.

A cap on leveling

Guild Wars capped characters at level 20 and left much of the room for improvement in the tactics and abilities players chose. Lee compares the attention to strategy with that in StarCraft. Keeping those choices competitive required continuing work on balance.

A shared world with private adventures

Guild Wars brought players together in public areas. It also gave groups their own copies of particular areas, limiting the interference that might come from sending everyone into the same dungeon.

Players could meet in towns and then move into a mission with the party they had assembled. The book compares this to making a room on Battle.net and playing with the people who joined it.

Some formats supported eight against eight. Lee sees a resemblance to the way Westwood’s Nox brought players together for a match.

Remaking the Romance of the Three Kingdoms

Few literary works have inspired as many games as Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Koei’s series is one of the best-known examples.

Lee looks at the choice of whose decisions to follow. Across the series, VII and VIII gave individual officers more room as playable characters.

IX combined battles and domestic decisions on a single map. XI continued in that direction after the book was published.

X leaned further into the source material. XII streamlined aspects of administration, a choice some players disliked. Other experiments included an online game built around the same setting.

When I revisited the book in 2024, the main series had reached XIV. XIII had centered on playing an officer, while XIV returned to the perspective of a ruler.

Avatars and the characters players inhabit

The last part of the book turns to the fate of a character when a player can inhabit or shape it.

Lee begins with the history of the word “avatar.”

• The Sanskrit avatāra refers to a descent or manifestation. In Hindu traditions it can describe a deity such as Vishnu taking form in the world.

Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash helped popularize the word for a representation of a person in a virtual environment. The sense of taking another form remains, now as a character a user can design or inhabit.

Who might play next?

The book ends by asking how games might reach people the industry had tended to overlook, particularly women.

Barbie Fashion Designer was a prominent example of a title marketed to girls in the 1990s. Its attraction lay more in making things than in following an elaborate story.

Later Korean games such as Crazy Arcade and KartRider brought in a wide audience through rules that were easy to start with and social ways to play.

Lee offers several suggestions for broadening the audience. They also reflect how the industry talked about women players in 2005.

• Rely less on violence.
• Give players ways to recognize and relate to one another.
• Try character designs that make the game easy to approach.

Rereading the book in the 2020s, I thought about how online worlds, AI, and the idea of a metaverse had given the industry more ways to talk about participation. Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard was one sign of how valuable game worlds and the communities around them had become.

That makes the older question worth returning to. How does the design of a game help someone decide there is a place for them in it?

Book details

Digital Games: A New Territory for the Imagination

Author

Lee Jeong-yeop

Published

August 1, 2005

ISBN13

9788952204219

View the book on YES24

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