Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy User Manual
Summary of Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy
Page 1
Free your purchased ebook form adhesion drm*! * drm = digtal rights management.
Page 2
Trigger happy videogames and the entertainment revolution by steven poole.
Page 3
Contents acknowledgments............................................ 8 1 resistance is futile ......................................10 our virtual history....................................................10 pixel generation .......................................................13 meme machines .....
Page 4
Out of control.........................................................109 4 electric sheep ...............................................119 the gift of sound and vision ..................................122 cinÉ qua non? ........................................................130 camera obscura.....
Page 5
Power tools ............................................................276 veni, vidi, lusi........................................................282 get into the groove.................................................291 you win again ........................................................298 9 ...
Page 6
Trigger happy 8 acknowledgments eat pixels, sucker: this book grew out of an orphaned article to which stuart jeffries kindly gave a home. I am grateful to everyone who agreed to be interviewed: paul topping, richard darling, jeremy smith, olivier masclef, nolan bushnell, terry pratchett and sam hou...
Page 7
Trigger happy 9 factual errors, and to cal barksdale and danielle a. Durkin for their work on the u.S. Edition. Trigger happy owes much to the incisive attentions of its editor, andy miller: il miglior fabbro . Any infelicities or errors that remain i acknowledge mine. Readers are invited to email c...
Page 8: Our Virtual History
Trigger happy 10 1 resistance is futile our virtual history in the beginning, the planet was dead. Suddenly, millions of years ago, arcane spontaneous chemical reactions in the primeval ooze resulted, by a freak cosmic chance, in the first appearance of what we now call “the code of life.” formed in...
Page 9
Trigger happy 11 (in geological terms) videogames crawled out on to the shore, developed rudimentary eyes and legs, and gradually began to conquer earth. Biologically speaking, early videogames were, as they are today, radically exogamous—that is to say, they did not replicate by breeding with each ...
Page 10
Trigger happy 12 but nothing could be certain in the great evolutionary game. Some seemingly successful species found it impossible to adapt swiftly enough to catastrophic changes in the environment, and died out. They were the dinosaurs. (by copying their “code” and letting it gestate under laborat...
Page 11: Pixel Generation
Trigger happy 13 story unfolds of how we came to be the planet’s masters. Remember, humans, it’s not how you play the game that counts, it’s whether you win or lose. >player 1 ready 0101111111010101001111101010111111110101010011 0011111100101010001000000101010100000011111100101110 101001000010100011...
Page 12
Trigger happy 14 don’t replace the old. Film did not replace theater. The internet did not replace the book. Videogames have been around for thirty years, and they’re not going away. When i was ten years old, my parents bought me a home computer. It was a zx spectrum, brainchild of the celebrated br...
Page 13
Trigger happy 15 cassette, and i would swap copies and hints with my schoolfriends.) for many years, the myriad delights that videogames offered were a reliable evening escape, their names now a peculiarly evocative roll call of sepia-tinged pleasures: jet pac, ant attack, manic miner, knight lore, ...
Page 14
Trigger happy 16 already by this stage a great number of teenagers were more interested in videogames than in pop music. And nintendo and sega inspired fanatical loyalty. They were the beatles and stones of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Nintendo was the beatles: wholesome fun for all the family, w...
Page 15
Trigger happy 17 their market preeminence, because sony wasn’t happy about being messed around with by the arrogant mario machine, and decided to go it alone and muscle in on the videogames business themselves. Thus the sony playstation was born. On its launch in 1995 it blew sega’s new machine, the...
Page 16: Meme Machines
Trigger happy 18 superior to anything i had seen on the fringe. And so, after sacrificing most of my sleep during that edinburgh stay to improving my lap times, i decided i needed to buy a playstation of my own. Perhaps one day, i thought, i might even write something about videogames. So i bought t...
Page 17
Trigger happy 19 videogames were indeed mainly a children’s pursuit, but now games cost between twenty and fifty dollars and are targeted at the disposable income of adults. The average age of videogame players is now estimated to be twenty-eight in the united states; one 2000 survey reported that 6...
Page 18
Trigger happy 20 renting movies. Total videogame software and hardware sales in the united states reached $8.9 billion, versus $7.3 billion for movie box-office receipts; 2 $6.6 billion of the videogame receipts were from software sales, retail and online. How did this strange invasion happen? How d...
Page 19
Trigger happy 21 the prodigy and underworld clamoring to provide tracks for the sequel. Sony had a playstation room built in london superclub the ministry of sound, and got its logo onto club flyers all over the country. Soon playstation was happily associated with dance culture, with enthusiastic s...
Page 20
Trigger happy 22 successful company in any industry in 1999. It has sold more than sixteen million copies worldwide of the first three games in the series. Add a conservative estimate for sales of the fourth installment, tomb raider: the last revelation, and lara’s getting close to becoming a billio...
Page 21
Trigger happy 23 course, lara’s contribution to the playstation brand itself cannot be overestimated. An exclusivity deal with sony ensured that the next three games appeared only on playstation, and a next-generation tomb raider game will appear on playstation2 in 2002. These days, videogames gener...
Page 22
Trigger happy 24 and alan shearer to endorse their soccer games. In the united states, sega has hired spokesmen of the likes of boston red sox pitcher pedro martinez and philadelphia 76er allen iverson, and has sponsored the san francisco giants in baseball and the tennessee titans and oakland raide...
Page 23
Trigger happy 25 the music industry, too, is slowly waking up to the commercial possibilities of placing an artist’s song in a videogame. British rock band ash is rumored to have earned nearly $1,000,000 in royalties by licensing just one song to the hit driving game gran turismo. Gremlin’s actua ic...
Page 24
Trigger happy 26 he would a film, “to provide an emotional heart to the game.” and it doesn’t stop there: the rock star’s involvement extends to being a digitized character in the game itself. Videogames also extend their silvery tentacles into the worlds of film and books. Star wars director george...
Page 25
Trigger happy 27 videogame tie-ins. Michael crichton is also setting up his own videogame development studio. And in 1998 douglas adams—who had a hand in the first videogame based on his sci-fi comedy the hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy , a text adventure game published by infocom in 1985—scripted ...
Page 26: The Shock of The New
Trigger happy 28 million of the consoles worldwide. In 2002, sony will expand playstation2’s capabilities further to include broadband internet access so that users will be able to browse the web, use email, play games online against each other, and even download music and featurelength movies strai...
Page 27
Trigger happy 29 videogames are powerful, but they are nothing without humans to play them. So the inner life of videogames—how they work—is bound up with the inner life of the player. And the player’s response to a well-designed videogame is in part the same sort of response he or she has to a film...
Page 28
Trigger happy 30 from traditional cartoons into videogame development. Musicians who might once have become television or film composers are now writing videogame soundtracks, and there is even such a beast as the professional videogame scriptwriter. There’s a huge amount of thought and creativity e...
Page 29
Trigger happy 31 affected by videogames in one way or another. Even if you’ve never played tomb raider, you can’t escape the clutches of lara croft. People are always loath to admit that something new can approach the status of art. Take this rather aggressive ejaculation: “a pastime of illiterate, ...
Page 30
Trigger happy 32 evaluation. Yet today there is a huge critical literature that has expanded our understanding and appreciation of films and jazz music. In half a century, i don’t doubt that this will also be true for videogames. I’m not trying to argue that there’s going to be a revolution. Like it...
Page 31
Trigger happy 33 and detail every year and conclude that videogames are increasingly realistic. Those cars look pretty real; those trees at the side of the racetrack, waving gently in the wind, look satisfyingly (arbo)real. This turns out to be the subject of a fundamental tension in videogames, whi...
Page 32
Trigger happy 34 inner lives can only be investigated once we have a more rounded view of what videogames actually are. What does this novel sensual fusion really have in common with films, with storytelling, or with painting? Where do videogames fit in the development of leisure technologies, of pe...
Page 33: Beginnings
Trigger happy 35 2 the origin of species beginnings it all started at the massachusetts institute of technology, one night in 1962. The first soviet sputnik spacecraft had been launched five years previously, and john f. Kennedy had just promised that america would get to the moon within the decade....
Page 34
Trigger happy 36 well, that’s how the story usually goes. 4 but beginnings are slippery things. Actually, the world’s first videogame was created four years earlier, at a u.S. Government nuclear research facility, the brookhaven national laboratory. William a. Higinbotham, an engineer who had design...
Page 35
Trigger happy 37 in fact, because the owner of any patent on oscilloscope tennis would have been the united states government. And so—as if, eons ago in the primordial soup, one helix of a dna molecule had winked into existence without the other, and therefore didn’t catch on—the videogame spark fiz...
Page 36
Trigger happy 38 the name’s melodrama, of course, grew out of the geopolitical tensions of the time. But despite the lurid sci-fi connotations, the game itself, which you can still play on the internet, 6 was serene, austere, a thing of alien beauty. Two dueling spaceships in a pas de deux against a...
Page 37
Trigger happy 39 products, at least until its x-box console arrives in 2001.) spacewar sprang so fully formed into the microcosmos that it took a very long time for other games to catch up. Its structure offered many of the virtues that are still essential features of videogames: simple rules with i...
Page 38
Trigger happy 40 same pivotal decade that saw the global war of the space race and the tectonic cultural shifts of pop music, videogames had launched a successful initial blitzkrieg on the digital plains. The lessons of the pdp-1’s unwitting involvement in game history are twofold. First: give a man...
Page 39
Trigger happy 41 by planting grain and assessing tax rates each year—a direct ancestor of civilization. And later, the advent of advent (1972): short for adventure, this was the first of a lost genre of game that was hugely popular on personal computers right up until the late 1980s. It was the firs...
Page 40
Trigger happy 42 microprocessor. Videogames could now be just as clever with much smaller, cheaper brains. Back in 1965, an engineering student at the university of utah called nolan bushnell had spacewar on his computer, and like the other techies bushnell played it obsessively. He began to wonder ...
Page 41
Trigger happy 43 without having to learn it first. He left nutting, determined to go it alone. And so pong was born. “avoid missing ball for high score” ran the only line of instructions on pong’s cabinet. It was a very simple version of tennis. A square dot of light represented the ball, and two ve...
Page 42
Trigger happy 44 but it was not all plain sailing. When pong first came out, atari was immediately sued. Ralph baer’s home-tennis game had finally been taken up by magnavox. The first home console, the magnavox odyssey, had been released six months before atari’s debut. And it was to all intents and...
Page 43: Art Types
Trigger happy 45 and then a little-known japanese pachinko manufacturer called taito rode in to the rescue. Their extraordinary new arcade game was the seed of the modern era. Within a few months of its 1978 release in japan, the game had caused a nationwide shortage of the coin required to play it....
Page 44: Happiness Is A Warm Gun
Trigger happy 46 happiness is a warm gun perhaps the purest, most elemental videogame pleasure is the heathen joy of destruction. You’ve got your finger hovering over the trigger, you line up an enemy and you fire. Such is the task presented by that venerable videogame genre, the shoot-’em-up. Space...
Page 45
Trigger happy 47 screen. You might manage to blast the entire division away, but then another reappears in its place, lower down and more bomb-happy. The eerie bass thumping of the invaders’ progress increases in tempo, along with your heartbeat. Just how long will you last, soldier? Fig. 1 space in...
Page 46
Trigger happy 48 space invaders was the first game to feature animated characters. The serried ranks of aliens waggled their brutish tentacles across the screen; the movement, for the time, was so realistically ugly that it was all the more pleasurable to blast the critters away. Space invaders was ...
Page 47
Trigger happy 49 long as possible, but the war can never be won. Earth will be invaded. And, of course, it was—by the explosion of videogames that followed in taito’s trailblazing footsteps. The late 1970s and early 1980s were the golden age of classic shoot-’em-ups, with asteroids, robotron, defend...
Page 48
Trigger happy 50 as processing power increased in the 1990s, the genre definitively broke the bounds of flat-plane representations with the emergence of the “first-person shooter,” exemplified by doom and its multifarious clones. Doom casts the player as a marine on mars, tramping around an invaded ...
Page 49: In My Mind and In My Car
Trigger happy 51 directly at the enemies on screen, and works a footpedal to reload the gun (after every six bullets) and duck behind objects to avoid enemy fire. Each section must be completed before the clock runs out. Though the games could hardly look more dissimilar, it is time crisis that is t...
Page 50
Trigger happy 52 rewind; we’ve gone too far. 8 true, i have a certain fondness for vanguard, a game i could happily clock as a nine-year-old on a family vacation in wales (you could shoot in four directions and the beepy tunes were evil mind-limpets). Clearly, however, goldeneye, a first-person shoo...
Page 51
Trigger happy 53 series of games continued to evolve until 1999’s ridge racer type 4, which ran on the same hardware but looked many times slicker (see fig. 2). Fig. 2. Ridge racer type 4: prettier, faster, better ( 1999 namco ltd; all rights reserved) early two-dimensional racing games, with a fla...
Page 52
Trigger happy 54 with namco’s arcade pole position (1982), whose steering wheel and pedals controlled a bright, colorful approximation of track driving. Ever since, racing games have become better and better at true perspective, while added textures on the tarmac and solid passing landmarks enhance ...
Page 53
Trigger happy 55 and only does so when available cpu power is already maxed out. The problem is, as we shall see, that videogame “realism” is always a fix anyway. Furthermore, simulations stomp roughshod all over one raison d’Être of certain types of videogame, which is to let the player perform amu...
Page 54: Might As Well Jump
Trigger happy 56 racing games not based on traditional cars are usually distinguished by the appearance of power-ups: weapons scattered along the course that can be picked up by a player and used to blow his opponents off the track. But in all categories of racer, the aim is the same: get to the fin...
Page 55
Trigger happy 57 themed shoot-’em-ups that were popular at the time. But miyamoto’s first game, called donkey kong (see fig. 3), became an enormous hit, and invented a new genre: the platform game. 9 the carpenter, known cratylically as jumpman (for it was his nature, uniquely at the time, to jump) ...
Page 56
Trigger happy 58 and could withstand one hit from an enemy), a system whereby an extra life could be won after collecting a hundred gold coins, and a regular “boss” battle at the end of every level. Fig. 3 donkey kong: get him over a barrel ( 1981 nintendo) throughout its history the platform game ...
Page 57
Trigger happy 59 the sinclair zx spectrum, manic miner (1983), the player controls a miner who must negotiate conveyor belts and killer spikes while avoiding robots, malign jellyfish, killer penguins and poisonous bushes to collect keys before his air supply runs out. In the most popular current pla...
Page 58
Trigger happy 60 from a number of other game types. The first tomb raider game, for example, was clearly a development of ideas in the classic 2d platformer prince of persia (the first game in which a character could grab on to ledges and pull himself up), yet it is also a threedimensional block-mov...
Page 59: Sometimes You Kick
Trigger happy 61 random rather than pleasurably challenging. What is left of the platform game, then, is just the defining physical ability that shigeru miyamoto gave to his original monkey-battling woodworker. Go ahead, jump. Sometimes you kick ah, how good it feels to boot a friend in the head sev...
Page 60
Trigger happy 62 moves. 10 as videogame consoles and arcade machines became more technically accomplished, however, the temptation was to show off the graphic power with ever more visually appealing displays, and never mind the realism. Street fighter ii (1991), the first of the really modern breed ...
Page 61
Trigger happy 63 sumo wrestler (ready 2 rumble boxing [see fig. 4])? Bruce lee in a gold lamÉ leotard, a pogo-happy alien cyborg or a tiny, annoying dragon (tekken 3)? Black, asian or caucasian; male, female or indeterminate xenomorph? Beat-’em-ups are nothing if not politically inclusive; it is muc...
Page 62
Trigger happy 64 since fighting games broke into 3d with virtua fighter, the physical contact of these lightbeam warriors has grown ever more convincingly thudding and solid. The stunningly graceful animations, meanwhile, are developed with a technique that films real martial artists and digitizes t...
Page 63
Trigger happy 65 motion-capture techniques mean that once an animation has started, it must finish before the next one can start. You can’t change tactics mid-move. That rules out true feints, which are critical in real fighting sports such as fencing. Oddly, beat-’em-ups such as the tekken series h...
Page 64: Heaven In Here
Trigger happy 66 heaven in here oh yes, the computer can make us divine. Should you want to build a city from scratch, construct a substructure of water pipes, sewers, power lines and underground trains, populate it with citizens, determine tax levels, build museums, parks, houses and office blocks,...
Page 65
Trigger happy 67 bandai, with their keyring digital pet, tamagotchi. Notice, however, that a simcity or civilization pet panders to a peculiarly narcissistic instinct in the player: if he or she does well, monuments will be erected and museums named in honor of the masterful deity. It’s a kind of fa...
Page 66
Trigger happy 68 now, i have conscientiously played these games in the interests of research, and i find them exceptionally tedious. Even so, god games are highly successful. Many people who aren’t at all interested in any other sort of videogame—such as the high-speed, colorful action experiences o...
Page 67: Two Tribes
Trigger happy 69 seems to be a pernicious subterranean motive here: such games offer you a position of infinite power in order to whisper the argument that, as an individual in the world, you have none at all. Two tribes armchair generals are well catered for by the god game’s sibling genre, the rea...
Page 68
Trigger happy 70 table at the weekend by men pushing little figures around with brooms—only now the computer allows the precise calculation of thousands of variables. This swamp of numbers, terrains and troop typologies effectively disguises the complementary fact that, as videogames, their formal r...
Page 69
Trigger happy 71 owing to different modem connection speeds, it is often difficult to play a satisfying game of quake over the internet against someone on the other side of the world, because that game is a very rapid-response shoot-’em-up. But a real-time strategy game such as the amusing alien war...
Page 70: Running Up That Hill
Trigger happy 72 running up that hill perhaps the most perverse-looking class of videogame on first inspection is the sports game. After all, videogames are supposedly played in darkened rooms by people who never get any real physical exercise. But in their hovels they can be tennis demons, baseball...
Page 71
Trigger happy 73 pixel humans in approximations of sprinting, shotputting, ice-skating, ski-jumping and the like. Variations on tennis, soccer (classic examples were match day and sensible soccer), ice hockey and baseball followed; graphics became more detailed, control methods more complex, and env...
Page 72
Trigger happy 74 all, with one of the best being konami’s iss pro evolution (see fig. 5). In ea’s world cup 98, not only are real players licensed, their faces digitally mapped on to computer figures, but the actual french stadia are lovingly rebuilt on the screen. Hoardings around the virtual playi...
Page 73: It’S A Kind Of Magic
Trigger happy 75 fig. 5. Iss pro evolution: the beautiful game ( 1999 konami) it’s a kind of magic dungeons, dragons, elves and wizards, treasure, trolls and spells. Yes, it’s the role-playing game (rpg), the synthesis of classic text-based games like advent and the 1970s teenage-male leisure pheno...
Page 74
Trigger happy 76 they are very popular, especially since, as with wargames, their relatively slow pace ensures popularity on the internet. In april 1999, a player’s “character” in ultima online, with impressive quantities of treasure and magic amassed over a period of six months, was sold at auction...
Page 75
Trigger happy 77 steve jackson and ian livingstone (the latter is now head of videogame publishers eidos) in the 1980s. Modern, complex rpgs owe their shared paradigms to one game series in particular: final fantasy, the first game of which was released in 1987. It had detailed, colorful two-dimensi...
Page 76
Trigger happy 78 ravenous yellow disc being chased by ghosts. In generic rpgs, however, character is not merely a pretext to the gameplay, but part of it. Character is defined by talents, strength, cunning and even certain psychological traits, measured strictly quantitatively in points. Whereas the...
Page 77: We Can Work It Out
Trigger happy 79 encompass a far wider and more creative range of subjects, from gardening to schoolday romance. Role-playing elements are creeping crabwise into any number of other genres, as a way of bolting on a framework of narrative drive to the old repetitive game style. Even arcade-style driv...
Page 78
Trigger happy 80 more primitive, kinetic way—in much the same way, in fact, as playing sports. Yet the closest thing to sport in videogames is not necessarily a sports game. Reflexes, speedy pattern recognition, spatial imagination—these are what videogames demand. This is perhaps their fundamental ...
Page 79
Trigger happy 81 the 1980s curio sentinel was an intriguing attempt at a sort of three-dimensional, simplified chess: the player had to negotiate a checkered landscape, avoiding the immolating gaze of the sentinel, until he occupied the higher ground, at which point the sentinel could be defeated by...
Page 80: Family Fortunes
Trigger happy 82 screen and must be rotated and laterally shifted so that they all fit together at the bottom. When they do, the horizontal line that they complete vanishes, and you have a bit more breathing space. Your job is to clear all the blocks away for as long as you can. Simple, but one of t...
Page 81
Trigger happy 83 lines between genres are gradually being erased. Just as hamlet ’s polonius happily burbles through the permutational possibilities of dramatic genre— “tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical- comichistorical-pastoral ...
Page 82
Trigger happy 84 wandering through recognizable environments built of stone or wood. But how closely can certain videogames ever hope to recreate something from the real world; and how does another sort of videogame, one that is built around a purely fantastic world, persuade us that it is in some s...
Page 83: Let’S Get Physical
Trigger happy 85 3 unreal cities let’s get physical you are playing a flashy, modern 3d videogame whose theme is space combat. As your craft spins and yaws around the fighting in response to frantic thumbpresses and stick-yankings, the view from your cockpit shows gorgeously rendered models of battl...
Page 84
Trigger happy 86 but—damn!—you didn’t aim far enough ahead of the fighter. By the time your lazy laser bolts reach their destination, he’s sailed past. Videogames have nearly always displayed lasers in this way, from the simple fire-ahead of space invaders or asteroids to the rainbow-hued pyrotechni...
Page 85
Trigger happy 87 of aim) at that high speed, he will have moved a pathetic total of four inches sideways in the time it takes your laser beam to travel from your guns to his hull. So unless he is very small, he is still very blown up. Eat dust, little green man. But perhaps our alien has very, very ...
Page 86
Trigger happy 88 whose early apotheosis was defined by the beautifully chaotic red and green laser bolt choreography in the film star wars (1977)—that’s wrong too. A laser is a very tightly concentrated ray of photons that have been lined up so they are all traveling in exactly the same direction (u...
Page 87
Trigger happy 89 out in all the time they’ve had since space invaders, getting thoroughly vaporized time and time again. Why, then, do videogames get it so wrong? The answer is they get it wrong deliberately, because with “real” laser behavior it wouldn’t be much of a game. It would be far too easy ...
Page 88
Trigger happy 90 the ball bounced off the bat obeyed the basic law “angle of incidence equals angle of reflection.” approach a stationary bat at an angle of forty-five degrees, and you’ll leave it at the same angle. Elementary stuff. Similarly, asteroids enjoyed a smattering of physics modeling in t...
Page 89
Trigger happy 91 virtual players will respond to physical knocks and tackles through a system based on detailed mechanical models of the human musculo-skeletal system, rather than through predetermined animations. Motioncapture techniques, based on filming human actors and digitizing the results, sy...
Page 90
Trigger happy 92 processor-cheap physics in his or her applications. If a game company is writing a racing game, for instance, using a kit like mathengine’s the car can be defined as a certain mass resting, through a suspension system, on four wheels, which have a certain frictional relationship wit...
Page 91
Trigger happy 93 automatically doing pretty complex parabolic calculus without any conscious thought. Appreciation of dynamic properties is hard-wired into the species—it’s essential for survival. This, then, is one of the most basic ways in which videogames speak to us as the real world does, direc...
Page 92
Trigger happy 94 knowledge of pong-style (or, in the real world, squashstyle) angular reflections, as bubbles may be bounced off the side walls to achieve tactically desirable formations that are impossible by aiming directly. Even so, the physical systems that games can model so accurately are neve...
Page 93: Let’S Stick Together
Trigger happy 95 don’t want absolutely real situations in videogames. We can get that at home. Let’s stick together naturally, the player doesn’t mind this fakery, this playing fast and loose with the laws of nature in the name of fun. But a critical requirement is that the game’s system remains con...
Page 94
Trigger happy 96 for which one simply has to find a rusty old key. (indeed, having traveled far from the austere nearperfection of its original incarnation, tomb raider iii boasts many instructive examples of design incoherence.) in direct contrast, quake iii incorporates the hilarious but highly co...
Page 95
Trigger happy 97 by contrast, perfect coherence of function is great fun. It is just one virtue of zelda 64 15 that, despite the colorfully huge gallimaufry of in-game objects, they are hardly ever single-use items; it is an unprecedentedly rich and varied yet highly consistent gameworld. The titula...
Page 96
Trigger happy 98 is a thoughtful, stern consistency based on properties of physical substances: link’s hookshot will bounce off stone, but if it hits wood it will sink in and let him swing up. And the player can be sure that a burning stick will always light a torch, wherever it may be encountered. ...
Page 97
Trigger happy 99 away in one of several chests—and, risibly, an object put in one chest may be retrieved from another chest three floors higher up in the building. By these standards, tomb raider iii and resident evil are arguably inferior to space invaders or pong, both of which exhibit total consi...
Page 98
Trigger happy 100 naturalistic milieu of the tomb raider series, the bolted-on possibilities of movement that are added in each sequel only serve to remind the player how odd it is that lara can run, swim, crawl and jump, but cannot punch or kick an assailant, for instance. She cannot even sit down,...
Page 99: Life In Plastic
Trigger happy 101 on the one hand—for instance, the laser behavior considered earlier, or manic miner’s winged cisterns— and inconsistencies in the fantastical system—such as lara’s rocket-launcher or resident evil’s item boxes— on the other. Life in plastic of sweeney’s 16 three certainties of life...
Page 100
Trigger happy 102 appears at the bottom of the screen, under your control, and you can continue the never-ending battle from the point where you left off. We are used to thinking of “life” as a single, sacred thing, the totality of our experiences. But videogames redefine a “life” as an expendable, ...
Page 101
Trigger happy 103 drama. 18 in a universe where guns have infinite ammunition and spacecraft infinite fuel, it is life itself that becomes a resource whose loss is survivable. Yet a videogame “life” is not just a resource but also a possible reward. Games such as defender or space invaders offer “ex...
Page 102
Trigger happy 104 which a fatal mistake need not be your last; branches of a system can be multiply explored until all the lives are used up. But when that happens, the downside is grim indeed. The result in this final situation is not a simple death, but a violent ejaculation from the safety of the...
Page 103
Trigger happy 105 while losing only an eighth of her “health.” modern videogames, however, are so full of perilous situations that such a sliding scale, rather than simply being alive or dead, is crucial to the game’s playability. Health is also the primary means of adjudication in beat-’em-up games...
Page 104
Trigger happy 106 the opponent, while severe blows to a limb will disable him. The spectacle of two wonderfully animated virtual fighters in beautiful oriental robes shuffling about a cherry-tree garden on their knees because leg injuries mean that they can no longer stand is hugely amusing. The wit...
Page 105
Trigger happy 107 wasn’t written in as a possibility, so you can’t do it. Remember, in a videogame you can only perform such actions as the programmers have allowed for. This recalls heidegger’s notion of “enframing”—that technology, far from being liberating, actually circumscribes the possibilitie...
Page 106
Trigger happy 108 order to render visible a web of security beams that will set off alarms if he breaks them; and if he smokes while using the sniper rifle, his aim is steadier. In this way, with its alluring mix of peril and desirability, smoking in metal gear solid, as in life, is sublime. 19 in a...
Page 107: Out of Control
Trigger happy 109 up, or amorphous blobs of energy floating in the air to be driven or flown through. Power-ups in general enhance the abilities of the player’s character in the game: aside from restoring health or granting an extra life, they may also increase speed, envelop the player’s ship in a ...
Page 108
Trigger happy 110 in the ruses and paradigms of their unreal worlds. But the videogame is not simply a cerebral or visual experience; just as importantly it is a physical involvement—the tactile success or otherwise of the human– machine interface. Some games recommend the use of a peripheral: an ex...
Page 109
Trigger happy 111 with the action. But there is no reason why such an arrangement should persist. Early sports games like daley thompson’s decathlon actually boasted a far more compelling physical interface with the notorious “joystickwaggling” method: the faster you could waggle your joystick from ...
Page 110
Trigger happy 112 a steering wheel. The cybernetic possibilities are rich and largely unexplored. A tennis game, for instance, could use one stick for your character’s movement over the court, and the other to control directly the movement of the racquet arm when playing a shot. Move the stick faste...
Page 111
Trigger happy 113 another fairly recent cybernetic innovation has certainly enhanced the “feel” of many videogames: force feedback. Sony’s dual shock controller is so named because the videogame can tell it to vibrate or “rumble” in the player’s hands. This vibrational feedback can be used in a driv...
Page 112
Trigger happy 114 player must use her whole body to control the game. It consists of actually dancing, on a pressure-sensitive floormat, in time to pumping techno music blaring from the speakers. The screen simply shows a bunch of symbols floating downward, and they correspond to squares on the floo...
Page 113
Trigger happy 115 for each new nintendo system in order to maximize gameplay potential. When i spoke to richard darling of british developers code-masters about what makes a game “fun,” he echoed paul topping’s admiration of early physics-based games such as thrust: “you’re flying that little space ...
Page 114
Trigger happy 116 and right up to a maximum speed, and when you jumped, the amount of time you held the button down for determined how high you jumped. Therefore there was an awful lot of skill in running along over a hole, jumping up on to a platform and landing on it without falling off the other ...
Page 115
Trigger happy 117 martial arts combination of smacks and punches by floating six feet into the air and delivering a roundhouse kick to the head? Counterintuitively, it seems for the moment that the perfect videogame “feel” requires the ever-increasing imaginative and physical involvement of the play...
Page 116
Trigger happy 118 cables that keep it running, and stroll around in its forest of signs. But for the moment we want to know just what kind of industry buzzes behind those imposing towers. Is this a city of words, a modern alexandria, or a city of images, a virtual hollywood? Look over on that street...
Page 117
Trigger happy 119 4 electric sheep a specter is haunting tinseltown. We have seen how successful videogames already compete in financial terms with the figures grossed by hollywood blockbusters. And one increasingly popular term of praise for a certain sort of exploration videogame is to say that it...
Page 118
Trigger happy 120 and decor drawn from popular cinema. Hideo kojima, the brilliant designer of metal gear solid, who comes on like a twenty-first-century beck, dressing up for interviews in garish pvc outfits and tinted shades, has joked that whereas most people are 70 percent water, he is 70 percen...
Page 119
Trigger happy 121 characters are incompetently written and amazingly badly acted. Some films have a “so bad it’s good” quality, but this hack attempt at drama is just so bad it’s appalling. If it’s supposed to be like a film in this way, it’s a film you wouldn’t ever want to see. However, what silen...
Page 120: The Gift of Sound and Vision
Trigger happy 122 aesthetic compost for supposedly “filmlike” videogames? No one has yet claimed that a videogame is like a good comedy film (though it may be funny in other ways, as is grim fandango, a rococo puzzlesolving rpg with delightful cartoonish graphics), or that a videogame tells a heartb...
Page 121
Trigger happy 123 soundtracks. At first, this looks very like film industry practice, but it soon becomes clear that deployment of the audio arts cannot always follow similar lines in the two media. The reason sound design is important in videogames is quite simple: if a laser makes a pleasing, fizz...
Page 122
Trigger happy 124 experience as immersive and (deceptively) “authentic” as possible. This concentration on “real” sounds in general parallels what movies do. But just as a film with terrific abstract sound design, like david lynch’s lost highway , is highly refreshing to the ears, so i think this at...
Page 123
Trigger happy 125 videogame developers were to experiment, say, with weird and unexpected sound effects to accompany supposedly “realistic” visual action, this might open up new avenues of strangeness and even comedy—the amusing disjunction of small action with epic sound, say—to future digital expe...
Page 124
Trigger happy 126 quite creative in using sound to enhance the player’s involvement. Resident evil, for instance, shows a superb handling of sound effects that is directly influenced by its movie forebears. One room is eerily silent, whereas a large galleried hall is ominously and stressfully domina...
Page 125
Trigger happy 127 underpowered audio chips, and these strictures resulted in a flood of remarkably inventive videogame music. If polyphony—the number of notes it is possible to play at the same time—was restricted to, say, four notes, the musician might write a piece characterized by deliciously flo...
Page 126
Trigger happy 128 blessed with total sonic freedom, because videogame systems (apart from the poor nintendo 64) now read music directly off a cd, so soundtracks are recorded with full banks of pro-quality digital instruments and no restrictions on epic breadth. Sometimes the music may even be record...
Page 127
Trigger happy 129 the best videogame scores circumvent this knotty problem altogether by not attempting to be continuous, film-like soundtracks at all. Instead, music is used as another kind of atmosphere-heightening information. The rather beautiful title music of the tomb raider games features und...
Page 128: Ciné Qua Non?
Trigger happy 130 videogames present information to our eyes in the same way as films? CinÉ qua non? Since the upstart videogame form shattered film’s monopoly on the moving image, the two media have been engaged in a wary standoff. As their powers of graphic realization have increased, videogames h...
Page 129
Trigger happy 131 a hybrid future of “interactive movies,” it would be as well to take a cold mental shower by looking at what actually exists in film videogame crossover form. Disney’s tron (1982) was the first film actively to engage in an aesthetic dialogue with videogames, arguably as a symptom ...
Page 130
Trigger happy 132 produce an et videogame, was so confident of its success that it produced nearly six million copies. One fly in the ointment: the game was terrible. Gamers aren’t stupid. Most of the cartridges were eventually buried in a landfill site in new mexico, where one hopes they will event...
Page 131
Trigger happy 133 interestingly, some of the first technical demonstrations of sony’s playstation2 console in tokyo concentrated on animating the muscles of a highly detailed human face in exactly the same way. In this purely cosmetic respect, it is true that videogames are converging with films. Th...
Page 132
Trigger happy 134 relatively hermetic fields. The first stage in development of a videogame at british designers core, for example, consists of the writing of several hundred pages of a “game design document,” which is rather like a (nonlinear) script for a film: the game’s characters are introduced...
Page 133
Trigger happy 135 paranoia wargames features a young geek hero who hacks into the pentagon’s military computer system because he thinks he’s going to get to play some cool videogames; in fact, he nearly starts a global nuclear war. Generally, if a movie shows a child playing videogames in his bedroo...
Page 134
Trigger happy 136 references, it starred keanu reeves as a computer hacker who learns that the world is something like an enormous game of simcity run by computers to keep us enslaved. In its exaggeratedly dynamic kung fu scenes, in which actors float through the air and smash each other through wal...
Page 135
Trigger happy 137 which chan, dazed by the blow, imagines his assailant as different digitally generated characters from the videogame itself, finally winning the fight in the virtual world and so in the real one. Videogames repaid the compliment with tekken 3 (1998), which contains, although the ma...
Page 136
Trigger happy 138 successfully reimagined as videogame forms. And the lure of the star wars franchise is such that every console and computer-game platform since then has been home to a game based on the film. They have covered nearly every conceivable genre: platform, 3d shooting, role-playing—even...
Page 137
Trigger happy 139 visuals of the blade runner city yet, welcomed these in-built visual limitations of the tech-noir genre thankfully, since it had so much else on its silicon mind. As well as influencing hundreds of other videogames, mostly futuristic shoot-’em-ups, blade runner has also been made i...
Page 138
Trigger happy 140 for me, driving a touring car in a race game, i don’t want a photo-realistic car in there, i want a computergenerated car. I think it would spoil it as soon as you put a proper car in there. I think in that, the interaction between the movie and the videogame is a step in the wrong...
Page 139
Trigger happy 141 was based on it. You couldn’t play the movie, so it was far inferior in terms of high-speed thrills. Of course, films become works of art in their own right by involving the spectator emotionally. But there is precious little emotional material in an actionoriented videogame for th...
Page 140: Camera Obscura
Trigger happy 142 is activated, providing an opportunity to relax and rest those tired wrists. Fmv sequences can be graceful and beautiful in their own right (especially in the final fantasy games, where they alone can eat up $4 million of the budget), but they are something of a red herring. These ...
Page 141
Trigger happy 143 seemingly robust analogy with film, they are known as player-controlled “cameras.” if it can be argued that the film camera in some sense creates the onscreen world rather than passively recording it, 20 such a theory can be taken rather more literally with videogames. For, of cour...
Page 142
Trigger happy 144 view to enhance the feeling of speed. The same genres also offer a “cockpit cam,” which puts the player in the hotseat, right at the virtual controls. G-police (1997), a helicopter gunship sci-fi shoot-’em-up, makes available an “aerial cam” that looks perpendicularly down on proce...
Page 143
Trigger happy 145 classic television angle, has an averagely good view of all the lines and can appreciate cross-court angles. By contrast, the side-on spectator has a limited experience of these aspects, but he is much better placed to appreciate the varying arcs of the balls through the air, the n...
Page 144
Trigger happy 146 catches this point when he dismisses one early example, video hustler, as “like playing marbles.” a similar sort of disjunction might be argued to operate in g-police, where the multiplicity of viewpoints on offer creates different game styles within the same environment; the aeria...
Page 145
Trigger happy 147 was developed in order to enable the player to see the action from the most useful angle. In mario 64, for instance, the player must often rotate the camera to a different compass point, or select a view from slightly farther away, in order to guide the rotund plumber across a part...
Page 146
Trigger happy 148 method of inducing tension: the player can get killed by zombies not because the environment is cleverly designed but because he was deliberately hindered from seeing them coming until it was too late. And, crucially, resident evil 2 doesn’t let you choose the shots in the way mari...
Page 147
Trigger happy 149 fig. 6. Resident evil 2: claustrophobic camera angles don’t always help your battle against the undead ( capcom/virgin interactive entertainment) here is an example from any standard television commercial. A car turns a corner, coming toward the viewer, seen from a helicopter’s al...
Page 148
Trigger happy 150 might assume that these were identical-looking but different vehicles. This is how montage creates a sense of rhythm and motion, but such an approach would be fatal in a videogame, where the player has to control the car, and thus requires a continuous, unbroken viewpoint—either a ...
Page 149
Trigger happy 151 7). But function always takes precedence over such stylish touches: when the hero moves away again, the camera reverts to its normal view, enabling the player to see more of the environment. True montage, meanwhile, is still not used. An action movie would, for instance, cut from a...
Page 150
Trigger happy 152 slavering slow-motion reiterates the final, lethal combinations of kicks and punches when a fighter in tekken 3 is brutally floored. Television sports directors have understood for a long while that, when it comes to the electronic mise-en-scÈne of fast movement in three dimensions...
Page 151: You’Ve Been Framed
Trigger happy 153 fig. 7. Metal gear solid: a low cinematic angle as snake (left) hides from a guard ( 1998 konami) you’ve been framed when videogame “versions” of films do work, it is by creating a completely different experience that branches off from the same scenario as its parent movie. Golden...
Page 152
Trigger happy 154 a satellite; rescue natalya from a speeding train; and so on. Such sections of the plot generally happen at the end of a mission, and they happen to the player. The game does not let the player change the plot: for instance, to the dismay and fury of many addicts, you cannot decide...
Page 153
Trigger happy 155 round a corner unless the plot and the director take you that way. But in goldeneye you can explore areas from every conceivable angle. Indeed, one aficionado of the game, on seeing the film again, commented: “i thought, ‘i know this place—i know it better than the characters do.’”...
Page 154
Trigger happy 156 incommensurable sort of pleasure to that of goldeneye the film. For the moment it is hard to see how videogames and movies could ever converge without losing the essential virtues of both. The cinema— especially good action cinema, which, as we have seen, has the closest links with...
Page 155
Trigger happy 157 luigi bashing their enemies with huge mallets in the 1980s is a direct homage to such exaggerated cartoon violence as that found in tom and jerry . Now, with vastly increased graphic power, the multi-million-selling crash bandicoot 3 (see fig. 8) is as gorgeously colored, smoothly ...
Page 156
Trigger happy 158 fig. 8. Crash bandicoot 3: a cartoon you can play with ( 1998 sony computer entertainment) it is perhaps no coincidence that since videogames have been able to offer a detailed world of humorous action similar to that of the traditional cartoon, with the added killer ingredient of...
Page 157
Trigger happy 159 it did boring first-person shooter sequences with weapons such as the cow-launcher. If film, as jean-luc godard said, is “truth, twenty- four times a second,” then modern videogames are lies that hit the nervous system at two and a half times the frequency. Videogames, as we have s...
Page 158
Trigger happy 160 videogames are still a very young medium. Yet videogames already—it can hardly be denied— constitute a type of entertainment every bit as revolutionary, in its form, as cinema was for benjamin. If it’s adventurous traveling the chthonic prisoner is after, videogames can deliver in ...
Page 159: A Tale Of Two Cities
Trigger happy 161 5 never-ending stories a tale of two cities los angeles is a game of simcity played by a maniac. Six-lane freeways gridlocked with sports utility vehicles pump out untold cubic tons of exhaust fumes, enveloping the city in a permanent yellow smog. It’s more or less compulsory to dr...
Page 160
Trigger happy 162 apocalyptic music of hundreds of new games on display. This is where videogame companies show off their latest glories of manipulable son et lumiÈre , with hundreds of playstations, dreamcasts and nintendo 64 consoles hooked up to television monitors running soon-to-be-released pro...
Page 161
Trigger happy 163 vast acreage of the various videogame halls to meet and do business, and to play as many of the games as possible in five- or ten-minute bursts. People happily wait in line for twenty minutes to try out the most promising new videogames, and the constant bustle and electronic noise...
Page 162
Trigger happy 164 non, the lightgun. And as i wander the halls speaking to designers showing off their latest games, there is a marked tendency for them to make excuses. Yes, they say, this is a cutting-edge first-person shooter where you can put bullets through people’s heads and blast their limbs ...
Page 163
Trigger happy 165 film or a book, a videogame changes dynamically in response to the player’s input. Surely this must mean something drastic for the traditional concept of a story, authored jealously by one godlike writer? Two extreme responses, for example, might be: videogames are so radically dif...
Page 164: Back to The Future
Trigger happy 166 argued optimistically, is the entertainment medium of the future. Well, the proselytizers are right in at least one weak sense, because it’s certainly not the entertainment medium of the present. Not only has no convincing example of this new creature called “interactive storytelli...
Page 165
Trigger happy 167 action. For instance, the back story of blade runner is the invention, programming and rebellion of the replicants; the “present” story is deckard’s attempts to find and kill them. Some movies in fact are all about attempts by the characters in the present to find out what the back...
Page 166
Trigger happy 168 model, indeed, for all detective fiction: whodunit is the diachronic story, while the process of investigation is the synchronic story.) in general, because a story in any medium must limit itself to a finite period of time, and cannot tell the entire history of the universe leadin...
Page 167
Trigger happy 169 some diachronic stories, even in old games, are very complex, dipping freely into the myth kitty by basing themselves on arthurian legend (excalibur), celtic sagas (tir na nog and dun darach on the zx spectrum), norse sagas (valhalla), or tolkien’s middle earth (the hobbit), not to...
Page 168
Trigger happy 170 even thinner with more action-oriented games whose diachronic stories are less rich with suggestion: the story of what a player does during a game of robotron will just be a tedious list of movements and shootings, or more generously a higher-level, but still highly abstract—and un...
Page 169
Trigger happy 171 well, robotron and valhalla are pretty old games. Things on first inspection look somewhat different with the modern multimedia extravaganzas. Gamers familiar with epics such as the final fantasy series will quickly voice this objection. For every so often in such games, an fmv (fu...
Page 170
Trigger happy 172 discontinuous break between gameplaying, which still has no story to speak of, and watching, which bears all the narrative load. In general the player runs around fighting, solving puzzles and exploring new areas, and once a certain amount of gameplay is completed, he is rewarded w...
Page 171
Trigger happy 173 is a small step toward narrative interactivity—but only a small one. In the space-combat game colony wars, for example, every few missions the player gets an fmv sequence detailing how the war is going: if gameplay has gone badly, a player’s side is in disarray; if gameplay has gon...
Page 172
Trigger happy 174 composed of only nine short chapters; at the end of each chapter (except the last), the reader will be offered a choice of eight different directions in which the story might go. That sounds pretty simple. Eight, nine— they’re pretty small numbers. Unfortunately, if each possible p...
Page 173
Trigger happy 175 choices; you made your choice and went to the next appropriate numbered section to see what happened. The fighting fantasy titles, such as the warlock of firetop mountain, citadel of chaos and forest of doom , were generally darker and nastier, based on dungeons & dragons and with ...
Page 174: Erase and Rewind
Trigger happy 176 does a character reflect upon previous events within the synchronic story. Not easy, is it? A second problem with shared story nuggets is increasing familiarity. The reader of a particular fighting fantasy book, after just a few “plays,” would soon learn to avoid number thirty-four...
Page 175
Trigger happy 177 replayability—in that you can always try again— means to narrative. One problem is that great stories depend for their effect on irreversibility 24 —and this is because life, too, is irreversible. The pity and terror that aristotle says we feel as spectators to a tragedy are clearl...
Page 176
Trigger happy 178 care why my city is cursed, i’m off to the hills with jocasta to live out my days in luxury,” you’re not going to get much of a story out of the game. Some kinds of irreversibility, indeed, are actually anathema to good videogame design. A good exploration game, for example, should...
Page 177
Trigger happy 179 control—and it is precisely because of these irreversible factors that a videogame story can become involving. The death of a certain character in final fantasy vii is often cited as an example of videogames’ power to induce emotional reactions— and if a player does so react, this ...
Page 178
Trigger happy 180 outcast is a fine example of the sort of quasi- “cinematic” narrative sweep that a videogame with a three-million-dollar budget can create. The player’s character awakes in a strange alien world, and is identified by the inhabitants as a long-awaited prophet. He must win the trust ...
Page 179: Cracked Actors
Trigger happy 181 you don’t have high levels of dramatic changes, everything starts to seem the same. So above the nonlinear play you have a totally linear story line.” this, he thinks, is one way to address our theoretical concerns about nonlinearity (that is, reversible, interactive stories). Nonl...
Page 180
Trigger happy 182 characters. And just as it is largely the interactions between people that make a story interesting, so a good storytelling videogame ought to simulate believable exchanges between characters. Character interactions can happen in cut-scenes as much as the designer likes, but a grea...
Page 181
Trigger happy 183 curiosity is bigger, the creature will investigate; if its agent of fear is bigger, he’ll run away.” meanwhile, if the player accidentally or deliberately kills a friendly alien, the rest of them have their agents of helpfulness instantly adjusted downward: they will be far less in...
Page 182
Trigger happy 184 what a huge challenge for programmers. But the results would be worth it. It’s all very well to try to script every possible interaction, but then—as we have seen—the game’s story engineer has to write an awful lot to approach any semblance of interactivity. The artificial intellig...
Page 183
Trigger happy 185 a fascinating corollary of this arm’s-length approach—set it up and let it roll—is that what happens in the videogame, though not random, then becomes highly unpredictable. This idea is seconded at core design’s development studios, during the early stages of work on a beautiful pl...
Page 184
Trigger happy 186 of “strong ai” in order to become excited by these possibilities for videogames. “strong ai” is the position, much postulated in science fiction from blade runner and terminator to the matrix , that one day computers will be able to think for themselves. Now, just as with physical ...
Page 185: Talking It Over
Trigger happy 187 clear that, even if olivier masclef’s ambition to have the computer generate the characters’ responses automatically is fulfilled, the process will never feel like a conversation to the player as long as he is constricted by having to choose from a set of predetermined speechlets. ...
Page 186
Trigger happy 188 and, needless to say, it hasn’t been achieved yet. There are anecdotal reports of “bots”—little mobile computer programs that roam the internet 25 —fooling people in chat rooms, but given the depressing level of conversational aptitude in such places, that is hardly surprising. But...
Page 187
Trigger happy 189 but it is locked. An orc appears, snarling hungrily.” the player would then type in unlock door. Go east, thus getting out of the way of the monster and calling up the computer’s stored description of the next environment. The input language available to the adventuregame player be...
Page 188
Trigger happy 190 virtual psychotherapist. The user had a rudimentary conversation with it by typing answers to its questions, and eliza would then respond to those answers and ask for further elaboration. “eliza was one of the really exciting events throughout the computer industry,” darling recall...
Page 189
Trigger happy 191 plant monster bars the way: go find some weedkiller that you can splash on it. You must collect three books, or some crystals, or combine some herbs, or get more ammo for your gun. The only difference is that instead of typing in commands, you directly control the movement of your ...
Page 190: The Play’S The Thing
Trigger happy 192 seen, it tries to be like a film, making use of certain horror-movie camera angles and so on. And its most evocative language is the incoherent moaning of zombies. The play’s the thing so what might the future hold? It is clear, for one thing, that mainstream videogames will never ...
Page 191
Trigger happy 193 player to rear a hilariously bizarre fish with a man’s head (straight out of monty python’s the meaning of life ) that swims around a digital aquarium. The player can speak into a microphone peripheral that plugs into the joypad, and seaman answers back. For the moment, however, on...
Page 192
Trigger happy 194 in a drama over which he has no control—for only then, as we have seen, is it a drama. The author, pace roland barthes, is not quite dead yet. Pending some future computational revolution, then, in which a machine might be programmed to simulate a real human author, with a real aut...
Page 193: Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down
Trigger happy 195 tie me up, tie me down so should videogames totally abandon their current model of prescripted story line interrupting interactive play? Not necessarily. While it certainly does not amount to “interactive storytelling,” it can still work remarkably well on its own account, under th...
Page 194
Trigger happy 196 bodystockinged martial arts cyborg called psycho mantis, comments sarcastically on the other videogames you play (by reading the memory card in your console, which contains data saved from other games). And a helpful character will tell you at one point to pull your controller out ...
Page 195
Trigger happy 197 tasks for the player to perform. Sega’s dreamcast game shenmue, for example, looks absolutely gorgeous and has a suitably epic story line, but the gameplay is somewhat limited. What we want in general from a videogame story is not interactive narrative at all, but a sophisticated i...
Page 196
Trigger happy 198 live performance by slacker-country rocker beck, ken kutaragi, the engineering genius at sony japan who designed the playstation and its successor, gave an intriguing speech that concentrated on the advantages of “new worlds” and “characters.” he was cheered to the echo by the audi...
Page 197: Vector Class
Trigger happy 199 6 solid geometry vector class the world is made of glowing green and red lines. You are seated in a cockpit, grasping a sculpted black lever in each hand, thumbs hovering over the twin red fire buttons on top. You are in a tank. Audio rumblings and sonar-like pings go off around yo...
Page 198
Trigger happy 200 view, as if you were actually there. (there had been previous attempts at perspective in games, notably in night driver, which used moving white blocks on a black screen to evoke cats’ eyes and side bollards on a road, and in star raiders [1979], a rudimentary 3d space shoot-’em-up...
Page 199
Trigger happy 201 3d.” 26 where two planes of an object meet, a line is drawn, but the planes themselves have no surface, no solidity. Every object is drawn from simple geometrical objects such as triangles and rectangles. These are generally known as “polygons.” wireframe 3d caught on after battlez...
Page 200
Trigger happy 202 structures of logical thought incarnated in a beautiful dance of electrons. Martin amis wrote that battlezone has “the look of op or pop art and the feel of a genuine battlezone.” this intriguing comparison is instructive in its shortcomings. For unlike op art, which produces an il...
Page 201
Trigger happy 203 doubt battlezone and its ilk had some influence on william gibson’s seminally incandescent descriptions of the matrix (whence the 1999 film got its title). In neuromancer, gibson describes this computersimulated world, where corporations are represented by “green cubes” or a “stepp...
Page 202: The Art Of The New
Trigger happy 204 modern videogames themselves understand the loss and even grieve it, in witty ways: metal gear solid, for instance, provides the player with a delicious “vr training mode,” in which strategies for the game proper are practiced in a wireframe world, and moving among these glowing gr...
Page 203
Trigger happy 205 mathematical method for what became known as “scientific perspective.” you know it already. Objects in the distance decrease in apparent size according to strictly defined ratios. Parallel lines converge at one or more “vanishing points.” 27 scientific perspective is universally fa...
Page 204: Pushing The Boundaries
Trigger happy 206 but along the way, videogames have rehearsed other histories of pictorial representation, and come up with imaginative and original visual strategies themselves. Moreover, as has been made abundantly clear in the mid- to late 1990s by the industry’s numerous abortive attempts to co...
Page 205
Trigger happy 207 environment had no characteristics of its own: it was not terrain, but simply a function of the relations between objects (such as the perilous gravitational field surrounding the sun in spacewar) or a means by which time could pass while one object traveled across the screen (the ...
Page 206
Trigger happy 208 invented to gild the cage, and then burst its bars completely. “wraparound” screens were soon developed, as in asteroids (1979), where the player’s ship could, rather than bouncing off the screen edges, travel off one side of the screen and magically reappear on the other, providin...
Page 207
Trigger happy 209 dispensation of characters, in order to uncover more text than is currently viewable on the open section. We are now all familiar with the process of smoothly scrolling down a word-processing document or web page: videogames got there first. Early scrolling games were mostly of the...
Page 208
Trigger happy 210 videogames had, with such forms as defender’s, somehow acquired a new dimension of action. It is certainly not the same space as in the old, static, onescreen games. Yet nor is it three-dimensional, for the player cannot fly “into” or “out of” the screen. The game demands, moreover...
Page 209
Trigger happy 211 fig. 9. Defender: swoop low over the mountains and defend the human race. The radar (top) shows the whole level space in miniature ( 1980 williams) focusing on a fixed area of the interior. Defender marries the endless, wraparound vista of the cyclorama with the flickering animati...
Page 210
Trigger happy 212 later games, such as r-type (1988), took advantage of spare power to create an inventive impression of depth with “parallax” scrolling. Imagine the viewer inside the circular strip described above, only now it is not one but several concentric circular strips, revolving at decreasi...
Page 211: Points Of View
Trigger happy 213 confined space with twenty, fifty or a hundred bloodthirsty automatons in order to save the last nuclear family on earth. As the game’s designer, eugene jarvis, explained to j. C. Herz: “it was kind of about confinement. You are stuck on this screen. There’s two hundred robots tryi...
Page 212
Trigger happy 214 vertically or horizontally, but diagonally up and to the right. “isometric” means “constant measurements.” in architectural parlance, “isometric projection” is the name given to a type of drawing in which all horizontal lines are drawn at an angle of thirty degrees to the horizonta...
Page 213
Trigger happy 215 fig. 10. Zaxxon: isometric perspective and terraformed space ( sega 1982) however, while having as usual to deal with enemy aircraft, could also explode if it crashed into any of the numerous barrels, pylons and buildings poking up out of the ground. Movement was now nearly in thr...
Page 214
Trigger happy 216 isometric perspective was not a brand-new discovery. It is very similar, for instance, to the form of “parallelism” (representation in which parallel lines do not converge) found in ancient chinese art, whose high viewpoint and oddly elongated (to the modern eye) diagonals are repr...
Page 215: Being There
Trigger happy 217 isometric perspective still prospers in the huge genre of strategy gaming. In simcity and civilization or command and conquer, the player controls numerous units (people, tanks, factories and so on) within a vast playing area. Construct this world in scientific perspective, without...
Page 216
Trigger happy 218 supposed viewpoint of the player’s character wandering around an enemy-infested arena with a battery of projectile weaponry. 30 yet battlezone, more than a decade previously, was in effect a first-person shooter, and the first-person viewpoint had even been crammed into a game rele...
Page 217
Trigger happy 219 movement—only the walls of the room moved; and the enemy soldiers were constructed by bit-mapped sprites, which means they were basically flat drawings. When the enemies got nearer, they grew perspectivally by the simple means of enlarging every pixel in the drawing, so that they l...
Page 218
Trigger happy 220 points it dead ahead along the central axis of vision, rather than across the body; the videogame gun, however, is moved over to one side so as not to obscure the center of the screen, where most of the action takes place, and a separate aiming cursor (usually small crosshairs) is ...
Page 219
Trigger happy 221 wireframe 3d was a nice start, but now it’s old hat. Real tanks don’t look like that. In two dimensions, you join the dots; in three dimensions, you join the lines. It was time to color in the surfaces, and in the early 1990s game types such as aircraft combat simulators, driving g...
Page 220
Trigger happy 222 and form, but videogames have the added challenge that they move, and 3d videogames allow objects to be seen from more than one angle. So the demonic form is defined as a mathematical solid, and then the computing engine can calculate all the shading and foreshortening automaticall...
Page 221
Trigger happy 223 the timaeus, plato’s eponymous speaker reasons that the entire universe is made up of simple geometrical shapes that can be represented by the first four numbers: one is a point, two is a line, three is a triangle and four is the simplest non-spherical solid, a triangular pyramid. ...
Page 222
Trigger happy 224 geometric figurings for such common subjects as stags and birds, and argued that the fact that all animals are reducible to simple euclidean forms is attributable to divine providence. The geometrical method revealed to the artists a deep, timaean truth about the nature of the univ...
Page 223
Trigger happy 225 but though human beings do not actually look like this, they do move like this, and the tangible solidity of one leg sweeping in front of another, of a fist slamming into a chest, is a magic wrought by plato’s four numbers. Just as timaeus argues further that the four numbers (or a...
Page 224: The User Illusion
Trigger happy 226 polygons’ very ubiquity will lead to their immolation. Sony’s playstation2 draws about seventy million polygons per second, which is roughly equivalent to the total number of pixels on the screen. 32 hardware is thus getting very close to being able to provide so many polygons that...
Page 225
Trigger happy 227 in the real world, we perceive depth because we have two eyes: each receives a slightly different perspective on the scene and our brain blends them into a stereoscopic image. But a flat representation such as that in paintings or videogames can still offer a lot of information abo...
Page 226
Trigger happy 228 relative size. Most of these are self-explanatory, apart from the term “aerial perspective.” this was coined by leonardo da vinci; it has nothing to do with geometry but describes the effect of distance upon color. Because light of different wavelengths is scattered in different ra...
Page 227
Trigger happy 229 range of vision (and thus what the computer has to draw) is markedly limited. Objects or monsters can loom out of the mist with stylish effect, passing smoothly from blued-out fuzz to sharp delineation. Often, fog and general darkness make an effective means to heighten tension in ...
Page 228
Trigger happy 230 size you would draw the snoozing cat on the garden wall if you traced her outline on the window. Now usually, any object b that subtends a larger view angle than object a has a correspondingly larger plane projection. This is common artistic sense: it looks bigger, so you draw it b...
Page 229
Trigger happy 231 fig. 12. Silent hill: fog and snow heighten the tension ( 1999 konami) in general, painting avoids the confusions of marginal distortion by two methods: combining several slightly different viewpoints (especially in large canvases), or keeping the angle of vision relatively narrow...
Page 230
Trigger happy 232 looking directly at it for a fraction of a second, we would confirm that its outline really is round and not elliptical. Videogames presented in a first-person viewpoint thus far have failed to overcome these problems, and their hyperbolic claims to a sort of “realism” must therefo...
Page 231: The Third Way
Trigger happy 233 make sure you are not going to tread in some fatal ooze, break a trip wire or fall down a satirical pit. While videogames are still played out on flat television screens or monitors, therefore, and while the interface remains so doggedly mechanical, a critical level of realism will...
Page 232
Trigger happy 234 tomb raider games (see fig. 13), this is a perspectival construction in which the player can see the character under control, and the representational viewpoint itself is a completely disembodied one. Disembodied? I mean that the view we are given corresponds to no actual pair of e...
Page 233
Trigger happy 235 from the cinema: the player’s point of view is explicitly defined, as we saw, as that of a “camera,” whose movements can often be controlled as if the player were a phantom movie director, floating about on an invisible crane. The external view of the player’s character, although p...
Page 234: Brave New Worlds
Trigger happy 236 fig. 13. Tomb raider 3: the third-person perspective—we watch lara watching her surroundings (here, an imaginary london wharf) ( and ™ 1998 core design limited; all rights reserved) brave new worlds this brief history of the construction of space in videogames has suggested two th...
Page 235
Trigger happy 237 that development, for by the eighteenth century in painting the classical ideal of beauty based on some cosmic mathematical order was already being challenged, and the shortcomings of perspective were already being identified. Videogame scenery, being an artifact of computers, is c...
Page 236
Trigger happy 238 dimensions that we are currently assured constitute reality. There is no question that such a game could be built; it is a question of whether there exists the vision to build it—and, of course, whether anyone would want to play it. Such a mixture of styles in our hypothetical game...
Page 237
Trigger happy 239 example, in software for the gameboy, the most successful videogame system ever made. The choice of spatial mode, of course, which includes the choice even of whether or how far to be representational at all (doom versus tetris), is bound up intimately with the question of what kin...
Page 238: Dress Code
Trigger happy 240 7 false idols dress code chiba city: a sprawling, industrial town in the humid, rainy japanese spring, where downbeat pockets of hardware shops, pachinko parlors and lean-to noodle shacks are carved up by multilane highways. Cars don’t stop to admire the view; they are always going...
Page 239
Trigger happy 241 except a symbolic one: to emphasize and celebrate the area’s gigantism of scale. Makuhari, in its odd flatness of texture, its aggressively rectilinear architecture and its constellation of rosy aircraft-warning lights winking from the buildings at night, looks just like a city out...
Page 240
Trigger happy 242 of character in videogames. So i’m going to brave the crush and see for myself. Inside makuhari messe, the vast national exhibition center (whose undulating roof gives it the appearance of eight hi-tech railway stations shoved together), more than a hundred and sixty thousand japan...
Page 241
Trigger happy 243 huge inflatables of spyro the dragon and crash bandicoot, in japan it offers a live stage show, with a rock band fronted by performers in the cuddly, furry costumes of um jammer lammy and parappa the rapper. These two forms of entertainment marketing have quite different functions:...
Page 242: Virtual Megalocephaly
Trigger happy 244 character can be an idol as much as a pop star or an actor in the west. One of the major criteria, therefore, for a game’s success in japan is that it contains good characters. Here, by the way, is another important difference between videogames and films. The star of a movie is ch...
Page 243
Trigger happy 245 anime (animated cartoon films)—the massive japanese toy and videogame corporation bandai, for instance, is a major sponsor of animated programming. Whole books have been written about “japanimation” alone. But the most pertinent aspect of these comic forms for our purposes is their...
Page 244
Trigger happy 246 miyamoto says: “mario was born of rational design in the days of immature technology.” more generally, both with mario and with later characters, such considerations meant that, since the face and eyes are the richest physical loci of “personality”—we concentrate on them in real li...
Page 245
Trigger happy 247 produce proportionally more realistic avatars of human characters. When japanese fans got their first look at final fantasy viii there was palpable outrage, because it seemed the characters had been “westernized”: no longer the cute, deformed people of ffvii but longerlimbed and mo...
Page 246
Trigger happy 248 but what is it about the deformed aesthetic that makes it so desirable? To most western eyes, such characters look merely childlike and childish: “cutesy.” but remember that unrealism in videogames need not be a handicap; it can be a positive, deliberate pleasure. The japanese pref...
Page 247
Trigger happy 249 media stars for this reason: desire that can never in principle be reciprocated is thoroughly safe and free of any possible disappointment. This phenomenon is known in japan by the term of disapprobation nijikon fetchi —literally, “twodimensional fetish,” though it more generally c...
Page 248: Gender Genres
Trigger happy 250 are that they are too overdetermined and prescripted (just like preset “combo” moves in beat-’em-ups, and just like prescripted “narrative” interactions in story games). With kyoko date, we see further that motion capture is also aesthetically impoverishing, as it limits the achiev...
Page 249
Trigger happy 251 statistical insights into videogaming in japan are richly furnished by the 1997 cesa 36 games white paper. It reports that attendance at the 1997 tokyo game show was 82 percent male (while very heavily male-oriented, then, this still means nearly a fifth of attendees were female), ...
Page 250
Trigger happy 252 than three times as many women as men nominated the pokÉmon (“pocket monster”) series (12.7 percent versus 3.9 percent). These games, unleashed upon the british and american market in the 1999 christmas season, are cartoonish virtual bestiaries, in which lovable monsters may be rea...
Page 251
Trigger happy 253 “game grrlz” movement in america that proves that women can frag 37 with the best of them. What we can infer so far is just that these japanese women simply have different aesthetic tastes: their preferred videogames are in general more quirky or brain-taxing than the straight-ahea...
Page 252
Trigger happy 254 men. But brenda laurel of purple moon software, an american development studio that produces videogames aimed at young females, does exactly this: “girls’ objection to computer games isn’t what you’d expect. It’s not that they’re too violent, it’s that they’re too boring. They’re e...
Page 253
Trigger happy 255 depressingly adolescent, sexist advertising) 39 —from any posited “innate” preferences. Now that many more women are involved in the videogame design process worldwide, we may see in the near future that this fact, allied with better marketing, will erase it completely. According t...
Page 254
Trigger happy 256 industry as a whole is not meeting their needs and not taking their interests and preferences into account. Given the enormous buying power that women have and will continue to have, this is a shortsighted mistake,” according to one writer. 40 so what kinds of games do women prefer...
Page 255
Trigger happy 257 home video game software,” in which respondents were asked what kind of games they would like to see. Girls of 7 to 12, for example, would like “a chatting game,” while 16- to 18-year-olds envisage “a game in which a user creates various stories and can be a leading role.” as with ...
Page 256: Character Building
Trigger happy 258 was ranked overall favorite by equal proportions of men and women cesa respondents). Videogame developers in the future will appeal to more men and to more women only as long as their games mature aesthetically. Character building let us return to one clear aesthetic preference of ...
Page 257
Trigger happy 259 a really successful character is not just a moneymaker for software developers, either: as we’ve seen, it enables hardware companies to sell consoles. Witness the fact that nintendo’s n64 machine was delayed for a whole year while the finishing touches were put to the game super ma...
Page 258
Trigger happy 260 fig. 14. Lara croft: a beautiful abstraction ( and ™ core design limited; all rights reserved) now at first sight there is a world of difference between pac-man and a modern videogame character such as lara croft (see fig. 14). That is certainly true if.
Page 259
Trigger happy 261 you regard them as traditional static pictures. But as we must keep reminding ourselves, videogames are a kinetic art form: many of their pleasures can only be realized through time. And on a very basic level, pac- man and lara do in fact share one important attraction. If you swin...
Page 260
Trigger happy 262 witness the beautiful bounces and skids of mario in mario 64, or the graceful, arcing somersaults and handstands of lara in tomb raider iii. Good characters are good largely by virtue of having a wide range of physical abilities, and by having those physical abilities particularly ...
Page 261
Trigger happy 263 fig. 15. Sonic the hedgehog: cat and mouse (from sonic adventure, sega 1999) more proportionally humanoid “good characters”—such as lara croft, jin kazama from tekken 3, or solid snake from metal gear solid— work (on this purely static, visual dimension) in a slightly different w...
Page 262
Trigger happy 264 3 is an idealized amalgam of body-building action grunts such as schwarzenegger and martial arts movie heroes. A good videogame character is one that the player, because of a fulfilled combination of dynamic and iconic criteria, likes—just as we like cartoon characters such as sylv...
Page 263
Trigger happy 265 gonna really work.” well, at that point, it really didn’t make any difference. It was only when they really started to develop lara—she was animated and her hair was moving— it was like, “wow, you could actually quite relate to this!” one apotheosis of this sort of emotional manipu...
Page 264
Trigger happy 266 surely be careful never to let lara become too individuated. If she were to look photorealistic, too much like an actual individual woman, what seductiveness she possesses would thereby be destroyed. Smith agrees: we feel that we can make lara significantly different to the way she...
Page 265
Trigger happy 267 like lara croft or mario is, in these ways, inexhaustible. Some say life’s the thing . . . . . . But i prefer playing videogames. Time to dive once again into the bleep-ridden throngs of makuhari, because it’s not just in terms of character design that the japanese industry is inst...
Page 266
Trigger happy 268 carrying out the ceremony are as intricate as they are because the point is to feel the beauty involved in each and every movement.” so, the point is not the flowers themselves; the point is not the tea. Form is its own content. And the japanese words that describe such an aestheti...
Page 267
Trigger happy 269 and the remit of videogame “simulations” in japan is sure to expand. Adult japanese women, for example, want “a simulation game of being a housewife, giving experience of leading a happy married life including housework, having/raising children, sex”; “a simulation of buying a hous...
Page 268
Trigger happy 270 except for the wealthy. Yet in a culture where the form of an activity is held in such high esteem for its own sake, being able to recreate that form in a videogame context is, it seems, a decisively valuable pleasure. This is not so different from a western driving game. Most of u...
Page 269: Tiny Silver Balls
Trigger happy 271 8 the player of games tiny silver balls after the luminous hi-tech orgy of makuhari’s videogame exhibition, let’s stop off at a pachinko parlor in akihabara, or “electric town,” the tokyo district that constitutes a paradise on earth for devotees of denki seihin , or consumer elect...
Page 270
Trigger happy 272 stylish businesswomen on their lunch hour, lean elderly men in tatty suits dropping cigarette ash into the machines’ integral ashtrays. Lined up in endless rows like workers on a factory conveyor belt, the players are nevertheless all alone, gazing intently at the machines in front...
Page 271
Trigger happy 273 the machine into a big plastic basket. From there they can be scooped back into the machine for more plays, after the initial hundred have been used up. Now if you amass a great many balls, and you have the self-discipline not to shove them straight back in the machine, you can go ...
Page 272
Trigger happy 274 with western slot machines, the bottom line is how much money the thing spews out at the end. With pinball, with which pachinko obviously has a lot in common mechanically, the object of the game is to amass a different kind of currency—the social capital (in french sociologist pier...
Page 273
Trigger happy 275 some pachinko experts roam the halls with a gaze so intuitively attuned to the game that they can pick out machines whose pins are slightly bent from the constant battering of balls. These, they know, will pay out more often. But to minimize this advantage, parlor operators go arou...
Page 274: Power Tools
Trigger happy 276 randomness with a continuous control over one important variable of the system. So do videogames. That one variable is the behavior of the player’s own character (animal, humanoid or mechanical), battling in an otherwise unpredictable virtual world. As the pachinko control is analo...
Page 275
Trigger happy 277 videogames are also part of a different lineage. The arcade, which today is normally a fluorescently lit space crammed with the latest monster videogame cabinets and their ever more inventive control mechanisms—lightguns, life-size kayak oars, motorized snowboards, electronic drumk...
Page 276
Trigger happy 278 previously been causing an unimaginable upheaval in the lives of millions, forcing people out of work and instigating the formation of resistance groups such as the luddites. 41 the lesson was quickly learned. By the 1890s, the fruits of applied science were deliberately offered to...
Page 277
Trigger happy 279 in this, videogames are again part of a larger tradition: this time, that of the technological prostheticization of play in general. Tennis, for example, has been transformed over the past few decades by material racquet technologies and stringdampening. Serious chess players routi...
Page 278
Trigger happy 280 some pretense of monetary exchange—you might shoot enough ducks and win a cuddly toy—time crisis finishes the job begun by pachinko, and offers nothing but purely sensual and psychological rewards for your cash. Another lightgun game, point blank, explicitly acknowledges this herit...
Page 279
Trigger happy 281 try again. (the relative safety of high-speed collisions, moreover, turns most racing videogames further into digital versions of the fairground dodgems.) so the rollercoaster and the videogame both offer the pleasurable, adrenaline-surging experience of danger, with none of the ri...
Page 280: Veni, Vidi, Lusi
Trigger happy 282 videogames’ special virtue of interactivity, though, vastly increases this technological dependence until it attains a quality of symbiosis. You are perforce a happy accomplice. For though you can appreciate a photograph or watch a film quite happily without being able to operate a...
Page 281
Trigger happy 283 refining them. They are exactly those skills exercised by modern target videogames such as time crisis 2. Games of chance, meanwhile, seem to have originated from a belief that divine will could be glimpsed through seemingly random machinations; the i ching , for example, is a book...
Page 282
Trigger happy 284 direct forerunner of the twentieth-century board game risk, and in turn, technologically prostheticized and expanded, of real-time strategy videogames such as command and conquer: tiberian sun. Here is an account of the “judicial duel” in medieval english law: though sometimes foug...
Page 283
Trigger happy 285 the fighting is performed on the player’s behalf by a digital “substitute”; here, too, unequally skilled human players may have a sporting match by tweaking the videogame’s built-in “handicap” device. Not only has bloody violence been transformed into a choreography of light, but t...
Page 284
Trigger happy 286 must construct larger shapes—except the videogame challenge is again a dynamic one, introducing time pressure on the player. And children have always made up their own “exploration games,” playing, for instance, in a deserted house and imbuing it with magical qualities. Now the tec...
Page 285
Trigger happy 287 martin amis astutely pointed out in 1982 that the burgeoning criticism of videogames even then was simply a repeat of “the heated debates about snooker and pool earlier in the century.” games are not serious, runs this argument, they are somehow intellectually degrading. Play, anth...
Page 286
Trigger happy 288 society. His final, polemical chapter holds that the modern world (he was writing in 1938) is anomic and impoverished precisely because games have been torn from their organic place at the heart of community and neatly cordoned off into such spheres as that of professional sports. ...
Page 287
Trigger happy 289 beating your friends and competing with your friends than doing the same thing with computer-controlled opponents.” this is similar to the pleasure of playing doubles in tennis, or playing a rubber of bridge; perhaps it is closer, however, to that of board games, which have always ...
Page 288
Trigger happy 290 connect games such as quake iii, half-life or starcraft to an internet server and play in real time against hundreds or thousands of other people all over the globe. Sega’s dreamcast, of course, now incorporates a modem to facilitate precisely this activity. Richard darling sees im...
Page 289: Get Into The Groove
Trigger happy 291 enough people for you to arrange with friends at work to all log on at eight o’clock in the evening and play selectively, just against each other. So it doesn’t have to be the way internet communication is portrayed in the media, with people who are rather sad and lonely communicat...
Page 290
Trigger happy 292 absorption in which the dynamic form of successful play becomes beautiful and satisfying. How exactly does such an experience come about? One highly influential attempt at a logical interpretation of “fun” has been made by psychologist mihaly csikszentmihalyi, with his concept of “...
Page 291
Trigger happy 293 experiences are attained when there is a perceived match between the demands of the activity and the subject’s skills. Now why else would many videogames such as metal gear solid let you change the difficulty level? Clearly it is boring to play a game that is too easy, and frustrat...
Page 292
Trigger happy 294 pleasure increases up to a point according to difficulty. So it seems very likely that one crucial component of videogaming pleasure is in fact a certain level of anxiety. This sounds counterintuitive but is supported by simple experiments that report increased heart rate and adren...
Page 293
Trigger happy 295 in that small movements of the fingers result in beautiful music. But musicians know that there is another phenomenon at work, which is also appropriate to a discussion of videogame playing: muscle memory. When a pianist attempts a new piece, most of her attention is focused consci...
Page 294
Trigger happy 296 flow or anything else: cognitive scientists have shown that practicing complex sequences of finger movements actually rewires neuronal connections in the brain until they become automatic. A reduction in self- consciousness is naturally pursuant upon the observation that my critica...
Page 295
Trigger happy 297 it is so much harder to get past the initial mechanical demands. Secondly, the optimal match of demands and skills that we looked at earlier is the other factor that contributes materially to the pleasurable loss of selfconsciousness, because if the brain is having to process a lot...
Page 296: You Win Again
Trigger happy 298 which contestants from all over the world compete for prizes of hundreds of thousands of dollars.) but now we have uncovered some sources of videogame pleasure, it remains to be seen just how that pleasure is manipulated. How, in other words, does the machine play the man? You win ...
Page 297
Trigger happy 299 amis quotes the science fiction writer isaac asimov, invoking both the above motivations: “kids like the computer because it plays back . . . It’s a pal, a friend, but it doesn’t get mad, it doesn’t say ‘i won’t play,’ and it doesn’t break the rules.” considerations such as these m...
Page 298
Trigger happy 300 how do videogame designers achieve such a delicate balance? Such considerations are very important to richard darling. He argues that what makes an action game (driving, sports or shooting) fun is precisely this: “the player’s efforts being rewarded by achievements.” it’s not so si...
Page 299
Trigger happy 301 things to be cropping up. So really our goal is to make sure that there’s enough there to start off with so that people find our game exciting and interesting, but then the more they play the more they achieve, and they can’t constantly be getting new rewards for all those achievem...
Page 300
Trigger happy 302 in other words, there would be no great incentive to play the game and to get better at it. But the videogame must not be too difficult: there must be some initial reinforcement for the player to want to keep going. Darling agrees: “you need to be given rewards in a short enough ti...
Page 301
Trigger happy 303 and stay at the back of the pack so all the computer cars slow down, and then on the last straight just put your foot down and cruise past them and win. You’ve got to be very careful with the logic of what’s happening to make sure that a better driver will always do better. One pro...
Page 302
Trigger happy 304 trivial pursuit, risk, tennis, dominoes, chess or football, your increased sense of power and selfrespect is the only reward on offer. The game remains the same. (the transaction of capital in the coin-op arcade game seems to be a positive if still strictly extrinsic phenomenon. Th...
Page 303
Trigger happy 305 “stealth” suit, so that you can have enormous fun playing through the environments as an invisible, death-dealing hero. Beat-’em-ups such as tekken 3 or soul calibur, meanwhile, cleverly spread rewards between their two-player modes (two humans fighting each other’s digital surroga...
Page 304
Trigger happy 306 interact with videogames. So what exactly are the nuts and bolts of this process? When we talk to videogames and they talk to us, what language is this conversation in? By its signs shall you know a city..
Page 305
Trigger happy 307 9 signs of life a jaundiced figure floats across the screen. He is constantly searching for things to eat. We are looking at a neo-marxist parable of late capitalism. He is the pure consumer. With his obsessively gaping maw, he clearly wants only one thing: to feel whole, at peace ...
Page 306: I Am What I Eat
Trigger happy 308 it is one of the fascinations of videogames as a form, indeed, that they constitute a kaleidoscopic, prestissimo exercise in semiotics, which is the everchanging interaction of signs. More than advertising or the internet, videogames, in their immense speed and complexity, have to ...
Page 307
Trigger happy 309 disks and what looks like a brace of cherries. Now, considering this image solely as a picture, why do some paths in the maze have dots while others are empty? Why is there one disk inside the maze and others, slightly smaller, outside it? And what has all this to do with fruit? It...
Page 308
Trigger happy 310 fig. 16. Pac-man: a parable of late capitalism, and a complex web of signs ( 1980 namco ltd; all rights reserved).
Page 309
Trigger happy 311 but we know that an important part of any videogame character is its dynamic form, and, sure enough, pac-man’s animation lets him partake of another kind of sign. As he moves around, the missing “slice of pizza” expands and contracts, resembling a schematic mouth in profile. It act...
Page 310
Trigger happy 312 instance, is an index, in that it shares in and points to deep structural features of the landscape it describes, but it is also an icon, in that it simply looks like the terrain as seen from the air. The illuminated first letter of a medieval manuscript is both a symbol, in that i...
Page 311
Trigger happy 313 japan, that at the time was just beginning to claim a role as a global financial power—as a satire on a different kind of consumption: late-twentieth-century capitalism. Hence our parable at the start of the chapter. For pac-man, consumption cannot end; no conceivable quantity of d...
Page 312
Trigger happy 314 there is nothing left of him at all. In his mania of consumption, he has eaten himself.) what about pac-man’s little cousins below the playing area? By videogame convention, these represent the number of lives he has in reserve. While the pac-man in play is almost entirely symbolic...
Page 313
Trigger happy 315 signs about signs. The blob itself is an agreed symbol for “power-up” according to pac-man’s game design, but the power-up itself has no independent existence. Funnily enough, this is one context in which a phrase from postmodern theory is particularly appropriate: a power-up is a ...
Page 314
Trigger happy 316 look at the cherries below the playing area, for instance. They seem iconic (like fruit), but in fact they are indices: they indicate that shortly some cherries will appear temporarily in the middle of the screen. If pac- man eats those, they earn him 100 points, or ten times the v...
Page 315: Deep In Conversation
Trigger happy 317 importantly, it does in fact explain at one level what it means to play a videogame. Because it helps to reconstruct something the player is doing automatically—there can be no doubt that to play the game well she must understand how all the signs on the game screen interact, in ju...
Page 316
Trigger happy 318 whereas pac-man is abstract, largely symbolic, voldo (left) is a triumph of iconic or pictorial representation. Now what does this do for the player’s sense of involvement with the game? The unique feature of videogames, after all, in terms of the structure of their consumption as ...
Page 317
Trigger happy 319 fig. 17. Soul calibur: fabulously iconic fighting ( 1998, 1999 namco ltd; all rights reserved) this is not to say, of course, that iconic arts such as photography and cinema do not stimulate the imagination at all. Of course they do (or can). But there is a difference in the facul...
Page 318
Trigger happy 320 processes of a character by reading an actor’s face. This process is hermeneutic: it is about interpretation. But the imagination that videogames require of the player is a different process: it is pragmatic. It can be subdivided into two parts: “imagining into” and “imagining how....
Page 319
Trigger happy 321 exercising the pragmatic imagination. And indeed, we can say that a videogame is better as its symbolic conversation becomes more interesting. The aesthetic importance of symbols to videogames is played on in the commercial sphere too, in marketing imagery. The four “action” button...
Page 320: Time, Gentlemen, Please
Trigger happy 322 time, gentlemen, please remember that a videogame is not a static “text”; it is a dynamic form. And since videogames operate through time, another constituent of good symbolic conversation is obviously going to be its rhythm, or how the symbols combine over time. The importance of ...
Page 321
Trigger happy 323 combinations of these must be manipulated in time with their corresponding symbols floating down the screen. Other “rhythm games,” as they are known, include parappa the rapper, in which the player must help a paper-thin rapping dog undergo musical training from an onion; guitar fr...
Page 322
Trigger happy 324 dance dance revolution and beatmania are very literal applications of videogame rhythm. But rhythm is also important in games that are not explicitly predicated on musical interaction. Giving the keynote speech at the 1999 game developers’ conference in san jose, shigeru miyamoto e...
Page 323
Trigger happy 325 the sudden appearance of grenades flying toward us in time crisis 2, and we “duck” by lifting our foot off a pedal before they hit. The expansive exploration game shenmue, meanwhile, utilizes a “quick-time event” system for certain periods of gameplay, which in contrast to the game...
Page 324
Trigger happy 326 to start with, you must use them to your best advantage, in the situations where they will be most effective. That is strategic timing. The fact that destroying things earns you more points, and at certain scores you win another smart bomb or an extra life, makes a correct calculat...
Page 325
Trigger happy 327 reactions are subordinated to the intelligent deployment of resources over time. The third way in which time and rhythm operate in videogames is at a high structural level, where i’ll call it “tempo.” 47 this describes, for instance, the ebb and flow of anxiety and satisfaction thr...
Page 326
Trigger happy 328 become predictable, and the element of pleasurable surprise is lost. A videogame designer must therefore consider the large-scale distribution of such aspects of his game and organize them to the best effect—then it will have good tempo. A brilliant example of this aspect of design...
Page 327
Trigger happy 329 fig. 18. Resident evil: a shocking moment ( 1997 capcom) built up—they also have temporal resolution, which describes the fluidity or otherwise of the image’s movement through time. Now if a videogame suffers from “jerky” animation, in that there are too few frames to the second, ...
Page 328: Say Something Else
Trigger happy 330 see the road in snapshots every twenty yards, you cannot drive very accurately. However powerful a computer processor, its resources will always be finite, so there will always be a trade-off between temporal resolution and graphical resolution. You can have very richly defined pic...
Page 329
Trigger happy 331 a different lock. A tomb raider door, therefore, operates as a symbol for “exit” or “threshold,” a means of policing movement between predefined spaces, and a key operates symbolically a little like a minor powerup, a second-order sign denoting “ability to use door.” there are also...
Page 330
Trigger happy 332 the virtue of tomb raider is that, although the variety of symbolic interaction that it offers to the player—manipulating keys, doors and switches—is quite rudimentary and uninteresting, the way the player is required to interact with such symbols in the three dimensions of space i...
Page 331
Trigger happy 333 within the gameworld. But the ghosts inside suddenly come to life with a demonic chuckle. The player realizes that he must shoot them with an arrow before the painting turns blank and the ghost flees to the painting behind him. So the pure icon has suddenly become a symbol to be fo...
Page 332
Trigger happy 334 melodies according to which button on the controller is pressed, keyboard-style. Once you have learned certain melodies, you may cause day to turn to night, or invoke rain, or talk to your friend in the forest. The game helps the player by showing the tune on a stave, in traditiona...
Page 333
Trigger happy 335 functionally they remain the same sort of animal as the large blobs in pac-man: they are second-order signs effecting changes in the possible symbolic relationships of the game. The ocarina works in this way by expanding the player’s symbolic language. Another zelda 64 gadget, for ...
Page 334
Trigger happy 336 controlled car. When you are first given this gadget, you just play with it, as you would with a real one. The form is identical. Herein lies one secret of the videogame’s enormous potential: it is the universal toy. (indeed, 1999’s rc stunt copter is a videogame simulation of play...
Page 335
Trigger happy 337 fig. 19. Ape escape: monkeying around in the ice age ( 1999 sony computer entertainment) an exquisite head shot to a bad guy. A virtual environment that reveals more detail when viewed telescopically is naturally more convincing than one which only works on one informational scale...
Page 336
Trigger happy 338 power-up, but as we saw it’s also a special case of the dreaded “functional incoherence.” by contrast, metal gear solid superbly combines a large number of gadgets with a delicious freedom as to how they are used and reused in various situations. You may use a simple cardboard box ...
Page 337: Information Overlord
Trigger happy 339 information overlord now as signs are basically vehicles of meaning, 48 a videogame will, for its own part in the conversation, need to erect highly efficient, semiotic systems as it tries to present ever greater quantities of raw information to the player. That information can be ...
Page 338
Trigger happy 340 fig. 20. G-police: the information superhighway ( 1997 sony computer entertainment) look at the screen. Top right is a number surrounded by a segmented, shaded ring. The number, a symbol, denotes the “health” of your gunship: when it reaches zero, the craft is destroyed. Similarly...
Page 339
Trigger happy 341 gradually turning to red for minimum. The shaded brackets at either side of screen center, meanwhile, are indices: at left for craft speed (colored above the middle for forward speed, below the middle for reverse); and at right for engine thrust. Again color is overlaid symbolicall...
Page 340
Trigger happy 342 enjoy a greater importance in the business of providing feedback to the player on the basis of which he can determine his next action. It is more intuitively and speedily understandable to “read” an indexical shape such as the remaining health segments than to read the numerical sy...
Page 341
Trigger happy 343 that provide a map of the current environment. In zelda 64, the player must find a map: it is an object in the gameworld that functions as a power-up. Once acquired, it can be viewed to help you find your way to new areas: it is graphically designed so as to look like a real parchm...
Page 342
Trigger happy 344 choose game modes or to save and load game data or preplay mission briefings—all the prerequisites to play (which shigeru miyamoto calls a game’s “labor”) that surround the action at the heart of even the simplest modern game. G-police 2: weapons of justice (1999), for example, is ...
Page 343: Drawing You In
Trigger happy 345 no one wants to come home, turn on a game and feel like they’re still working at the office pc. 50 but the particular aesthetic phenomenon of techno-nostalgia is also working a very clever, stealthy trick. Just as hamlet’ s deliberately archaic play-within-a-play enhances the audie...
Page 344
Trigger happy 346 good game. Conversely, a game built entirely from abstract visual symbols can be a bad game if those symbols do not interact in interesting ways. Tic-tac- toe, played by arranging the abstract symbols x and o, is a boring game for exactly this reason, as well as the more general co...
Page 345
Trigger happy 347 pragmatic imagination for the symbolic interaction. The semiotic demands of videogames are becoming greater all round. One irregular videogamer, an habituÉe of pac-man and tetris, told me on playing tomb raider for the first time: “i found i was looking at lara rather than worrying...
Page 346
Trigger happy 348 very “real”-looking people; for the game to remain innocent, visceral fun, they must remain partial symbols, retain that “computer look.” modern videogames are in this way more seductive than ever, as thanks to their visual enhancement they challenge us doubly. The same gameplayer ...
Page 347
Trigger happy 349 core enthuses over the possibilities offered by the next technological standard: there are far more things you can do with lara’s hair, and with her clothing . . . The leaves that you’re going past or the vines are all moving and animating, and there may be water dripping off them ...
Page 348
Trigger happy 350 videogame at bottom is still a highly artificial, purposely designed semiotic engine. And its purpose is not to simulate real life, but to offer the gift of playing a game. When we are at play, whether in front of a videogame screen, in a chess cafÉ, at the bowling alley or in the ...
Page 349: God’S Gift
Trigger happy 351 10 the prometheus engine god’s gift in the beginning, heaven and earth were married. Gaia (earth) and uranus (the heavens) then gave birth to the titans, the twelve gods of earliest times. They had dominion over all the cosmos. The youngest titan, kronos, married his sister rhea, b...
Page 350
Trigger happy 352 all his other eaten children. The titanomachy ensued: a ten-year war between zeus and his siblings on one side and the rest of the titans on the other that shook the universe to its foundations. There was one titan battling on zeus’s side: prometheus. His name means “he who thinks ...
Page 351
Trigger happy 353 continued to improve the brutish lives of his creations by teaching them writing, astronomy, agriculture, sailing, medicine, mining and the interpretation of dreams. He also fooled zeus into accepting the worst portion of meat from sacrificed animals: gristly bone was the gods’ due...
Page 352: Burn This
Trigger happy 354 the champion now of human imagination and sexuality, defeats the tyrannical god and casts him forever into the abyss. For the moment, man’s inheritance is safe. For what had prometheus done in the first place? He had given humans a power-up. Burn this the gift of fire. Like most ch...
Page 353
Trigger happy 355 the babylonian techno palace on ibiza. Lately, electricity has become the preferred fire—eminently biddable and plastic—of the moderns. Electric light freed us from the tyranny of the dark, hastening the march of technology. The movies came along and “broke our prisons asunder”: re...
Page 354: Bad Company
Trigger happy 356 watching, you’re doing. And when videogames are at their best, what you’re doing is something vastly more creatively challenging than watching a docusoap or a quiz show. Your reasoning, reflexes and imagination are tested to exhilarating limits. That hunk of molded plastic, that pl...
Page 355
Trigger happy 357 into the possible negative effects of videogames is so far inconclusive. Patricia greenfield’s 1984 study, media and the mind of the child , concluded that there was no such evidence, but then videogames were not nearly so graphically detailed as they are now. In more recent times,...
Page 356
Trigger happy 358 mortal kombat. Grand theft auto (1997), a game in which the player steals cars, runs over lines of hare krishnas and shoots cops, was described by the british police federation as “sick, deluded and beneath contempt,” and in the summer of 1999 a member of parliament wrote to the pr...
Page 357
Trigger happy 359 gun in a fashion making him an...Effective killer without teaching him any of the constraints or responsibilities needed to inhibit such a killing capacity.” the suit was summarily dismissed in may 2000 by a federal court judge, but the scapegoating of videogames continues. Now it ...
Page 358
Trigger happy 360 a t-34c turbo mentor, the aircraft used for primary flight training. But what does it mean to say that a videogame can train you to kill? I think it means rather less than critics want it to. When i was in school, my favorite sport was fencing. I was trained to wield my preferred w...
Page 359
Trigger happy 361 motivated to kill by their experience of playing that game; they are ordered to do so by their superiors. Fencing, of course, is a sport whose kinetic form is derived from a long, bloodthirsty history of actual sword fighting, combat and duels. But we class it as a morally neutral ...
Page 360
Trigger happy 362 videogames might be said to have an influence on reallife violence in the same way that films or any other media do—by having a particular style that may be imitated. The columbine murderers are thought to have dressed in black trench coats in emulation of keanu reeves in the matri...
Page 361
Trigger happy 363 kill, you can find stylistic inspiration anywhere: in a detective novel, a film, a painting by hieronymus bosch, a heavy-metal album or a videogame. They won’t, however, implant the murderous desire in the first place. A videogame can even be seen as positively valuable if it enabl...
Page 362: Genesis
Trigger happy 364 genesis in a dance of fire are new worlds born. At british videogame developers core design, they have a special, home-grown software tool designed exactly for the purpose of building new worlds: it’s called, not inappropriately, worldbuild ii. After the artists have drawn hundreds...
Page 363
Trigger happy 365 valleys and rivulets. Block by block, the ground is raised and lowered; edges are smoothed off. Only then, when the landscape is shaped in three dimensions, do the artists start to color it in, choosing from a palette of colors and textures (endless pages of sun-bleached grass, clo...
Page 364
Trigger happy 366 meadows and open spaces to get the player comfortable with the character.” the terrain is designed expressly to optimize gameplay. One theory of how the universe came to exist is a provocative idea called the strong anthropic principle, which suggests that the universe is designed ...
Page 365: The Final Frontier
Trigger happy 367 the final frontier this is a particular kind of utopianist terraforming, where a person’s capabilities are never insufficient. But what about the purely visual imagination of videogame worlds? Whereas the battlezone universe was in its day shockingly new, today’s environments are m...
Page 366
Trigger happy 368 they aim for an effect of vertiginous scale such as that created so masterfully by giovanni battista piranesi’s etchings of nightmare dungeons in his carceri d’invenzione (see fig. 21), which had an enormous influence on the aesthetics of romanticism and, later, surrealism. In this...
Page 367
Trigger happy 369 such skewed spaces would initially be very confusing to the gameplayer, but by building in a sufficient degree of intuitive predictability in other aspects—the way, say, that inertia or gravity works—the game could still present an enjoyable challenge without becoming thoroughly al...
Page 368
Trigger happy 370 fig. 21. Piranesi’s carceri d’invenzione: a dungeon master’s perspective on the unreal (rosenwald collection; photograph 1999 board of trustees, national gallery of art, washington).
Page 369: In An Ideal World
Trigger happy 371 in an ideal world but a good illusion must be cogent. The fabulous, unreal world that we are given to play with must seem to be perfectly real on its own terms. A strange new world is a thing of awe, but of course there is also a certain pleasure to be had from playing in recogniza...
Page 370
Trigger happy 372 such videogames at the moment, however, fall squarely into the high-velocity driving genre, and for a good reason. Because games as yet have only made a few faltering steps toward a necessary goal of the future: the fully interactive environment. If you were walking a character aro...
Page 371
Trigger happy 373 that looks like a door, i should be able to open unless it’s locked, or break it down if it’s made of rotting wood; if its hinges are visible i should be able to blow them off with a shotgun. Anything that looks like a window, i should be able to smash, with my bare fists if necess...
Page 372
Trigger happy 374 videogame environment as a whole is perfectly coherent. If this cannot be accomplished at the moment for recreations of large “real” environments like tokyo, owing to the data intensiveness problem, that in itself should be a good reason for videogames to develop their architectura...
Page 373
Trigger happy 375 even games that do not try to build a recognizable, real-world place are still rather repetitively reliant on the same hoary old visual references. Littered around core’s studios during the development of tomb raider: the last revelation, for instance, are photographic and illustra...
Page 374
Trigger happy 376 original environments so far in modern gaming have been seen, ironically, in some of the worst products, those triumphs of virtual tourism over symbolic richness myst and riven, whose pleasurably organic topography extrapolates inventively from the real, natural world. Another stra...
Page 375
Trigger happy 377 fig. 22. Tomb raider: the last revelation: egyptian architecture reimagined ( and ™ 1999 core design limited; all rights reserved).
Page 376: Virtual Justice
Trigger happy 378 virtual justice terry pratchett, the videogame-loving author of the discworld novels (whose universe, like that of a good videogame, is bizarre but consistent), explained to me just why he enjoys games in these terms: “for me, it’s the fun of exploration, and new challenges. I like...
Page 377
Trigger happy 379 player’s ability to switch control between several soldiers with different mission duties enhances the demands of strategic timing and also, since the environment may be seen from several different viewpoints in rapid succession, increases the sense of that environment’s solid exis...
Page 378
Trigger happy 380 the fun of turok: dinosaur hunter was thus compromised by passages that required the player to make precise jumps, platform-style—yet in a game where you can’t see your own feet, such jumps are impossible to judge properly. Equally, however, there are problems in the other directio...
Page 379
Trigger happy 381 organically related to and coherent with the rest of the virtual world. One good example of this, again, is in the resident evil games: the quite arbitrary restriction on inventory that we saw in chapter 3. How much stuff you can carry is illogically determined—a herb takes up as m...
Page 380: The Moral Maze
Trigger happy 382 this all in one go; the current position in the game may be saved to disk, or to a “memory card.” but often, the process of saving is made into another thoroughly arbitrary hurdle. Tomb raider iii, for example, only allows the player to save when he or she has collected the appropr...
Page 381
Trigger happy 383 in purgatory and in heaven; 56 heretics are burned at the stake, yet a bonfire is a means of celebration. Many ancient cultures, such as the zoroastrians or assyrians, worshiped fire as a god. Fire is the perfect representative of the romantic sublime: at once beautiful and terrify...
Page 382
Trigger happy 384 impossible, task). The old-style scrolling shooter metal slug already has a rudimentary version of such a “consequences” system: if your plane is shot down, the game doesn’t instantly stop; instead, you get captured and have to fight your way out of prison. This idea could eventual...
Page 383
Trigger happy 385 flawed soul reaver (1999). The player’s character is a vampire called raziel. When he dies, you do not start again from the last safe point; instead, you shift into the “spectral realm,” the same environments with a twisted, boschian air, where you continue playing and find previou...
Page 384
Trigger happy 386 in videogames, regret is an easily vanquishable phantom; it operates merely as a fleeting wound that may be quickly salved. If i had timed that jump correctly, lara wouldn’t have been impaled on the spikes. So i will do it again, properly this time. In 1983, in mind at play , geoff...
Page 385
Trigger happy 387 machine guns, guided missiles) that one so enjoys playing with. Metal gear solid, then, toys with the player’s emotions in largely non-interactive ways, as a film does. The future challenge is this: if videogames choose to try to expand their nuances of emotional impact interactive...
Page 386: Ashes to Ashes
Trigger happy 388 to beat your opponent or beat the computer at flicking this ball back.” modern games, vastly more visually thrilling though they are, must still answer the same need. “we play videogames because they’re fun to play. You’re not playing it to further your education, you’re playing it...
Page 387
Trigger happy 389 can never compete. If architecture is frozen music, then a videogame is liquid architecture. Indeed, the united nations has funded the development of a “virtual tour” of notre dame cathedral, which uses the engine (the computer code which draws 3d environments) from the first-perso...
Page 388
Trigger happy 390 fire. Now, it is true that the great cathedrals of europe, at rome, chartres or cologne, purposively evoke wonder not as a purely aesthetic end in itself, but as a means to lead the spectator to humble contemplation of his or her impotence in the face of the grandeur of god. Videog...
Page 389
Trigger happy 391 why the wonder induced by videogames should not enjoy a similar motivational power. Early videogame designers were inspired by imagery from comics, films and paintings. Now that videogames enjoy a general popularity and pervasiveness easily comparable to those media, we should be p...
Page 390
Trigger happy 392 earlier, i described the way in which a videogame such as time crisis enables you to simulate the form of killing while being happily dissociated from the morality of the acts represented, because there is no actual killing going on. This in itself is an innocent phenomenon with re...
Page 391
Trigger happy 393 were incinerated from afar; hospitals were bombed. Relying on pixels rather than eyes is perilous, because computers can malfunction, and pixels can lie. Moreover, if the modern pilot has been trained on souped-up videogame systems, we should not be surprised if, when he is perform...
Page 392
Trigger happy 394 metal gear solid is an anti-war wargame that features a plot about treacherous goings-on in darpa itself— the very defense agency that commissioned a version of battlezone for its tank gunners all those years ago. Metal gear solid is also remarkable for its imaginative emphasis on ...
Page 393
Trigger happy 395 crisis 2. The player in such games is always cast, not as a violent gun-toting maniac, but as a law-enforcing agent of national security. The fictional calculus of letting innocent hostages die versus killing terrorists thus in some small way palliates the violent form. Meanwhile, ...
Page 394
Trigger happy 396 processing chip in sony’s playstation2 console is called an “emotion engine.” this is more than just a good marketing coinage; it also implies a more thoughtful approach—not toward something like an interactive novel, of course, but certainly toward videogame software that will tak...
Page 395
Trigger happy 397 videogames continue to plough clichÉd visual and formal ruts, they will furnish the anomic mental landscape of an impoverished and unimaginative future generation, not only of artists but of people in general. Which is why it is so important for videogames to continue aiming at cre...
Page 396
Trigger happy 398 afterword sony’s long-awaited playstation2 console, which launched in the u.S. And europe in late 2000, did not represent the instant big bang that some were expecting, and only served to demonstrate the point that an increase in processing power does not instantly entail better ga...
Page 397
Trigger happy 399 extraordinary worldwide success. Over six days in august 2000, the pokÉmon yellow game sold a million copies across europe. A survey of british teenagers found that they were more likely to recognize pikachu, the cute yellow mascot of the pokÉmon franchise, than tony blair, the cut...
Page 398
Trigger happy 400 or sulk all by themselves as the player watches. Your job is to change their environment to their advantage and help them succeed in the careers you choose for them; but you can also set up deliberately fraught love triangles and chuckle over fights in the chintzy living room. The ...
Page 399
Trigger happy 401 buying new things for the sims’ house in order to increase its inhabitants’ happiness (such as a large mirror, which will boost their charisma, or a new oven, which will help them cook meals for their housemates and so become more popular), and in helping them climb the slippery po...
Page 400
Trigger happy 402 desirable. But you must choose your simplifications carefully. Though true artificial intelligence, as discussed in chapter 5, is still very much in its computational infancy, it remains one of the key buzzwords of the videogame industry. Every bog-standard driving game or first-pe...
Page 401
Trigger happy 403 videogame concepts, black and white nevertheless still comes up against the inherent problem of reversible systems identified in chapter 10. Although your moral decisions have global effects in the gameworld—let your worshippers drown, or destroy them with fireballs, and the remain...
Page 402
Trigger happy 404 to providing a more dramatically interesting, and even emotionally involving, virtual world. Another innovative aspect of black and white is in its cybernetics: every aspect of play is controlled with the mouse, using a highly intuitive “gestural system.” with this, you can stroke ...
Page 403
Trigger happy 405 while such cybernetic innovations hold out tantalizing possibilities for the future, one aspect of videogaming that drew ever greater interest during 2001 was massively multiplayer action, either over wired networks or online. Full-time gamers, such as britain’s sujoy roy, can now ...
Page 404
Trigger happy 406 might eventually come to represent a revolutionary democratization of the nature of sport. Laurels are no longer determined simply by the tyranny of genes. Women and men, able-bodied and otherwise, can compete on a level playing field, a digital city of play where all are equal bef...
Page 405
Trigger happy 407 interestingly warped chessboard spaces—but its combination of a first-person viewpoint with precise platform-jumping gameplay was staggeringly inept. Like so many games, it was great to look at but a pig to play. The eagerly awaited follow-up to goldeneye, perfect dark (2000), a sc...
Page 406
Trigger happy 408 seems possible: you can specialize in computers and hacking and infiltrate the enemy installations that way, or you can become an expert lockpicker, or a lethal sniper, or just rock in, all guns blazing. No strategy is privileged over another. The terms of the semiotic conversation...
Page 407
Trigger happy 409 glorious detail and color, it cast the player as a cybernetic infiltrator in a neuromancer -style matrix of coruscating firewalls, defense programs and virus detectors. Success by the player effected greater polyphonic sophistication in the real-time synthesized soundtrack, and at ...
Page 408
Trigger happy 410 shigeru miyamoto’s wonderfully curious herding game pikmin (both on nintendo’s gamecube), plus the long- awaited release of hideo kojima’s extraordinary metal gear solid 2: sons of liberty, which enhanced all the anti-realistic tricks of its precursor while pushing the visual desig...
Page 409
Afterword (2004) extra final chapter from the 2004 us edition of trigger happy over the last four years, as the new generation of videogame hardware — sony’s playstation2, microsoft’s xbox, and nintendo’s gamecube — came to maturity, there were a handful of standout videogames. One of the most heavi...
Page 410
World of blocky wireframe 3d skyscrapers gradually morphs, over the game’s five levels, into a lushly solid representation of a green earth, in a parable of human and machine evolution. The arrival of true artifical intelligence predictably failed to happen, although large steps were made by peter m...
Page 411
Theodor adorno, whom we met in chapter 1, once observed that the products of mass entertainment secretly had much in common with work in industrial society. “amusement in advanced capitalism is the extension of work,” he wrote. “it is sought after by those who wish to escape the mechanised work proc...
Page 412
Economic and political ideology was even more to the fore in the sims (2001), for example, a god game in which you look after little people in a house, with some of the voyeuristic kick of a reality tv show. Rapidly becoming an extraordinarily successful multi-tentacled franchise, it is the soap-ope...
Page 413
Participating in a certain totalising idea of foreign policy without ever examining its own assumptions. Other developers are already seeing the problem and avoiding it: the squad- based combat sequel conflict: desert storm 2 (2003), for example, was set like its predecessor during the first gulf wa...
Page 414
Trigger happy 411 bibliography in addition to the works cited below, i have found useful several non-bylined articles and reviews in the excellent monthly videogame magazine edge. Arcade and mcv magazines have also been useful sources of industry reporting. Adorno, theodor, and walter benjamin. The ...
Page 415
Trigger happy 412 benjamin, walter. “the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction ” (1935). In film theory and criticism, edited by mast, cohen & braudy. Oxford: oxford university press, 1992. Cassell, justine, and henry jenkins, eds . From barbie to mortal kombat: gender and computer games...
Page 416
Trigger happy 413 gombrich, e. ɢ h. Art and illusion: a study in the psychology of pictorial representation. Princeton: princeton university press, 1961. ———. The story of art. London: phaidon press, 1995. Greenfield, patricia. Media and the mind of the child: from print to television, video games a...
Page 417
Trigger happy 414 herman, leonard. Phoenix: the fall and rise of videogames . 2d. Ed. Union, n. J.: rolenta press, 1997. Herz, j. ɢ c . Joystick nation . Boston: little, brown and company, 1996. Huizinga, johann. Homo ludens: a study of the play- element in culture . Boston: beacon press, 1986. Hume...
Page 418
Trigger happy 415 statistical verification of a possible causal link.” ms thesis, edinburgh university, 1998. Loftus, geoffrey r., and elizabeth f. Loftus. Mind at play: the psychology of video games. New york: basic books, 1983. Martinez, d. P., ed. The worlds of japanese popular culture. Cambridge...
Page 419
Trigger happy 416 ———. Laws. Edited and translated by thomas l. Pangle. Chicago: university of chicago press, 1998. Propp, vladimir. Morphology of the folktale . Austin: university of texas, 1968. Sale, kirkpatrick. Rebels against the future: the luddites and their war on the industrial revolution: ...
Page 420
Trigger happy 417 wittgenstein, ludwig. Tractatus logico- philosophicus. London: routledge, kegan & paul, 1995. Zielinski, siegfried. Audiovisions: cinema and television as entr’actes in history . Amsterdam: amsterdam university press, 1999..
Page 421
Trigger happy 418 index please note: text in ebooks is reflowed according to the reader you are using. Hence, pagination and indexing change from one environment to another. If you are looking for a word or a name, you can select it in the list below and use the "search" or "find" feature of your eb...
Page 422
Trigger happy 419 first appearance of, 22“motion-capture” technique of physics-based polygonal ape escape arcades cybernetic resources of first coin-op videogame in good reason for spending money in nineteenth-century examples of architecture pleasure of investigating videogames as new form of arist...
Page 423
Trigger happy 420 bushnell, nolan bust-a-move cameras depth of field in disembodied types of use in sports games carmageddon cartoons games as competitors of iconic influence of japanese cartoons castle wolfenstein 3d chance ancient games of in evolution in role-playing games characters criteria for...
Page 424
Trigger happy 421 industry links with games of influence of on murderers civilization columbine massacre colony wars command and conquer computer space core design cosmogony, theories of cows happily roaming digital pastures as offensive weapons crash bandicoot series crawford, chris croft, lara cro...
Page 425
Trigger happy 422 dÜrer, albrecht elite elixer studios eliza emotion, potential for in videogames exploration games beauty of definition iconicism of rules for reversibility of fairground games fawlty, basil fencing fetish, two-dimensional fighting fantasy gamebooks final fantasy series fishing free...
Page 426
Trigger happy 423 gran turismo grand theft auto greenfield, patricia griffiths, mark grim fandango half-life hamlet hammurabi heidegger, martin herz, j. C. Higinbotham, william a. Hobbit, the house of the dead houser, sam hubbard, rob huizinga, johann imagination, types of, exercised by videogames i...
Page 427
Trigger happy 424 language parsing le diberder, alain & frÉdÉric legend of zelda: ocarina of time (aka zelda 64) lemmings little lovers: she so game luigi’s mansion lunar lander manic miner mario, birth of mario 64 marxism, cryptic message of in pac-man masclef, olivier mathengine the matrix metal g...
Page 428
Trigger happy 425 nabokov, vladimir nietzsche, friedrich, pummeling the joysticks nintendo the nomad soul oedipus rex omega boost online gaming. See internet outcast pachinko pac-man pajitnov, alexei, inventor of tetris parallax effect peirce, c. S. Perfect dark perspective aerial artistic limitatio...
Page 429
Trigger happy 426 playstation2 plinth ideology pokÉmon pole position police, attitude to videogames of polygons pong populous power stone power-ups in classical mythology as “gadgets,” ontology of semiotics of various functions of pratchett, terry prince of persia prostheticization of play psycholog...
Page 430
Trigger happy 427 replays republic resident evil series rez reznor, trent ridge racer series robotron role-playing games (rpgs) romero, jon roy, sujoy r-type scrolling seaman: the forbidden pet sega semiotics sentinel sheff, david shelley, p. B. Shenmue shogi (japanese chess) shoot-’em-ups silent hi...
Page 431
Trigger happy 428 soul blade (aka soul edge) soul calibur, iv soul reaver sound design, see also music space invaders spacewar special relativity spector, warren sports games star wars stories strong anthropic principle super mario bros. Tamagotchi tekken series tempest tetris thrasher: skate and de...
Page 432
Trigger happy 429 unfair challenge unreal uridium vanguard vector graphics violence, nature in videogames of virtua fighter v-rally wipeout series wireframe graphics wittgenstein, ludwig, gnomic utterances of wolfenstein 3d wright, will xbox zaxxon zen, and the art of videogame playing.
Page 433: Steven Poole
Trigger happy 430 about the author steven poole steven poole is a journalist and writer who has contributed articles to the guardian, the independent , and the times literary supplement , and has worked as a composer for television and short films..