Authorship and interaction
Asim Islam w1542585

3. Examine the informational structure and interactive possibilities of ONE piece of ‘conditional design’ (game, narrative, collaborative process) of your choice. Explore these as examples of interaction, with particular reference to the role of the audience & designer in each.

This essay will give examples of the informational structure and interactive possibilities of a video game called ‘Grand Theft Auto V’ which is an open world action adventure game. The essay will show how the game is set and the experience of the interactive capabilities in the game. Also will tell you about ways to cheat and the hacking possibilities in the game. This will also show how much the designers of the game ‘Rockstar’ wants the audience to control Grand theft auto see if we have can challenge them to see if we can gain all control.

Grand Theft Auto V was released 2013 based on a fictional state called San Andres based in South California. It is based on three characters who are criminals it is a first person and third person game. The main storyline of this game is that they are trying to perform heists under pressure from the government agency. The informational structure of the game when putting the disc in the console the first thing that happens is a loading screen showing several pictures and giving two options, two buttons, by pressing one button will take you to single player story mode (campaign) and the other will take you online giving us an option. Visual icon are the images in the loading screen because it looks like what it is also showing information that’s currently going on and what activities that is going online. The symbolic is the option in the way you start the game because we know what it does and what it means. While the game has started, you choose what mode you can first person mode or third person it usually starts third person but you can change this anytime in game. There is also a pause menu containing different things such as The Map showing where you are located in the whole map of the game, brief helping you with your current mission, stats, settings allowing you to change things for your preferences such as the camera and audio, online, gallery allowing you take pictures in game and then you have the store allowing you to buy virtual money for your character online. The difficulty of the game is the same you can’t change it, it’s the difficulty that the developers have set it. This means that the developer is making it fair for everyone so they will be on the same level. ‘Diegetic components provide the player with cues and information without distracting them from the narration of the world. These cues are something that the player’s avatar and other characters in the game world are aware of, and can interact with. This makes the experience more immersive and cinematic’(Russell). The diegetic form in Grand theft auto V is what the character sees such as the cars, city landscape and the character himself. The non diegetic form in this game will be the radar (maps), the money, the character switch, the wanted level, health and amour bar. There is also one that I think that can be both diegetic and non-diegetic which is the mobile phone in the game the avatar pulls out the phone as an action it also appears on the screen as a non- diegetic form which I thought was kind of interesting because it is showing two forms in one action.

After getting thorough the start page and the loading screen as always the developer gives us a tutorial in how to play the game. They do this so they can teach you how to play the game, they do this by putting you in the prologue teaching you the buttons of the game, the prologue takes roughly around 20-30 minutes long. There is a lot of interactive options make while in the prologue there is things that the developer makes you do things that you can’t change because they want us too learn the concept of the story. They teach us several things one of the things is that you can switch characters you have the choice of which character you want to interact with you do this by the navigation they show. I think this interaction is pretty good feature because some games don’t allow you to change character such as Uncharted, Final Fantasy and Super Mario. When changing charters on this game each of the three character’s they all have their own story backgrounds. The designer gives the audience a chance to customise each character by letting choose what type of clothes and hair they have by giving us option that they have put in the game but there is a lot to choose from, the designer also gives the audience a chance to buy houses which they can also choose the interior of by choices they give and several to choose from. They do this because they allow the audience to control each character lifestyle. ‘It all feels incredibly immersive, which, combined with the enhanced beauty of the open world, makes you feel like you’re living inside GTA 5 instead of simply playing it’(Pearson). This quote shows hoe realistic the game in how much the designer lets you have control make Rob Pearson feels he is living inside inside the actual game. The map of the game is huge give us the chance to explore the game without actually doing the story you have the choice to the of doing by driving to an icon which will allow you to continue the story of the game. The game doesn’t have one way to complete missions there is several ways giving you an option how you would to go through the missions, while on missions you can still explore a map ignoring the mission but you could fail the mission. This just shows us that the designer has most control because they are putting the freedom for you in the game to do what you in the game which they have created for you. While in missions there are choices to make in several of them some choices can change the outcomes of missions depending on what you do. ‘Games are both object and process; they can’t be read as texts or listened to as music, they must be played. Playing is integral, not coincidental like the appreciative reader or listener. The creative involvement is a necessary ingredient in the uses of games’(Aareseth 2001). I agree with this because the creative involvement is needed to play a game otherwise there is no interaction in the game it will be nothing. There aren’t much rules in Grand Theft Auto V only some instructions while in missions but when free roaming in the game there is no rules you can do whatever in the game lets you, for example games like Call of duty and Fifa have objectives and rules that you have to follow to in the game you can’t just do what you want such as in Fifa the main objective is to score a goal to win the game. There is other games such as Minecraft gives you a interface and the tools to create anything you want.

In this paragraph I will talk about the online, cheats and the hacking possibilities in ‘Grand theft auto V’ most game these days have online so you can play with your friends and do different things there then offline. The designer gives us more freedom online then the single player giving us a chance to do whatever and giving us the interactive choice on what you want to do. The first time you start online you get to actually make your character from scratch the designer gives us several templates of different types of heads you can use, what kind of character is your player going to be you get to control his lifestyle everything. Same as single player you can always change bits of your look such as hair and clothes for the way you want him or her. You can also customise your own car choosing the colour of it and the accessories that you can put on. The designer gives us the opportunity to actives online if you want and the designer also lets you create your own matches giving the audience the freedom to create their objectives giving us the advantage because we know where everything is placed. This gives us small control only because designer lets us have that. The player can do online jobs to earn money for your character but when they released the game for the first time they were several of cheats that weren’t meant to be in the game such as you could get money easy by really cheating the game it was called a money glitch you could get millions in five minutes this was the fault of designer. This gave us this control that we are talking about because it let us essentially buy everything we want. The designer stop this but finding out the problem but the community carried on finding faults. This still carried on by having different hacks in the game giving the designer the problems some of the hacks gives you complete control because there is hacks when you can make your character massive just take over city destroying everything. Hacks can be used to change the game source code making it even more expressive using different game play aspects. ‘Sometimes your own way won’t be the way that the designers expected you to do something, and though Grand Theft Auto V is usually very good at bending around you when that happens, there were one or two occasions where it wasn’t prepared for my personal brand of chaos. Overtake a car you’re not supposed to overtake and it will zip through lines of traffic as if by magic’ (Macdonald). This quote show how much people had control form doing these hacks obviously that the designer didn’t want you to do it wasn’t intentionally in the game. There are multiple ways to giving the player additional control over the game outside of the normal defined boundaries of the game structure: cheats, mods. A cheat allows the player to nullify or change certain aspects of a game, the player has an option on they way to do the cheats they can do it to type up numbers on the phone or you can also by entering the button combination corresponding to the cheat you would like to do in the game to give you several of things such as every weapon you can also get unlimited health and amour with also any car, invincibility. Although these are built by the developers themselves it gives the player a wide variety on how they handle the cheats. In this way it is possible to increase the chance of freedom a player gets without actually changing the narrative or core gameplay. Mods (modifications) are created by the community such as other player’s, mods can be used by all players online who are currently in the same game allowing changes in gameplay and the game structure. Using mods is a possibility giving the players a chance of being designer for other players.

This essay looked at the informational structure and interactive possibilities of Grand theft auto V showing the role of the audience and the designer. The informational structure is helpful for the player to understand the game making it simple to follow instructions. There is several of interactive possibilities in the Grand theft auto V that designer has put in that the game to make it feel like you are actually in the game. The audience has a lot of control in the game because the designer has let us have that control, what I mean by this is that he has gave us these interactive options for us to explore, we could only challenge this by hacking or modifying the game because it makes us the designer for a while and lets us have the control. Overall I think the open world action adventure game was interesting to examine because of all these possibilities of interaction and the simple but effective informational structure.