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Trigger Happy VIDEOGAMES AND THE ENTERTAINMENT REVOLUTION by Steven Poole Published 2000; revised 2001, 2004. This 2007 web download edition from http://stevenpoole.net/ License: Creative Commmons BY-NC-ND 3.0. If you enjoy this book, please consider leaving a tip.
Contents ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ............................................ 8 1 RESISTANCE IS FUTILE ......................................10 Our virtual history ....................................................10 Pixel generation .......................
Out of control .........................................................109 4 ELECTRIC SHEEP ...............................................119 The gift of sound and vision ..................................122 CinÉ qua non? .........................
Power tools ............................................................276 Veni, vidi, lusi ........................................................282 Get into the groove .................................................291 You win again ...........
Trigger Happy 8 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Eat pixels, sucker: this book grew out of an orphaned article to which Stuart Jeffr ies 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 Houser.
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 atten tions of its editor, Andy Miller: il miglior fabbro . Any infelicities or errors that remain I acknowledge mine.
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.
Trigger Happy 11 (in geological terms) videogames crawled out on to the shore, developed rudimentary eyes and legs, and gradually began to conquer Earth.
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.
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.
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.
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: Je t Pac, Ant Attack, Manic Miner, Knight Lore, Way of the Exploding Fist, Dark Star .
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.
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 Saturn, out of the water.
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.
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 61 percent of all U.
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.
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.
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 Raid er: The Last Revelation, and Lara’s getting close to becoming a billion-dollar babe.
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.
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 Raiders in football.
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.
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.
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 come.
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 straight onto the machine’s hard drive.
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, or to a painting: it is an aesthetic one.
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 encoded on to that little silver disc.
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.
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.
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.
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 sensua l fusion really have in common with films, with stor.
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.
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.
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 fizzled and went out.
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.
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.
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 su ccessful initial bl itzkrieg on the digital plains. The lessons of the PDP-1’s unwitting involvement in game history are twofold.
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 unt il the late 1980s.
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.
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.
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.
Trigger Happy 45 And then a little-known Japanese Pachinko manufacturer called Taito rode in to the resc ue. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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, Defender, Galaxian, Scramble, Tempest et al.
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.
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 the true modern descendant of Space Invaders.
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 directi ons and the beepy tunes were evil mind-limpets).
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.
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 the feeling of speed.
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.
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 finish line first.
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.
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.
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.
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-moving puzzle game with added combat elements.
Trigger Happy 61 random rather than pleasurably challenging. What is left of the platform game, then, is just the definin g physical ability that Shiger u Miyamoto gave to his original monkey-battling woodworker.
Trigger Happy 62 moves. 10 As videogame consoles and arcade machines became more technically accomplished, however, the temptation was to show off th e graphic power with ever more visually appealing displays, and never mind the realism.
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.
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.
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.
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 trai.
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.
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.
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 real-time strategy game.
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.
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.
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.
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 environments more colorful and detailed.
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.
Trigger Happy 75 Fig. 5. ISS Pro Evolution: the beautiful game (© 1999 Konam i) It’s a kind of magic Dungeons, dragons, elves and wizards, treasure, trolls and spells.
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 for hundreds of dollars in real money.
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 seri es in particular: Final Fantasy, the first game of which was released in 1987.
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.
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 ol d repetitive game style.
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, spatia l imagination—these are what videogames demand.
Trigger Happy 81 The 1980s curio Sentinel was an intriguing attempt at a sort of three-dimensional, si mplified 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 having its energy sucked out.
Trigger Happy 82 screen and must be rotated and latera lly shifted so that they all fit together at the bottom. W hen 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.
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 .
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 so.
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.
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 pyrotechnics of Omega Boost (1999).
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 sm all, he is still very blown up. Eat dust, little green man.
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.
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.
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 a ngle.
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.
Trigger Happy 92 processor-cheap physics in his or her applications. If a game company is writing a racing g ame, for instance, using a kit like Mathengine’s the car can be defined as a certain mass resting, thr ough a suspension system, on four wheels, which have a certain frictional relationship with the road.
Trigger Happy 93 automatically doing pretty c omplex parabolic calculus without any conscious thought. Appreciation of dynamic properties is hard-wired into the species—it’s essential for survival.
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 never totall y “realistic.
Trigger Happy 95 don’t want absolutely real situations in videogames. We can get that at home. Let’s stick togethe r 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 consistent, that it is internally coherent.
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 coherent idea of “rocketjumping.
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.
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.
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 consistency in the laws of the imaginary world.
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.
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.
Trigger Happy 102 appears at the bottom of th e 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.
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.
Trigger Happy 104 which a fatal mistake need not be your last; branches of a system can be multiply explored un til all the lives are used up. But when that happens, the downside is grim indeed. The result in this final situation is no t a simple death, but a violent ejaculation from the safety of the entire game universe.
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.
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.
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 possibili ties of action.
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 ai m is steadier. In this way, with its alluring mix of peril and desirability, smoking in Metal Gear Solid, as in life, is sublime.
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 abilitie s of the player’s character in the game: aside from re.
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.
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 i.
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.
Trigger Happy 113 Another fairly recent cybernetic innovation has certainly enhanced the “f eel” 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.
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 pumpi ng techno music blaring from the speakers.
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 .
Trigger Happy 116 and right up to a maximum sp eed, and when you jumped, the amount of time you held the butto n dow n for determined how high you jumped. Therefore ther e was an awful lot of skill in running along over a hole, jump ing up on to a platform and landing on it without falling off th e other side.
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 pe.
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.
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 is like an “interactive film.
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 percent movies.
Trigger Happy 121 characters are incompetently written and amazingly badly acted. Some films have a “so bad it’s good” quality, but this hack atte mpt 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.
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 heartbreaking romance.
Trigger Happy 123 soundtracks. At first, this looks very like film industry practice, but it soon become s clear that deployment of the audio arts cannot always follow similar lines in the two media.
Trigger Happy 124 experience as immersive and (deceptively) “authentic” as possible. This concentration on “real” sounds in general parallels what movies do.
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 sma ll action with epic sound, say—to future digital experiences.
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 galleri ed hall is ominously and stressfully dominated by the solemn ticking of a clock.
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 floaty buzzing arpeggios.
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.
Trigger Happy 129 The best videogame scores circumvent this knotty problem altogether by not attempting to be continuous, film-like soundtracks at all.
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.
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.
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 ga me was terrible.
Trigger Happy 133 Interestingly, some of the first technica l 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 vi deogames are converging with films.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 interac tion between the movie and the videogame is a step in the wrong direction.
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 ma terial in an actionoriented videogame for the filmmaker to latch on to.
Trigger Happy 142 is activated, providing an opportunity to relax and rest those tired wrists. FMV seque nces can be graceful and beautiful in their own right (especially in th e Final Fantasy games, where they alone can eat up $4 million of the budget), but they are something of a red herring.
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.
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 proceedings from a great height.
Trigger Happy 145 classic television angle, ha s an averagely good view of all the lines and can appreci ate cross-court angles. By contrast, the side-on spectator has a limited experience of these as.
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 .
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 of ten rotate the camera to a different compass p.
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 Mario 64 does.
Trigger Happy 149 Fig. 6. Resident Evil 2: cl austrophobic camera angles don’t always help your battle against the undead (© Capcom/Virgin Interactive Entertainment) Here is an example from any standard television commercial.
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 cockpit cam or follow cam.
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.
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.
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.
Trigger Happy 154 a satellite; rescue Natalya from a spee ding train; and so on. Such sections of the plot generally happen at the end of a mission, and they happen to the player.
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.
Trigger Happy 156 incommensurable sort of pleasure to that of Goldeneye the film. For the momen t it is hard to see how videogames and movies could ever converge without losing the essential virtues of both.
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.
Trigger Happy 158 Fig. 8. Crash Bandicoot 3: a car toon you can play with (© 1998 Sony Computer Entertainment) It is perhaps no coincide nce that since videogames have been able to offer a detailed w.
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.
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 a s revolutionary, in its form, as cinema was for Benjamin.
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.
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 products.
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.
Trigger Happy 164 non, the lightgun. And as I wander the halls speaking to designers showing off their latest games, the re is a marked tendency for them to make excuses.
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 trad itional concept of a story, authored jealous.
Trigger Happy 166 argued optimistically, is the entertain ment 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.
Trigger Happy 167 action. For instance, the back story of Blade Runner is the invention, programming and rebellion of the replicants; the “present” stor y is Deckard’s attempts to find and kill them.
Trigger Happy 168 model, indeed, for all detective fiction: whodunit is the diachronic story, while the process of investigation is the synchronic story.
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 Du.
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 .
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.
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 p.
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.
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.
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 many more gory ways to die.
Trigger Happy 176 does a character reflect upon pr evious events within the synchronic story. Not easy, is it? A second problem with shared story nuggets is increasing familiarity.
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.
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.
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 .
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.
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).
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.
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.
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 interactiv ity.
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.
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.
Trigger Happy 187 clear that, even if Olivier Masclef’s ambition to have the computer generate the characters’ responses automatically is fulfilled, th e 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.
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.
Trigger Happy 189 but it is locked. An orc a ppears, 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.
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.
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 combin e some herbs, or get more ammo for your gun.
Trigger Happy 192 seen, it tries to be like a film, maki ng 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 vi deogames will never go back to the keyboard.
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 digita l aquarium. The player can speak into a microphone peripheral that plugs into the joypad, and Seaman answers back.
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.
Trigger Happy 195 Tie me up, tie m e down So should videogames totally abandon their current model of prescripted story line interrup ting interactive play? Not necessarily.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Trigger Happy 200 view, as if you were actually there. (There had been previous attempts at perspective in ga mes, notably in Night Driver, which used moving white blocks on a black screen to evoke ca.
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 geo metrical objects such as triangles and rectangles. These are generally known as “polygons.
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.
Trigger Happy 203 doubt Battlezone and its ilk had some influence on William Gibson’s seminally incandescent desc riptions of the Matrix (whence the 1999 film got its title).
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 wh.
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.
Trigger Happy 206 But along the way, videogames have rehearsed other histories of pictorial representation, and come up with imaginative and original visual strateg ies themselves.
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 su.
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, providing increased fluidity of action.
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.
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.
Trigger Happy 211 Fig. 9. Defender: sw oop low over the mount ains and defend the human race. The radar (top) sh ows the whole level space in miniature (© 1980 Williams) focusing on a fixed area of the interior.
Trigger Happy 212 Later games, such as R-Type (1988), took advantage of spare power to create an inventive impression of depth with “p arallax” scrolling.
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.
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 horizontal plane of projection.
Trigger Happy 215 Fig. 10. Zaxxon: isometric pers pective 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.
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 reproduced by Zaxxon and its siblings.
Trigger Happy 217 Isometric perspective stil l 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.
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 i.
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 ev ery pixel in the drawing, so that they looked fuzzy and “blocky.
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 provided for accuracy of shooting.
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 dimens ions, you join the lines.
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 automatically.
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.
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.
Trigger Happy 225 But though human beings do not actually look like this, they do move like this, and the tan gible 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.
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.
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.
Trigger Happy 228 relative size. Most of thes e 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.
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.
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 comm on artistic sense: it looks bigger, so you draw it bigger.
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 (esp ecially in large canvases), or keeping the a ngle of vision relatively narrow.
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 therefore be qualified.
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,.
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 eyes in the gameworld.
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.
Trigger Happy 236 Fig. 13. Tomb Raider 3: the th ird-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 things.
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 learly still in thrall to the god of mathematics.
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 cour se, whether anyone would want to play it.
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 kind of game the designers intend to make.
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 somewhere else.
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 of a videogame.
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 appea.
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.
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 Japa n is that it contains good characters. Here, by the way, is another important difference between videogames and films.
Trigger Happy 245 anime (animated cartoon films)—the massive Japanese toy and videogame corporation Bandai, for instance, is a major sponsor of animated programming.
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, .
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 more “adult”-looking.
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.
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.
Trigger Happy 250 are that they are too overdetermined and prescripted (just like preset “combo” m oves in beat-’em-ups, and just like prescripted “narrative” interactions in story games).
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 .
Trigger Happy 252 than three times as many women as men nominated th e PokÉmon (“Pocket Monster”) series (12.7 percent versus 3.9 percent). These games, unleashed upon the British and American ma.
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 aesthe.
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.
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.
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.
Trigger Happy 257 Home Video Game Software,” in which respondents were asked what kind of game s 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.
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 matu re aesthetically.
Trigger Happy 259 A really successful character is not just a moneymaker for software de velopers, 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 Mario 64.
Trigger Happy 260 Fig. 14. Lara Croft: a beautiful abstraction (© and ™ Core Design Limited; a ll 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.
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 th eir pleasures can only be realized through time. And on a very basic level, Pac- Man and Lara do in fact share one important attraction.
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 well animated.
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.
Trigger Happy 264 3 is an idealized amalga m 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 Sylvester the Cat or Cartman.
Trigger Happy 265 gonna really work.” Well, at th at point, it really didn’t make any difference. It was only when the y really started to develop Lara—she was animated and her hair was m oving.
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 wo uld thereby be destroyed.
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 te rms of character design that the Japanese industry is instructive.
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.
Trigger Happy 269 And the remit of videogame “simulations” in Japan is sure to expand. Adult Ja panese women, for example, want “a simulation game of being a housewife, giving experience of lead.
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.
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 electronics.
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 of them.
Trigger Happy 273 the machine into a big plastic basket. From there they can be scooped back into th e machine for more plays, after the initial hundred have been used up.
Trigger Happy 274 With Western slot machines, the bottom line is how much money the thing spews out a t the end. With pinball, with which Pachinko obviously has a lot in common mechanically, the objec.
Trigger Happy 275 Some Pachinko experts roam the halls with a gaze so intuitively attuned to the g ame that they can pick out machines whose pins are slightly bent from the constant battering of balls.
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.
Trigger Happy 277 videogames are also part of a different lineage. The arcade, which today is normally a fluores cently lit space crammed with the latest monster videogame cabinets and their ever more.
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.
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.
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.
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 risk.
Trigger Happy 282 Videogames’ special virtue of interactivity, though, vastly increases this technological dependence until it attains a quality of symbiosis.
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 divin.
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.
Trigger Happy 285 the fighting is performed on the player’s behalf by a digital “substitute”; here, too, unequally sk illed human players may have a sporting match by tweaking the videogame’s built-in “handicap” device.
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.
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.
Trigger Happy 288 society. His final, polemic al 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.
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.
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.
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 an d lonely com municating with strangers on other continents.
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 “flow.
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 frustrating to play a game that is too hard.
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 sou nds counterintuitive but is supported by simple experiments that report increased heart rate and adrenaline levels among videogame users.
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.
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.
Trigger Happy 297 it is so much harder to get pa st the initial mechanical demands. Secondly, the optimal match of demands and skills that we looked at earlier is the other factor that contributes mat.
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 again Videogames give you their full attention.
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.
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.
Trigger Happy 301 things to be cropping up. So rea lly our goal is to m ake sure that there’s enough there to star t off with so that people find our game exciting and interestin g, but then the more they play the more they ach ieve, and they can’t constantly be getting new rewards for all those achievements.
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 reinfo rcement for the player to want to keep going.
Trigger Happy 303 and stay at the back of the pack so all the computer cars slow down, and then on the last stra ight just put your foot down and cruise past them and win. You’ve got to be very careful with the logic of what’s happeni ng to make sure that a better driver will always do better.
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.
Trigger Happy 305 “stealth” suit, so that you can have enormous fun playing through the environm ents as an invisible, death-dealing hero. Beat-’em-ups such as Tekken 3 or Soul Calibur, meanwhil.
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.
Trigger Happy 307 9 SIGNS OF LIFE A jaundiced figure floats across the screen. He is constantly searching for thin gs 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 with himself.
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.
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 th is to do with fruit? It is confusing, arcane.
Trigger Happy 310 Fig. 16. Pac-Man: a parable of late capitalism, and a complex web of signs (© 1980 Namco Ltd; all rights reserved).
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.
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.
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 dots is enough.
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.
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 “floating signifier.
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 hi m 100 points, or ten times the value of a single dot.
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 just the ways we have described.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Trigger Happy 322 Time, gentlemen, please Remember that a videogame is not a static “tex t”; 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.
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, .
Trigger Happy 324 Dance Dance Revolution and Beatmania are very literal applications of videogame rhyth m. But rhythm is also important in games that are not explicitly predicated on musical interaction.
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.
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 calculation even more potentially rewarding.
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 struct ural level, where I’ll call it “tempo.” 47 This describes, for instance, the ebb and flow of anxiety and satisfaction through the gameplaying experience.
Trigger Happy 328 become predictable, and the element of pleasurable surprise is lost. A videogame designer must therefore consider the large-scale distribution of su ch aspects of his game and organize them to the best effect—then it will have good tempo.
Trigger Happy 329 Fig. 18. Resident Evil: a shocki ng moment (© 1997 Capcom) built up—they also have te mporal resolution, which describes the fluidity or otherwise of the image’s movement through time.
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.
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.
Trigger Happy 332 The virtue of Tomb Raider is that, although the variety of symbolic inte raction that it offers to the player—manipulating keys, doors and switches—is quite rudimentary and unint.
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 a nd the ghost flees to the painting behind him. So the pure icon has suddenly become a symbol to be fought.
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.
Trigger Happy 335 functionally they remain the same sort of anima l as the large blobs in Pac-Man: they are second-order signs effecting changes in the possi ble symbolic relationships of the game. The ocarina works in this way by expanding the player’s symbolic language.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Trigger Happy 340 Fig. 20. G-Police: the informa tion 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.
Trigger Happy 341 gradually turning to red for min imum. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 phenome non of techno-nostalgia is also working a very clever, stealthy trick.
Trigger Happy 346 good game. Conversely, a game built entirely from abstract visual symbols ca n 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 competitive reason that it is always a draw.
Trigger Happy 347 pragmatic imagination for the symbolic interac tion. 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 what was going on in the game.
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.
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 on to a pool which is making a rippl e effect.
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.
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.
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.
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 Ze us into accepting the worst portion of meat from sacrificed animals: gristly bone was the gods’ due, while men kept the edible flesh.
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.
Trigger Happy 355 the Babylonian techno palace on Ibiza. Lately, electricity has become the preferred fire—eminently biddable and plastic—of the moderns.
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.
Trigger Happy 357 into the possible ne gative 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.
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 .
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.
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.
Trigger Happy 361 motivated to kill by their e xperience 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, bloodt hirsty history of actual sword fighting, combat and duels.
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 murd erers are thought to have dressed in black trench coats in emulation of Keanu Reeves in The Matrix .
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.
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.
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 c.
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.
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 much more instantly recognizable.
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.
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 a spects—the way, say, that inertia or gravity works—the game co uld still present an enjoyable challenge without becoming thoroughly alienating.
Trigger Happy 370 Fig. 21. Piranesi’s Carceri d’ invenzione: a du ngeon master’s perspective on the unreal (Rosen wald Collection; photograph © 1999 Board of Trustees, Nationa l Gallery of Art,.
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 fr om playing in recognizable environments.
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 interactiv e environment.
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 smas h, with my bare fists if necessary.
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 architectural imagination in much more creative ways.
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.
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.
Trigger Happy 377 Fig. 22. Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation: Egyptian architecture reimagined (© an d ™ 1999 Core Design Limited; all rights reserved).
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.
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 existence.
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.
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.
Trigger Happy 382 this all in one go; the current position in the ga me may be saved to disk, or to a “memory card.” But often, the process of saving is made into another thoroughly arbitrary hurdle.
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 terrifying.
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.
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 poin t; instead, you shift into the “spectral realm,” the same environments with a twisted, Boschian air, where you continue playing and find previously nonexistent pathways to new areas.
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.
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.
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.
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-person shooter videogame Unreal.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 gameplay.
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 th e PokÉmon franchise, than Tony Blair, the cute pink mascot of the British government.
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.
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 pole of a career as a politician or scientist.
Trigger Happy 402 desirable. But you must choose your simplifications carefully. Though true artificial intelli gence, as discussed in Chapter 5, is still very much in its computational infancy, it remains one of the key buzzwords of the videogame industry.
Trigger Happy 403 videogame concepts, Black and White nevertheless still comes up against the inherent problem of reversible systems identified in Chapter 10.
Trigger Happy 404 to providing a more dramatica lly 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 “gestura l system.
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, eith er over wired networks or online.
Trigger Happy 406 might eventually come to represen t 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 before the games begin.
Trigger Happy 407 interestingly warped chessboard spaces—but its combination of a first-person viewpoint with precise platform-jumping gameplay was staggeringly inept.
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.
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.
Trigger Happy 410 Shigeru Miyamoto’s wonderfu lly curious herding game Pikmin (both on Nintendo’s GameCube), plus the long- awaited release of Hideo Kojima’s extraordinary Metal Gear Solid 2: So.
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 Ninte ndo’s GameCube — came to maturity, there were a handful of standout videogames.
world of blocky wireframe 3D skyscrapers grad ually m orphs, over the game’s five levels, into a lushly solid representation of a green Earth, in a parable of hum a n and machine evolution.
Theodor Adorno, whom we met in Chapter 1, once observed that the products of mass entertainment secretly had m uch in co mmon with work in industrial society.
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 som e of the voyeuristic kick of a reality TV show.
participating in a certain tota lising idea of foreign policy without ever exam ining its own assumptions. Other developers are a lready se eing the problem and avoidin g it: the squad- based combat s.
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.
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 .
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 and Computers.
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 .
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.
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: Lessons for the Computer Age.
Trigger Happy 417 Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus. London: Routledge, Kegan & Paul, 1995. Zielinski, Siegfried. Audiovisions: Cinema and Television as Entr’actes in History .
Trigger Happy 418 INDEX Please note: text in eBooks is reflowed according to the reader you are using. Hence, paginati on and indexing c h ange from one environment to another. If you are looking fo r a word or a name, you can select it in the list belo w and use the "Search" or "Find" feature of your eBook reader.
Trigger Happy 419 first appearance of, 22“moti on-capture” technique of physics-based polygonal Ape Escape arcades cybernetic resources of first coin-op videogame in good reason for spending money.
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 Cast.
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 .
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 Fawlt.
Trigger Happy 423 Gran Turismo Grand Theft Auto Greenfield, Patricia Griffiths, Mark Grim Fandango Half-Life Hamlet Hammurabi Heidegger, Martin Herz, J.
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 Ma.
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.
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 o.
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.
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.
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, gn omic utte.
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.
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