gaming, where each player has his own computer system and thereby cannot always
see what the other players are doing.
Boss Monster: An enemy in a game, though not necessarily a “monster” per se, that
is much larger or simply more difficult to defeat than the other opponents in the game.
Typically boss monsters are placed at the end of levels and provide a climax for that
level’s gameplay.
’Bot: Short for “robot,” this refers to artificial intelligence agents that are designed to
appear to play similarly to humans, typically designed to work in first-person shooter
death-match games.Quake III ArenaandUnreal Tournamentboth feature ’bots as the
player’s only opposition in the single-player game.
BSP: Short for Binary Space Partition. A method for storing and rendering 3D space
that involves dividing the world into a tree of space partitions, most famously used in id
Software’s gamesDoomandQuake.
Builder Games: One term used to describe games in which the player is responsible
for building lasting structures in the game-world. In a sense, in builder games, the play-
ers are responsible for the level design. Examples of this type of game areSimCity,
Civilization,RollerCoaster Tycoon, andThe Sims.
Burn Rate: The amount of money a company, typically a developer, spends in a
month to keep itself in business. This typically includes all of the employees’ salaries,
rent, utilities, and other persistent expenses. Sometimes publishers will try to fund a
developer only to the extent of its burn rate, so that the developer does not have any
spare cash and remains forever beholden to the publisher.
Candidate: SeeRelease Candidate.
Canned: Another term for “scripted,” though “canned” is typically used more deri-
sively.SeeScripted.
Capture the Flag: A game involving two teams, both of which have a flag. The flag is
kept at a specific location and possibly guarded, while the players on both teams try to
grab the other team’s flag through stealth or brute force. In computer games, this is
often a game variant offered in first-person shooter multi-player cooperative games,
such asQuakeorUnreal.
Choke-Point: A point in a game past which a player can progress only by passing
through a particular area, completing a particular puzzle, or defeating a particular mon-
ster. Often the areas preceding and following a choke-point allow the player more
freedom of play, while the choke-point presents a task the player absolutely must
accomplish before proceeding.
Classic Arcade Game: This does not necessarily mean a game that is a classic, but
any game that was released during the early period of arcade games or that exhibits the
traits typical of those games. Classic arcade games include simple, single-
screen-player games such asSpace Invaders,Centipede,Robotron: 2084,orPac-Man.
Classic arcade game is defined more fully in Chapter 4.See alsoArcade Game.
Code: When used in reference to games, code is the lines of text that programmers
enter into the computer and which the computer then compiles into the functional
game. A talented programmer is sometimes referred to as a code-jockey.
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