Free your purchased eBook form adhesion DRM*!
* DRM = Digtal Rights Management
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Contents
Life in plastic .........................................................101
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Tiny silver balls......................................................271
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR...........................................430
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Eat pixels, sucker: this book grew out of an orphaned
article to which Stuart Jeffries kindly gave a home. I
am grateful to everyone who agreed to be interviewed:
Paul Topping, Richard Darling, Jeremy Smith, Olivier
Masclef, Nolan Bushnell, Terry Pratchett and Sam
Houser.
David Palfrey saved crucial passages of the
manuscript from themselves. Jason Thompson
phlegmatically suffered innumerable defeats at Tekken
3 and Gran Turismo, but turned the tables in Bushido
Blade. He and Kate Barker also made constructive
comments on the text.
Dr. Mark Griffiths and Maugan Lloyd generously
provided psychology material, Gavin Rees was a most
hospitable guide to Tokyo, and I enjoyed useful
conversations with Caspar Field, Mike Goldsmith,
AndrÉ Tabrizifar and Teresa Grant. My agent, Zoe
Waldie, has been an oasis of profound calm and
encouragement. Thanks also to Rev. Stuart Campbell
and Chris Arrowsmith for expertly homing in on
8
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
factual errors, and to Cal Barksdale and Danielle A.
Durkin for their work on the U.S. edition.
Trigger Happy owes much to the incisive attentions
of its editor, Andy Miller: il miglior fabbro.
Any infelicities or errors that remain I acknowledge
mine. Readers are invited to email comments for future
9
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
1
RESISTANCE IS FUTILE
Our virtual history
In the beginning, the planet was dead.
Suddenly, millions of years ago, arcane
spontaneous chemical reactions in the primeval ooze
resulted, by a freak cosmic chance, in the first
appearance of what we now call “the code of life.”
Formed in knotty binary strings, each node
representing information by its state of “on” or “off”
and its place in the series, the code grew adept at
replicating in ever more complex structures.
Eventually, the organizations of code became so dense
that an overarching property emerged that could not be
explained by reference to any of the constituent parts.
This was “life” itself.
The first videogame formed in the sludge. It was a
simple organism, but a father to us all. Soon enough
10
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
(in geological terms) videogames crawled out on to the
shore, developed rudimentary eyes and legs, and
gradually began to conquer Earth.
Biologically speaking, early videogames were, as
they are today, radically exogamous—that is to say,
they did not replicate by breeding with each other, but
with “humans,” a preexisting carbon-based life form
whose purpose was, and still is, unknown but seemingly
providential. If the videogame managed to impart
particularly intense pleasure to a parasitic human
during the reproductive act, the chances of its offspring
surviving were enhanced. Obviously, videogames were
programmed by Nature to be as promiscuous as
possible: the more humans impregnated with code, the
more likely that some of the next generation would
survive to breed in their turn. The work of such genetic
programming persists in the primeval substratum even
of modern, sophisticated videogame civilization.
Over this vast meander of time, the pressures
of adapting to varied conditions prompted the
formation of different genera and species of
organism with different habitats, social structures
and breeding strategies. The fittest survived.
11
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
But nothing could be certain in the great
evolutionary game. Some seemingly successful species
found it impossible to adapt swiftly enough to
catastrophic changes in the environment, and died out.
They were the dinosaurs. (By copying their “code” and
letting it gestate under laboratory conditions, however,
we can actually bring these fossils to life again, and let
them roam happy, if confused, in virtual amusement
parks.)
Nor was this evolution a gradual and inexorable
expansion of possibilities and types. There seems to be
no final goal to the random machinations of Nature.
Some species of game, for example, turned at certain
points down evolutionary blind alleys and failed to
develop, concentrating instead, like the peacock, on
attracting partners with ever more lurid visual displays.
Other species merged, pooling resources and erasing
previous distinctions to become the great games that we
know and love.
The narrative of these manifold splittings and
fusings, this world-historical struggle of the will
encoded in our deepest selves, is not a mere just-so
story for the young. For through the noble history of
videogame species, with due homage made to the great
examples that have paved the way for us, the heroic
12
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
story unfolds of how we came to be the planet’s
masters. Remember, humans, it’s not how you play the
game that counts, it’s whether you win or lose.
>Player 1 Ready
0101111111010101001111101010111111110101010011
0011111100101010001000000101010100000011111100101110
1010010000101000111101001010100100101010010110111
Pixel generation
Like millions of people, I love videogames. I also love
books, music and chess. That’s not unusual. For most
of my generation, videogames are just part of the
cultural furniture. In particular, videogames, among
people all over the world, are a social pleasure. The
after-hours PlayStation session is one of the joys of
modern life.
Videogames are in one sense just another
entertainment choice—but compared to many, a much
more interesting one. And yet there seems to be a fear
that videogames are somehow nudging out other art
forms, and that we’re encouraging a generation of
screen-glazed androids with no social skills, poetical
sensitivity or entrepreneurial ambition. But new forms
13
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
don’t replace the old. Film did not replace theater. The
Internet did not replace the book. Videogames have
been around for thirty years, and they’re not going
away.
When I was ten years old, my parents bought me a
home computer. It was a ZX Spectrum, brainchild of
the celebrated British inventor Sir Clive Sinclair (this
was before he went on to create the savagely
unsuccessful electric tricycle called the C5). The entire
computer, which was a contemporary of the American
Commodore Vic-20, was about half the size of a
modern PC keyboard, and it plugged into a normal
television. It was black, with little gray squidgy keys
and a rainbow stripe over one corner. Tiny blocky
characters would move around blocky landscapes
lavishly painted in eight colors, while the black box
beeped and burped. It was pure witchcraft. But the
magic wasn’t simply done to me; it was a spell I could
dive into. I could swim happily in this world, at once
mysterious and utterly logical, of insubstantial light.
Doubtless my parents imagined the Spectrum
would be educational. In a way it was, for very soon I
was an expert at setting exactly the right recording
levels on hi-fi equipment to ensure a perfect copy of a
hot new game. (In those days, videogames came on
14
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
cassette, and I would swap copies and hints with my
schoolfriends.) For many years, the myriad delights that
videogames offered were a reliable evening escape,
their names now a peculiarly evocative roll call of
sepia-tinged pleasures: Jet Pac, Ant Attack, Manic
Miner, Knight Lore, Way of the Exploding Fist, Dark
Star . . . Then I decided, at the age of sixteen, to put
away childish things. So I bought a guitar and formed a
skate-punk heavy-metal band.
While I was away practicing my ax heroics, home
computers—the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64, as
well as a later, more powerful generation comprising
the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga—were gradually
being supplanted by home videogame consoles. These
little plastic boxes could not be programmed by the
user, and the games came on cartridge rather than on
cassette tape. The big players in the late 1980s and
early 1990s were two Japanese giants: Nintendo, with
its Nintendo Entertainment System (or Famicom) and
the more powerful Super NES; and Sega, with its
Megadrive. Each company was represented by its own
digital mascot: Nintendo had Mario, the world-famous
mustachioed plumber, and Sega had Sonic, a cheeky
blue hedgehog.
15
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
Already by this stage a great number of teenagers
were more interested in videogames than in pop music.
And Nintendo and Sega inspired fanatical loyalty. They
were the Beatles and Stones of the late 1980s and early
1990s. Nintendo was the Beatles: wholesome fun for all
the family, with superior artistry but a slightly “safe”
image; Sega, on the other hand, were the snarling,
street-smart gang, roughing it up for the hardcore
videogame fans.
As videogaming culture grew and the games
became ever more complex and adventurous (with ever
larger profits to be made), the hardware companies
realized that technology had to keep pace with the
designers’ ambitions. The seemingly unassailable
Nintendo, having seen enormous success with the 1989
launch of the handheld Game Boy, decided to soup up
the SNES by adding a CD-ROM drive. CD-ROMs hold
a lot more information than cartridges, so the games
could be even bigger in scope. But Nintendo had no
expertise in that area of hardware, so they hooked up
with the Japanese audio giant Sony, manufacturer of hi-
fi and inventors of the Walkman. It seemed like a
marriage made in heaven.
But after various behind-the-scenes shenanigans,
Nintendo pulled out of the deal. It was to lose them
16
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
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.
Nintendo, meanwhile, didn’t have a competitive
console out until two years later: the Nintendo 64,
which had a handful of brilliant games but was
woefully under-supported by most software developers.
The landscape of power had irrevocably shifted while
my back was turned.
Apart from the odd blast in an arcade, I hadn’t
thought about videogames again. Then, one summer, I
was staying in a friend’s Edinburgh flat while watching
more or less disastrous pieces of fringe theater at the
rate of three or four a day. The odorous broom closet I
was sleeping in had only one particularly interesting
piece of furniture: a PlayStation. My friend introduced
me to something called WipEout 2097, a fast, futuristic
hover-racing game. My jaw dropped.
Over the previous decade, it seemed, videogames had
really grown up. This was an amazing, sensebattering,
physically thrilling trip. Artistically, it felt
17
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
superior to anything I had seen on the Fringe. And so,
after sacrificing most of my sleep during that
Edinburgh stay to improving my lap times, I decided I
needed to buy a PlayStation of my own. Perhaps one
day, I thought, I might even write something about
videogames.
So I bought the console. And then I had to buy a
few games. Soul Blade (fighting), WipEout 2097
(racing), Tomb Raider (Lara Croft)—that would do for
starters. On second thought, better add V-Rally (more
racing) and Crash Bandicoot (marsupial wrangling).
My research had to be dutifully wide-ranging, didn’t it?
Soon, I also bought the Nintendo 64, which slotted
neatly on to my shelves with Super Mario 64 and 1080
Snowboarding. Now they’re joined by a Sega
Dreamcast, Sony’s PlayStation2,
GameCube, and Microsofts’s Xbox.
a
Nintendo
It hasn’t been cheap. But my experience is one
that’s shared by millions of people all over the planet.
Indeed, this acceleration in videogame evolution would
not have been possible otherwise.
Meme machines
Videogames today are monstrously big business.
Their present status has largely to do with the shift in
demographics, of which I was a part. In the 1980s,
18
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
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.S. videogamers are eighteen and
over, with a full 42 percent of computer
gameplayers and 21 percent of console
gameplayers thirty-six years of age or older.1
More and more grownups choose to play
videogames rather than watch TV or go to the
movies. According to the European Leisure
Software Publishers’ Association, the British
videogame market already grosses 60 percent
more than total movie box-office receipts, and 80
percent more than video rentals. On the other side
of the Atlantic, Americans named videogames as
their favorite form of home entertainment for the
third year in a row in 1999. Twice as many people
nominated videogames as chose watching TV,
three times as many preferred videogames to
going out to the movies or reading books, and six
times as many preferred videogames to
_________________
1 According to figures published in the Interactive Digital Software
Association’s fifth annual Video and PC Game Industry Trends Survey,
2000.
19
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
renting movies. Total videogame software and
hardware sales in the United States reached $8.9
billion, versus $7.3 billion for movie box-office
receipts;2 $6.6 billion of the videogame receipts were
from software sales, retail and online. How did this
strange invasion happen? How did this stealthy virus
insinuate itself into so many homes?
Well, one company has done more than any other
over the last six years to stake out videogames’ huge
place in adult popular culture: Sony, manufacturers of
the PlayStation, the unassuming gray box that
reinvigorated my own interest and that of so many
others. The last time they counted, Sony had sold five
million PlayStations in the UK alone. “The focus for
the brand,” explains Guy Pearce, Sony’s UK PR
manager, “is eighteen to twenty-five. That’s the age
group we aim at, and always have done.” One in every
four U.S. households owns a PlayStation.
Sony’s initial stroke of marketing brilliance was to
release an early game, 1995’s WipEout, with a
thumping techno soundtrack featuring well-known
electronic acts of the caliber of Orbital, Leftfield and
the Chemical Brothers. The success of this product had
_________________
2 Wall Street Journal, April 28, 2000.
20
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
the Prodigy and Underworld clamoring to provide
tracks for the sequel. Sony had a PlayStation room built
in London superclub the Ministry of Sound, and got its
logo onto club flyers all over the country. Soon
PlayStation was happily associated with dance culture,
with enthusiastic support from early adopters such as
the band Massive Attack, who had bought theirs while
on tour in Japan. Control of the soundtrack to the third
game in the series, 1999’s Wip3out, was handed over to
superstar DJ Sasha, thus ensuring another soundtrack
cleverly poised between cutting-edge and mass-appeal
dance music.
Sony targeted the youth market with intelligent
aggression. During the 1995 Glastonbury Festival, they
distributed thousands of perforated cards adorned with
PlayStation logos, which could be torn up to make
convenient roaches for marijuana joints—or, as Sony
claimed, to dispose of chewing gum.
And then God created woman. Enter Lara
Croft, the pistol-toting, ponytailed, hotpants-
and-shadeswearing
digital
star
of
a
revolutionary 1996 game, Tomb Raider. Much
has been written about her. She has been on the
cover of The Face and the subject of countless
Sunday-supplement articles. The publisher of
Tomb Raider, Eidos, was named Britain’s most
21
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
successful company in any industry in 1999. It has sold
more than sixteen million copies worldwide of the first
three games in the series. Add a conservative estimate
for sales of the fourth installment, Tomb Raider: The
Last Revelation, and Lara’s getting close to becoming a
billion-dollar babe.
Lara is such a recognizable icon that she now
advertises other products, appearing, for example, in
computer-generated television commercials for
Lucozade and Nike. Generation X author Douglas
Coupland contributed to the devotional tome Lara’s
Book; the Germans have a monthly magazine dedicated
to her. In the summer of 1999, Lara could be seen
hanging from the back of buses all over London, and
six months later a bus and billboard campaign giving
Lara the movie-star treatment was undertaken in
several cities in the United States. Jeremy Smith,
managing director of Lara’s birthplace, Core Design,
points out what a gift her exploding profile was to the
company: “Who knows how many millions and
millions of pounds’ worth of free marketing we got
from the press, by them putting it in front of people
who’d then think, ‘Well, wow, that looks like a great
game.’ We could never have spent that sort of money
on the marketing that we got from the media.” And of
22
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
course, Lara’s contribution to the PlayStation brand
itself cannot be overestimated. An exclusivity deal with
Sony ensured that the next three games appeared only
on PlayStation, and a next-generation Tomb Raider
game will appear on PlayStation2 in 2002.
These days, videogames generate a large spin-off
industry of playing cards, posters, strategy guides,
clothes and plastic figurines. In the summer of 1999,
sales of Bandai’s Duke Nukem action figures soared,
with the majority of purchasers being women. (Duke is
the testosterone-dripping digital hero of humorous
shoot-the-aliens games. He sports a blond crop and
mirrored shades and uses arch catchphrases such as,
“It’s time to chew gum and kick ass!”) Bandai claimed
to have received an “anxious” call from a woman after
her local store ran out of Nukem figures. According to
their press release, she claimed that 1990s women were
turning away from Victoria’s Secret and Tupperware
parties in favor of Duke Nukem evenings. Even if this
is just a tease, it is illuminating that Bandai feels the
potential female audience is large enough for them to
make such a claim.
Game companies have also cultivated strong
commercial links with the UK’s biggest game, soccer.
Videogame companies pay stars like Michael Owen
23
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
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. Meanwhile,
Sony sponsors the Vans Triple Crown series of sports
such as snowboarding and freestyle motocross.
And videogames have gradually become a
marketing medium in their own right. My first
experience of the PlayStation, WipEout 2097, featured
neon advertisements for Diesel jeans and Red Bull
caffeine drinks that flashed by as you sped around its
virtual racecourses. Stockholm company Addgames
released Mall Maniacs in 1999, a bizarre “virtual
supermarket” game whose entire development costs
were covered by retail companies paying to have
reconstructed presences in the digital world. Meanwhile
Sega’s Dreamcast game, Crazy Taxi, in which the
player drives passengers around an imaginary
American town center, sports a suspicious number of
people asking to go to the Pizza Hut or Kentucky Fried
Chicken, restaurant franchises given their own near-
photorealistic presences in the shopping area.
24
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
The music industry, too, is slowly waking up to the
commercial possibilities of placing an artist’s song in a
videogame. British rock band Ash is rumored to have
earned nearly $1,000,000 in royalties by licensing just
one song to the hit driving game Gran Turismo.
Gremlin’s Actua Ice Hockey 2 has a soundtrack
entirely by cult post-rockers Mogwai, whose faces have
also been digitized and slapped onto the team members’
heads. Trent Reznor, the man behind industrial-techno
outfit Nine Inch Nails, composed the soundtrack for
Quake. CDs of specially written videogame music now
regularly enter the pop charts in Japan, and videogame
scores are now eligible for three categories of
soundtrack music in the annual Grammy Awards.
Videogames now have such a potent influence on
other forms of entertainment that they raise a clutch of
questions about what they really have in common with
the older forms. For example, David Bowie, well
known as a man with an eye for the next big thing,
wrote and performed (with guitarist Reeves Gabrels) an
entire concept album for the soundtrack to the 1999
videogame Omikron: The Nomad Soul. At the Los
Angeles press conference to announce this
collaboration, Bowie said he approached the project as
25
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
he would a film, “to provide an emotional heart to the
game.” And it doesn’t stop there: the rock star’s
involvement extends to being a digitized character in
the game itself.
Videogames also extend their silvery tentacles into
the worlds of film and books. Star Wars director
George Lucas has had his own videogames division,
the widely respected LucasArts, for many years; Sega
put up a chunk of the budget for David Cronenberg’s
movie eXistenZ; and in summer 2001, Japanese
software giant Square released Final Fantasy: The
Spirits Within, an $80 million computer-generated
feature film based on its enormously successful Final
Fantasy games, with voices provided by Hollywood
stars Steve Buscemi, James Woods and Donald
Sutherland. Amazingly, videogames now compete
directly with movies in terms of financial returns. Over
the six-week Christmas 1998 period in the United
States, one videogame, Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda:
Ocarina of Time, grossed $160 million, well outpacing
the most popular film, Disney’s A Bug’s Life.
Meanwhile, thriller novelist Tom Clancy now
writes scenarios for videogames produced by his own
company, Red Storm, so that eventually his paperbased
products may be demoted to the status of
26
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
videogame tie-ins. Michael Crichton is also setting up
his own videogame development studio. And in 1998
Douglas Adams—who had a hand in the first
videogame based on his sci-fi comedy The Hitchhiker’s
Guide to the Galaxy, a text adventure game published
by Infocom in 1985—scripted the adventure videogame
Starship Titanic before the appearance of the tie-in
novel, which he didn’t even write himself. These guys
aren’t stupid; they know which way the wind is
blowing.
The major videogame console manufacturers,
meanwhile, have epic ambitions for their little lumps of
extruded plastic. Consoles aim to be not just gaming
machines but the one-stop entertainment center in the
homes of millions. One Sony insider has been
overheard saying that the company’s aim with
PlayStation2 is to “own the living room.”
In the late 1990s, you could already play audio CDs
on a PlayStation, but that’s small beer. Sony’s
PlayStation2 plays DVE movies through your TV, and
various interface ports allow the connection of digital
video cameras for editing home movies, printers,
scanners, storage devices and much else. Playstation2
sold 980,000 units on its first launch weekend in Japan
in March 2000, and by mid-2001 Sony had shipped 15
27
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
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. While
the hard drive and modem of PlayStation2 are an
optional accessory, Microsoft has cunningly built these
features into its own first videogame console, the Xbox,
which is also a domestic DVD player. Consoles today
can offer more different types of entertainment than
ever before.
Can anything stop this fun-juggernaut? Research
from U.S. analysts Datamonitor suggests that sales of
games consoles and software in Europe and the United
States will generate over $17 billion worth of business
a year by 2003. The conventional media—Hollywood,
music, even books—are scared. Who can blame them?
The shock of the new
Videogames are not going to go away. You can’t
hide under the stairs. Resistance is futile. Any industry
with such a vast amount of money sloshing around in it
is by that token alone worthy of investigation.
28
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
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.
Alain and FrÉdÉric Le Diberder, authors of an
excellent French book on videogames called L’Univers
des jeux vidÉo, welcome this idea with open arms. They
already declare that the videogame is the “tenth art.”3
Most people are not yet so progressive. But videogames
clearly have the potential to become an art form, even if
they are not there yet.
Here’s why. A videogame is put together by highly
talented artists and graphic designers, as well as
programmers, virtual architects and sonic engineers.
Increasingly, first-class graduates in computer science
from such universities as Cambridge and MIT are
moving into videogames rather than academic research;
there is also a large flow of animation talent
_________________
3 Tradition (since the Athenian Greeks and Confucian Chinese) has held
that there are six distinct arts: music, poetry, architecture, painting, dance
and sculpture. The Le Diberders add TV, movies and bandes dessinÉes
(graphic novels) to the list, and then declare the videogame the tenth.
29
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
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. And aesthetics, by which I mean in the
most general terms the systematic study of why we like
one painting or one film more than another, cannot
ignore this bizarre digital hybrid.
The original Greek meaning of “aesthetics” refers to
things that are perceived by the senses. Modern
videogames—dynamic and interactive fusions of colorful
graphic representation, sound effects, music, speed and
movement—are unquestionably a fabulously sensual form;
furthermore, the simple fact is that some videogames are
better than others, yet so far no serious attempt has been
made to understand why. Videogames are an increasingly
pervasive part of the modern cultural landscape, but we
have no way of speaking critically about them. The noisy
lightshows competing for attention in living rooms around
the globe appear as some kind of weird, hermetic monolith:
mysteriously exciting to the initiated, baffling to the non-
player.
But
both
kinds
of
people
are
30
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
affected by videogames in one way or another. Even if
you’ve never played Tomb Raider, you can’t escape the
clutches of Lara Croft.
People are always loath to admit that something
new can approach the status of art. Take this rather
aggressive ejaculation: “A pastime of illiterate,
wretched creatures who are stupefied by their daily
jobs, a machine of mindlessness and dissolution.” Such
high moral bile is typical of the attacks on videogames
today.
But this sentence wasn’t written about videogames;
it was written seventy years ago by French novelist
Georges Duhamel, about the movies. Yet today, few
people would argue that filmmaking is not an art form.
An art form that is dependent on new technology
always makes some people uneasy. The German
philosopher and musicologist Theodor Adorno
expressed his wariness of jazz (dependent on a recently
invented instrument, the saxophone, as well as
emerging recording technologies) in similar terms
during his correspondence with philosopher and critic
Walter Benjamin.
Videogames today find themselves in the position
that the movies and jazz occupied before World War II:
popular but despised, thought to be beneath serious
31
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
evaluation. Yet today there is a huge critical literature
that has expanded our understanding and appreciation
of films and jazz music. In half a century, I don’t doubt
that this will also be true for videogames.
I’m not trying to argue that there’s going to be a
revolution. Like it or not, the revolution has already
happened. Videogames are an enormous entertainment
business. The numbers, as we’ve seen, are huge. When
people talk about videogames, they tend to compare
them with forms they already know and love: film,
painting, literature and so on. But there’s one critical
difference that we need to bear in mind, and it throws a
huge spanner in the works of any easy equation
between videogames and traditional art forms. It’s this.
What do you do with a videogame? You play it.
In his Laws, Plato defined “play” like this: “That
which has neither utility nor truth nor likeness, nor yet,
in its effects, is harmful, can best be judged by the
criterion of the charm that is in it, and by the pleasure it
affords. Such pleasure, entailing as it does no
appreciable good or ill, is play.” It looks as if today’s
graphically astonishing videogames do have something
like “truth” or “likeness.” A casual observer would
certainly note the vast improvements in graphic style
32
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
and detail every year and conclude that videogames are
increasingly realistic. Those cars look pretty real; those
trees at the side of the racetrack, waving gently in the
wind, look satisfyingly (arbo)real.
This turns out to be the subject of a fundamental
tension in videogames, which will appear in many
guises throughout this book. It’s a version of a very old
question about art, concerning what Plato called
mimesis (“representation”). Is it real or not? How can
videogames claim to be “realistic” at all? But the
peculiar nature of videogames gives the old question
several intriguing and novel digital spins. The problem
of mimesis in this context—the virtual representation of
“realities”—informs the inner life of nearly every
videogame.
Plato allows something to be a game as long as it is
not “harmful” and has no “utility.” There is an
increasingly vocal charge from some sections of society
that videogames are in fact morally harmful. But do
they have positive effects—do they have “utility?”
Squabbles between psychologists as to whether
videogames enhance spatio-visual and motor skills are
largely unresolved. The only thing that everyone agrees
on is that playing videogames makes you better at
playing videogames. Their effects on our
33
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
inner lives can only be investigated once we have a
more rounded view of what videogames actually are.
What does this novel sensual fusion really have in
common with films, with storytelling, or with painting?
Where do videogames fit in the development of leisure
technologies, of perspectival representation, of the
narrative arts? Where do videogames fit in the history
of play?
Playing videogames may or may not be “useful.”
That’s beside the point. This book is about their charm:
the life in them, and their life in us. Videogames are
fun, but just what kind of fun is it?
What does it mean to be Trigger Happy?
34
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
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. Six months earlier,
Digital Equipment Corporation had delivered a hulking
new mainframe computer, a model PDP-1, to MIT’s
electrical engineering lab—an innovative, massively
expensive tool for serious scientific research. And by
happy chance, there was a revolutionary achievement
with that machine: the invention of the world’s first
videogame.
35
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
Well, that’s how the story usually goes.4 But
beginnings are slippery things. Actually, the world’s
first videogame was created four years earlier, at a U.S.
government nuclear research facility, the Brookhaven
National Laboratory. William A. Higinbotham, an
engineer who had designed timing devices for the
Manhattan Project’s atomic bomb and helped in the
first developments of radar, worked at Brookhaven in
charge of instrumentation design. He was trying to
dream up an entertaining exhibit for visiting members
of the public, and he hacked together a rudimentary
two-player tennis game. An analogue computer showed
the trajectories of bouncing balls drawn as ghostly blips
on an oscilloscope, controlled by a button and a knob. It
was a smash hit with the visitors for two years.
But owing to this lone pioneer’s modesty—he
didn’t think he had created anything earth-shatteringly
novel—the game never left the confines of the facility.
“I considered the whole idea so obvious that it never
occurred to me to think about a patent,” Higinbotham
said wryly, years later. Luckily for the future of games,
_________________
4 Both J. C. Herz (in Joystick Nation) and Alain and FrÉdÉric Le Diberder
(L’Univers des jeux vidÉo) give this erroneous starting point. A thorough
history is provided by Leonard Herman’s excellent Phoenix: The Fall and
Rise of Videogames, to which I am indebted in this section.
36
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
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. If that
oscilloscope could have spoken, it might have said:
“There is one who comes after me.”
And so there was. Three years later a big package
arrived at MIT. Until this point, computers had mostly
been tedious, mute hulks that usually had to be
programmed with ticker-tape or punchcards, and were
strictly for esoteric mathematical applications. But the
new-fangled circular, dedicated VDU screen and
keyboard of the PDP-1 tempted programmer Steve
Russell and his friends5 to indulge in a little creative
slacking. They began to fiddle around with the
interface, writing little bits of code that caused the
display to respond in real time to physical input. A
virtual typewriter and calculator. A model of the night
sky. And then . . . Spacewar.
_________________
5 I refer only to Russell by name for reasons of ease and fluency. These are
the full credits. Conception: Martin Graetz, Stephen Russell and Wayne
Wiitanen. Programming: Stephen Russell, Peter Samson, Dan Edwards and
Martin Graetz, together with Alan Kotok, Steve Piner and Robert A.
Saunders.
37
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
The name’s melodrama, of course, grew out of the
geopolitical tensions of the time. But despite the lurid
sci-fi connotations, the game itself, which you can still
play on the Internet,6 was serene, austere, a thing of
alien beauty. Two dueling spaceships in a pas de deux
against an electronic starfield, firing lazy torpedoes at
each other in the silence of space, avoiding all the while
the lethal gravitational pull of a central sun.
A leap of faith had been made. What these
coffeeguzzling student pioneers realized was that new
technology made possible a new sort of experience.
The photons fizzing from the screen were conceived
as manipulable packets of pleasure in themselves,
rather than simply a fancy way for the computer to
tell its user the result of a calculation via a dull string
of numbers. Russell and his friends designed—or
redesigned independently, to give Willy Higinbotham
his due—the first symbolic visual interface. That,
along with the work done by Xerox Parc in the 1970s,
is why you use word processors and other software
based around “windows” and “icons” rather than text.
(Playing
videogames,
though,
is
generally
acknowledged to be more fun than using Microsoft
_________________
6 Java-capable browsers can just point themselves at
http://lcs.www.media.mit.edu/groups/el/projects/spacewar
38
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
products, at least until its X-Box console arrives in
2001.)
Spacewar sprang so fully formed into the
microcosmos that it took a very long time for other
games to catch up. Its structure offered many of the
virtues that are still essential features of videogames:
simple rules with innumerable combinational
possibilities; the competitive urge to destroy your
opponent’s spaceship; the pleasure of mastery over a
well-defined, consistent system; the challenge of
reacting instantly to craft governed by inertial physics;
and the sensual buzz of playing with animated patterns
of light. The game is remarkably similar to Asteroids,
an arcade machine that appeared some seventeen years
later.
Having briefly considered trying to sell this curio,
Russell and his team decided that no one would want to
buy it, so they gave away the source code to anyone
who was interested. Within a few years it was
everywhere, a benign virus, an unstoppable meme,
eating up time all over the world on government,
military and scientific mainframes. And if you can’t
beat them, join them: in the end, Digital Equipment
Corporation used the game as a centerpiece for
commercial demonstrations of their computer. In the
39
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
same pivotal decade that saw the global war of the
space race and the tectonic cultural shifts of pop music,
videogames had launched a successful initial blitzkrieg
on the digital plains.
The lessons of the PDP-1’s unwitting involvement
in game history are twofold. First: give a man a tool,
and he will play with it. Second: pretty soon, everyone
will want one. Spacewar, however, never became a
mainstream entertainment, because so few people had
access to computers at the time.7 The videogame
concept was there, but it had to wait ten years for cheap
computer-chip technology to make possible its wider
distribution.
Meanwhile, throughout the 1960s, the small
community of mainframe programmers produced other
highly influential game templates in tiny programs.
Lunar Lander was a turn-based game with a text
interface that required the player to administer
rocketthruster firing without running out of fuel before
meeting the surface. Hammurabi was the first God
game, requiring the user to manage a feudal kingdom
_________________
7 DEC sold about fifty PDP-1s in total. Even by 1971, there was only a total
of about 50,000 computers in the world (The Economist, September 28,
1996). By the end of 1993, there were more than 173 million computers in
use, not counting videogame consoles.
40
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
by planting grain and assessing tax rates each year—a
direct ancestor of Civilization. And later, the advent of
ADVENT (1972): short for Adventure, this was the
first of a lost genre of game that was hugely popular on
personal computers right up until the late 1980s. It was
the first computerized version of “interactive
narrative”: the computer described a location and the
user typed in commands—“north,” “look,” “kill snake,”
“use torch”—to move around the virtual world, use
objects and solve fiendish puzzles. But the world at
large remained ignorant of the myriad charms of these
proto-videogames. It was a closed community, a
priesthood without a parish.
Most people assume that coin-operated arcade
games preceded home videogame technology. In fact,
in terms of conception rather than commercial
distribution, the reverse is the case, for by 1967 Ralph
Baer, the consumer-products manager of a military
electronics company, Sanders Associates, had invented
a TV-based home-tennis game and more complex
“hockey” simulations. Unfortunately it took him
several years to persuade other manufacturers of the
commercial possibilities. At last, at the turn of the
decade, Intel got their act together and invented the
41
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
microprocessor. Videogames could now be just as
clever with much smaller, cheaper brains.
Back in 1965, an engineering student at the
University of Utah called Nolan Bushnell had
Spacewar on his computer, and like the other techies
Bushnell played it obsessively. He began to wonder
whether people might actually pay to play videogames
in an amusement park, but given the size and expense
of computers, it was a mere pipe dream at the time. By
1970, however, thanks to the microchip, the project had
become commercially feasible, and Bushnell joined
pinball company Nutting Associates to develop a mass-
market version of Spacewar. In 1971, 1,500 units of
Computer Space, the first arcade game, were produced.
The project bombed.
So much for the future of entertainment. Computer
Space was just too complicated for the videogame
virgins of the general public. What the hell was it for?
Pinball, fine—it’s immediately obvious what to do:
there’s two flipper buttons, you light a cigarette and get
on with it. But this intimidating machine, with its reams
of instructions and its bizarre, bulbous casing, like
something out of Barbarella—it was just weird.
Bushnell learned his lesson. He would have to make a
videogame that anyone could just walk up to and play,
42
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
without having to learn it first. He left Nutting,
determined to go it alone.
And so Pong was born. “Avoid missing ball for
high score” ran the only line of instructions on Pong’s
cabinet. It was a very simple version of tennis. A square
dot of light represented the ball, and two vertical lines
at each side of the screen were the bats. Players only
had to use one hand to rotate the paddle control, thus
facilitating simultaneous beer consumption. The first
Pong machine, hand-built in Bushnell’s apartment, was
set up in Andy Capp’s Tavern, a California pool bar. It
was soon collecting $300 a week in quarters—six times
as much as the neighboring pinball machine.
Amazed at the game’s success, Bushnell founded
his own company, the now-legendary Atari (named
after a term used in the Japanese chesslike game “Go”),
which was staffed by young, Led Zeppelin– loving,
herb-smoking hippies. Atari released the first
commercial Pong in November 1972. It was a huge
success, and altogether ten thousand of the machines
were manufactured. Four years later, Nolan Bushnell
sold Atari to Warner for $28 million, staying on as
chairman himself. Silicon entrepreneurialism, it
seemed, was the new rock’n’roll.
43
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
But it was not all plain sailing. When Pong first
came out, Atari was immediately sued. Ralph Baer’s
home-tennis game had finally been taken up by
Magnavox. The first home console, the Magnavox
Odyssey, had been released six months before Atari’s
debut. And it was to all intents and purposes a home
Pong avant la lettre. It lacked the hypnotic sonar-blip
soundtrack of the arcade game, but there was no doubt
that it had got there first, and Atari was forced to pay
Magnavox a license fee on every game sold.
Of course, all these Pong-style games were direct
descendants of the lost oscilloscope program by Willy
Higinbotham, who never made a penny. Rip-offs of
home tennis and multi-player arcade versions of
“tennis” or “hockey,” as well as the first simplistic
shooting and driving games, flourished over the next
few years. But, as if punished by the Fates for not
honoring its ancestor, the booming videogame industry
was soon brought to its knees—and the reason was the
very multiplicity of Pongs. By 1977, there were so
many rival home machines that stores began dumping
them at knockdown prices, and many manufacturers
went bust. It looked as if videogames had been a mere
fad, a fad which had now burnt itself out. The industry
was on the verge of total meltdown.
44
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
And then a little-known Japanese Pachinko
manufacturer called Taito rode in to the rescue. Their
extraordinary new arcade game was the seed of the
modern era. Within a few months of its 1978 release in
Japan, the game had caused a nationwide shortage of
the coin required to play it. Twenty thousand cabinets
were sold the next year in America, and over its
lifetime the game grossed $500 million. It was called
Space Invaders.
Art types
Videogames today are a broad church. I’m using
the term “videogames” to encompass arcade games,
homeconsole games, and computer games. The
bewildering array of different forms and styles could
lead a casual observer to think that the only thing all
these games have in common is a microprocessor. In
fact, all such games share crucial low-level qualities.
As with any form, videogame genres mutate and
shift over history. If they never exactly die, they can
sleep for a long time, while other, newer types spring
up to take their place. Furthermore, few modern
videogames slot neatly into very discrete categories.
But I’ll start mapping out this confusing terrain by
identifying certain families of videogame.
45
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
Happiness is a warm gun
Perhaps the purest, most elemental videogame pleasure
is the heathen joy of destruction. You’ve got your
finger hovering over the trigger, you line up an enemy
and you fire. Such is the task presented by that
venerable videogame genre, the shoot-’em-up. Space
Invaders (see fig. 1) was not the first shoot-’em-up
(Atari’s Tank preceded it in 1974, and of course
Spacewar itself involved torpedo firing), but it was
revolutionary all the same. You control a laser turret
that can move from side to side at the bottom of the
screen. Farther up, a phalanx of fifty-five evil aliens
tramps across the screen in a smug dance of death.
When they reach one side of the screen, they all
descend one space and go back the other way. Your
task is simple: fire at will, and wipe them out.
Not so simple, though, because they are raining
bombs on you. You must dodge the bombs, or let your
four shields soak up the firepower. The shields,
however, crumble with every blast and are soon shot
through with holes, offering as much protection from
the merciless army above as a white handkerchief. As
you shoot off the invaders, their colleagues do not
panic, they do not break formation; in their infinite,
ego-less confidence they just move a little faster, and
faster still. They must not reach the bottom of the
46
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
screen. You might manage to blast the entire division
away, but then another reappears in its place, lower
down and more bomb-happy. The eerie bass thumping
of the invaders’ progress increases in tempo, along with
your heartbeat. Just how long will you last, soldier?
Fig. 1 Space Invaders: time to get trigger happy (‰ 1978 Taito
Corp.)
47
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
Space Invaders was the first game to feature
animated characters. The serried ranks of aliens
waggled their brutish tentacles across the screen; the
movement, for the time, was so realistically ugly that it
was all the more pleasurable to blast the critters away.
Space Invaders was also the first game to feature a
“high score” facility. The current highest score was
constantly displayed on your game screen, sneering at
your puny efforts, or encouraging you to develop your
own strategies to ever greater heights. As Martin Amis
put it in an early and engagingly enthusiastic book on
videogames, Invasion of the Space Invaders: “To
appear on the Great Score sheet is a powerful incentive
in space-game praxis—a yearning perhaps connected
with schooldays and the honor or notoriety of having
your name chalked up on the board, white on black.”
It was also the first “endless” game. Previously,
videogames had stopped when a certain score was
reached, or restarted; Taito’s classic, on the other hand,
just kept getting harder and harder, the aliens becoming
a terrifying blur as they whipped across the screen
raining bombs and hurtled ever closer to ground zero.
Therein lies the game’s special tension: it is
unwinnable. The player’s task is to fight a heroically
doomed rearguard action, to stave off defeat for as
48
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
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. pushing
the tension envelope of this most fiery, physically
draining of videogame genres. Indeed, the extreme
simplicity of the basic concept—destroying things with
guns—is the reason why, for a few years, the shoot-
’em-up expanded the possibilities of videogame action
more than any other type of game. Throughout the
1980s, shoot-’em-ups boasted ever more dazzling
lightshows and huge varieties of offensive weapons,
while gradually replacing the static Space Invaders
arena with larger, roamable spaces. Examples such as
the Commodore 64 and Spectrum classic Uridium
(easily as compelling as any arcade shooter of the time)
required not just shooting accuracy but high-speed
inertial negotiation of solid obstacles in two-and-a-half
degrees of freedom (the extra fraction granted by virtue
of the player’s ability to flip his craft onto its side and
zip through narrow spaces).
49
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
As processing power increased in the 1990s, the
genre definitively broke the bounds of flat-plane
representations with the emergence of the “first-person
shooter,” exemplified by Doom and its multifarious
clones. Doom casts the player as a marine on Mars,
tramping around an invaded base from the hero’s point
of view and, with the aid of a comically powerful
arsenal, blasting demons back into the bloody hell from
which they have erupted. This, a sub-genre that traces
its roots back to Atari’s 3D tank game Battlezone
(1980), ousted its two-dimensional counterparts as king
of the hill, at the same time adding rudimentary quest
and object-manipulation requirements which—
especially as environments and programmed enemy
cunning became more complex, as in the extraordinary
Half-Life (1998)—edged it into the gray zone between
shoot-’em-up, exploration and puzzle games.
The pure shooter, however, persists in the form of
lightgun games: Virtua Cop, House of the Dead or the
viscerally thrilling Time Crisis. This game has one of
the simplest, most intuitive human-computer interfaces
ever conceived: the player uses a molded plastic
handgun (with properly aligned sights and a
forcefeedback mechanism to simulate recoil) to shoot
50
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
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. Where the old enemies were alien spacecraft
in two-dimensional formations, the enemies in Time
Crisis are human terrorists scurrying about in virtual
arenas; where you used to be Earth’s last hope, you are
now a member of a U.S. government SWAT team
protecting the interests of national security. But the
purism and simplicity of the gameplay shows that the
games are brothers under the skin. Time Crisis even
manages to increase the sweating tension, because at
your back you always hear Time’s winged chariot. But
relax into your task and revel in the challenge, for the
blissfully simple rules are still the same. Kill them all.
In my mind and in my car
Gamers of a certain age often argue that the oldies
were the best, in much the same way as the pop records
of one’s own youth seem so much better than the
rubbish the kids listen to today. But we can’t
51
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
rewind; we’ve gone too far.8 True, I have a certain
fondness for Vanguard, a game I could happily clock as
a nine-year-old on a family vacation in Wales (you
could shoot in four directions and the beepy tunes were
evil mind-limpets). Clearly, however, Goldeneye, a
first-person shooter for the Nintendo 64 console which
lets you play the role of James Bond, is a much better
game.
One genre that certainly refutes this nostalgiatinged
argument is the racing game. In most sorts of
videogame, “feel” is at base more important than fancy
graphics or speed for its own sake. But in the racing
game, graphics and speed are part of the “feel.” Every
increase in technological power enhances the genre’s
unique pleasure: the feeling of hurling a vehicle around
a realistic environment at suicidal velocities.
Conversely, because of this intimate relationship
between hardware base and software superstructure, a
racing game has very often been used as a seductive
showcase for new technology: the Sony PlayStation
was the mouth-watering machine of the future on its
release, just because of the unprecedented speed and
solidity of one of its first releases, Ridge Racer. That
_________________
8 “Video Killed the Radio Star” (1979) by Buggles, a deathless masterpiece
of popular song, the KindertÖtenlied that on the one hand revels in
modernist sonic synthesis but on the other mourns the passing of the 1970s
and of youth itself.
52
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
series of games continued to evolve until 1999’s Ridge
Racer Type 4, which ran on the same hardware but
looked many times slicker (see fig. 2).
Fig. 2. Ridge Racer Type 4: prettier, faster, better (‰ 1999
Namco Ltd; all rights reserved)
Early two-dimensional racing games, with a flat
road scrolling up the screen, were little more than
simple dodge games or, with gun-equipped cars,
variations on the shoot-’em-up (Spy Hunter). The first,
crude attempt at driver’s-eye-view perspective was
Atari’s Night Driver, but the genre truly blossomed
53
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
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.
One of the best examples at the time of writing is Gran
Turismo, with tracks modeled on Japanese suburbs,
superbly atmospheric lighting effects and (crucially)
wonderfully throaty engine roars. As in most racing
games, players must learn to throw their cars into
powerslides with abandon and not to worry too much
about hitting other competitors; these vehicles might
look like racing cars but they act like dodgems.
This is not true, however, of a more serious kind of
racer, usually modeled on Formula One cars and real
Grand Prix circuits, and in spirit more of a simulation
than a pure videogame. Cars suffer real damage and
braking technique is vital. Simulation, distinct from the
role-playing game, is arguably not a genre in itself;
rather, it promotes in certain genres (driving, flight
games) the primacy of supposed “realism” over instant
fun. A true videogame deliberately simplifies any given
situation (imaginary or real) down to its essential,
kinetic parts; a simulation is loath to simplify
54
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
and only does so when available CPU power is already
maxed out. The problem is, as we shall see, that
videogame “realism” is always a fix anyway.
Furthermore, simulations stomp roughshod all over one
raison d’Être of certain types of videogame, which is to
let the player perform amusingly dangerous and
unlikely maneuvers in perfect safety. If playing an
arcade-style racing game is like being a car stuntman in
The French Connection or Ronin, playing a simulation
is a much more earnest business. Martin Amis again:
“It sounds rather like driving, doesn’t it?”
Unlike Space Invaders et al., racing games offer the
perfect opportunity for competitive two-person action,
either with two arcade cabinets linked together or with
one home console splitting the television screen into
two separate viewpoints for each player. And you need
not be satisfied with racing mere cars against a friend.
The racing-game genre splits into driving games (what
we have seen so far) and the rest, which encompass
cartoon go-cart competitions (the superb Super Mario
Kart),
snowboard
piste
challenges
(1080
Snowboarding), tiny cars speeding over a kitchen table
(Micro Machines) or futuristic hoverplanes thundering
around a sci-fi rollercoaster of a course (WipEout).
55
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
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. If the destructive orgy of the
shoot-’em-up captures the essence of humanversus-
machine competition, the racing game is the purest
expression of machine-mediated human-versushuman
competition. There can be no arguments about who
won and who lost. You were just too slow.
Might as well jump
Around 1981, a young Nintendo apprentice
designer, Shigeru Miyamoto, was asked to write
something to replace the innards of Radarscope, a
tedious shooter Nintendo’s American arm had
unwisely stocked up on to the tune of two thousand
unsellable cabinets. Miyamoto quickly, if somewhat
unpredictably, designed a game featuring a fat
mustachioed carpenter and a giant monkey. The
carpenter, under the player’s direction, had to begin
at the bottom of the screen and, jumping to avoid
barrels thrown by the infuriated simian, climb
ladders and move across platforms to reach the top,
where he could defeat the monkey and rescue a
princess. It was a far cry from the alien-
56
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
themed shoot-’em-ups that were popular at the time.
But Miyamoto’s first game, called Donkey Kong (see
fig. 3), became an enormous hit, and invented a new
genre: the platform game.9
The carpenter, known cratylically as Jumpman (for
it was his nature, uniquely at the time, to jump) in the
first game, was transformed by its sequel into a
plumber called Mario, who soon became the most
recognized videogame “character” of all, and most of
the innovations in the platform-game genre have been
made in games starring Mario, and written by
Miyamoto himself. Mario Bros. (1983) introduced the
plumber’s brother, Luigi, along with another paradigm
of platform gaming that stuck for years: enemies are
destroyed, not by means of projectile weapons, but by
the cartoonish method of jumping into platforms
underneath them to knock them over, then climbing up
and kicking them off the screen while they were still
dazed. Super Mario Bros. (1985) turned the platform
genre into a sideways-scrolling quest through a world
many times the size of one screen, and added powerups
(by eating a mushroom, Mario increased in size
_________________
9 In platform games, women are literally on pedestals, with men constantly
striving to attain their level. It is an interesting example of plinth ideology;
see, for the concept’s application in cognitive science, the rather eccentric
AndrÉ Tabrizifar, The Transparent Head, pp. 332–35.
57
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
and could withstand one hit from an enemy), a system
whereby an extra life could be won after collecting a
hundred gold coins, and a regular “boss” battle at the
end of every level.
Fig. 3 Donkey Kong: get him over a barrel (‰ 1981 Nintendo)
Throughout its history the platform game has built
the most purely fantastical sort of gameworlds. In the
Mario universe, baby dinosaurs coexist with masked
birds and solid clouds, potent fungi and magical
crotchets hanging in the air. In an early platform hit on
58
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Manic Miner (1983), the
player controls a miner who must negotiate conveyor
belts and killer spikes while avoiding robots, malign
jellyfish, killer penguins and poisonous bushes to
collect keys before his air supply runs out. In the most
popular current platform game, and the closest
approach yet to a true interactive cartoon, Crash
Bandicoot 3, the eponymous orange marsupial rides on
the back of a speeding tiger across the Great Wall of
China or does battle with giant glassy-eyed men
wielding sledgehammers.
But now the very term “platform game” is
somewhat outdated; perhaps more appropriate is
“exploration game,” which has been the defining point
of platformers since Super Mario Bros. This is partly
because such games have quite recently made a
transition to three-dimensional rather than flat-plane
representation—most effectively in the astonishing
Super Mario 64 (1996)—and in the process the
gameplay has necessarily changed. The old, simple
lines denoting “platforms” are now solid ledges or
columns made of brick, wood, earth or steel, and while
essential features of the platformer are retained, such as
the problem of figuring out a series of jumps to get
from “here” to “up there,” there are hybrid factors
59
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
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. And Crash Bandicoot 3 is not
really a platform game at all, even though it requires
you very traditionally to jump on enemies’ heads and
collect fruit. Apart from in the two-dimensional bonus
levels, there are very few platforms. Its major influence
is in fact the racing game with a dynamic obstacle
course: rather than figure out complicated routes in a
vertically oriented environment, you must run full tilt
“into” (or sometimes “out of”) the depth of the screen.
It qualifies partly as an “exploration game” because of
the player’s simple desire to see what surreal beauties
the designers have hidden around the next corner.
The old “platform game” is no longer a discrete
game type in itself, but denotes an aspect of gameplay
that may occur in many different genres. Even
firstperson shooters like Turok (1997) cravenly require
the player to negotiate platform elements, even though
current 3D engines make such a task infuriatingly
60
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
random rather than pleasurably challenging. What is
left of the platform game, then, is just the defining
physical ability that Shigeru Miyamoto gave to his
original monkey-battling woodworker. Go ahead, jump.
Sometimes you kick
Ah, how good it feels to boot a friend in the head
several times before applying an armlock and hurling
him to the ground. Especially if he’s bigger than you.
Fighting games allow players to battle each other’s
characters onscreen with an array of absurdly
exaggerated martial arts moves; with fists and feet or
with swords and flame. Of all the videogame genres,
the fighting game, or beat-’em-up, is one where the
solo, or player-against-computer, mode is most
pointless. It’s a two-player genre.
Early beat-’em-ups were particularly popular on the
home computers of the day. Way of the Exploding Fist
or Yie Ar Kung Fu (both 1985) took, as did most early
fighting titles, a relatively sober approach to martial-
arts gameplay, with a possible sixteen different
61
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
moves.10 As videogame consoles and arcade machines
became more technically accomplished, however, the
temptation was to show off the graphic power with ever
more visually appealing displays, and never mind the
realism. Street Fighter II (1991), the first of the really
modern breed of fighting games,11 featured enormous
blue light trails from swishing limbs and fireball
attacks, while Mortal Kombat (1992) attracted
vituperative noises from the American Senate and the
British Parliament for its terrifically gory “death
moves,” where a victorious character would rip out his
opponent’s spine and hold it bloodily aloft.
One of the attractions of modern beat-’em-ups is
the player’s ability to choose to play as any one of
numerous different characters, each with his or her
own strengths and weaknesses but all lusciously
pictured and animated. Do you want to be a blond,
sandal-wearing Greek woman in a miniskirt, or a
supernatural pirate with two enormous broadswords
(Soul Edge)? A Croatian behemoth or a Hawaiian
_________________
10 With exceptions such as Barbarian, in which your friend could be
graphically decapitated with a broadsword. There was media criticism of
this game—not, however, for the violence, but for the fact that it featured a
semi-clad model in its advertising.
11 In terms of visual excess, that is. Street Fighter’s legacy otherwise
continues in a cult sub-genre of the fighting game that eschews
threedimensional, “solid”-looking characters in favor of a flat-plane,
comicbook style with characteristically jerky animation.
62
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
Sumo wrestler (Ready 2 Rumble Boxing [see fig. 4])?
Bruce Lee in a gold lamÉ leotard, a pogo-happy alien
cyborg or a tiny, annoying dragon (Tekken 3)? Black,
Asian or Caucasian; male, female or indeterminate
xenomorph? Beat-’em-ups are nothing if not politically
inclusive; it is much more common for European men
to play as women or as Korean jujitsu experts than as
digital avatars of their own ethnic origins. It doesn’t
matter who you are in real life; here, the idea of play as
experimentation extends to your own genes.
Fig. 4. Ready 2 Rumble Boxing: Croatian tank Boris Knokimov
(left) takes on cuddly Hawaiian Salua Tua. Rumble bumble . . .
(‰ 1999 Midway)
63
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
Since fighting games broke into 3D with Virtua
Fighter, the physical contact of these lightbeam
warriors has grown ever more convincingly thudding
and solid. The stunningly graceful animations,
meanwhile, are developed with a technique that films
real martial artists and digitizes the results as movement
code that can be applied to the imaginary game
characters. This is known as “motion capture.”
But herein lies a problem. Beat-’em-ups boast ever
more complex control methods, with at least three
buttons beside the joystick, and baffling combinations
of button hits and circular shapes made with the stick
unleashing ever more spectacular and lethal activity on
screen. These preset special moves, also known as
“combos,” actually require the player to memorize a
string of ten button-presses; there might be hundreds of
such strings in a game. This is the Achilles’ heel of the
genre, for you cannot design on the fly your own
strings of moves that have the same speed and fluidity
as the preset combos. You must learn the sequences the
programmers have built in to the game—and, okay,
there are hundreds of them, but that does not constitute
freedom.
Not only is it (understandably) impossible to
perform a move for which there is no animation, but
64
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
motion-capture techniques mean that once an animation
has started, it must finish before the next one can start.
You can’t change tactics mid-move. That rules out true
feints, which are critical in real fighting sports such as
fencing. Oddly, beat-’em-ups such as the Tekken series
have extremely complex input methods, but threaten to
offer the player far less creative freedom than almost
any other kind of game with a much simpler interface.
Robotron gives you two joysticks: one to move, one to
fire. Simple. But with those tools, there is a huge
tactical potential of feints, misdirections and
apocalyptic vengeance.
The excessively deterministic, combinatorial
template, however, seems to be happily on the wane,
overtaken by newer versions such as Power Stone for
the Sega Dreamcast (1999), where the controls are very
simple and the tactical gameplay is transferred to use of
objects (benches, lampposts) and hilariously magical
power-ups (guided missiles and the like) in the fighting
arena itself; or Ready 2 Rumble Boxing, which mixes
pleasingly simple controls with beautifully judged
tactics. The fighting game, like fighting itself, will
always be popular.
65
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
Heaven in here
Oh yes, the computer can make us divine. Should you
want to build a city from scratch, construct a
substructure of water pipes, sewers, power lines and
underground trains, populate it with citizens, determine
tax levels, build museums, parks, houses and office
blocks, and then destroy the whole imaginary
metropolis by calling an earthquake on their heads—
sure, you can do that. It’s called SimCity. Or perhaps
you want to operate on a larger scale: create a neolithic
tribe and over the course of thousands of years send
them out to colonize the land, discover ironwork,
sailing and electricity. Play Civilization. Compete
against other gods in a polytheistic mythology?
Populous. There are similar “God games” for the fields
of global industry, railroad building and even
amusement parks.
There are two basic attractions of games like
SimCity. The first is that the virtual city itself, with its
apparently autonomous population, functions as a pet.
If neglected, it will pine and eventually die; if nurtured,
it will flourish. A player might form some sort of
emotional attachment to the gameworld. This is the
principle abstracted and miniaturized with such
extraordinary success by the Japanese company
66
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
Bandai, with their keyring digital pet, Tamagotchi.
Notice, however, that a SimCity or Civilization pet
panders to a peculiarly narcissistic instinct in the
player: if he or she does well, monuments will be
erected and museums named in honor of the masterful
deity. It’s a kind of fame.
The second potential pleasure of a God game is a
function of the very artificiality of the soi-disant
“simulation.” Now, of course, God-game variables are
“kludged”—simplified and imprecise—and their reality
is laughably clean compared to the infinitely chaotic
and messy real world. As J. C. Herz tartly observes in
Joystick Nation: “You can build something that looks
like Detroit without building in racial tension.” But
what they do offer by virtue of their machine habitat,
and what makes them slightly different from what they
would be otherwise— complex board games—is the
modeling of dynamic processes. Time can be sped up
or slowed down at will, and interactions of data over
time can be readily visualized. In this way, for instance,
fiddling with the fiscal and monetary operators of
SimCity for a couple of minutes and observing the
results for the next accounting period provides a
remarkably intuitive way to understand the
fundamentals of balancing a budget in a capitalist state.
67
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
Now, I have conscientiously played these games in
the interests of research, and I find them exceptionally
tedious. Even so, God games are highly successful.
Many people who aren’t at all interested in any other
sort of videogame—such as the high-speed, colorful
action experiences of racers or exploration games—
will often confess a sneaky addiction to Civilization or
Age of Empires. Some people simply prefer the
challenge of fiddling relaxedly with a process to that of
a high-speed test of reactions.
It seems, anyway, from the method by which God
games model dynamic processes, that they are not
primarily about cities or tribes or any of the putative
content. They are process toys. Time is transformed
from prison to Play-Doh. Perhaps the fantasy appeal is
really about a chance to observe the world over a
longer, more sober chronological span than that of a
single human life. But if the classic shoot-’em-up or
platform game is triumphantly individualistic—one
hero against the hordes—the God game is quite the
opposite. The individual doesn’t matter. He or she may
as well be an ant (in SimAnt, the individual actually is
an ant). The gameplayer doesn’t count as an individual:
he or she is, after all, God. What matters is the
inexorable march of the corporate machine. There
68
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
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. Its
natural milieu is that of war. Again in a godlike
position (single-handedly overseeing all military
operations), the player is briefed by advisers (actors in
video clips), and must then carry out certain missions
by issuing commands to numerous small troop units on
the battlefield. The player clicks on a certain unit and,
for instance, tells it to move somewhere, to attack
another unit, to defend itself or to scatter. The
stupendously successful Command and Conquer series
of games offers with every sequel more lovingly
recreated “theaters of war” and conflict situations
drawn from twentieth-century history, yet at the same
time litters the battlefield with increasingly fantastic
depositories of hi-tech weaponry for your troops to pick
up and bash the Axis with.
Real-time strategy games are, at base, congruent
with the traditional class of wargame played on a large
69
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
table at the weekend by men pushing little figures
around with brooms—only now the computer allows
the precise calculation of thousands of variables. This
swamp of numbers, terrains and troop typologies
effectively disguises the complementary fact that, as
videogames, their formal root is Atari’s panic-inducing
arcade game Missile Command (1980), which
originally grew out of a military simulation to see how
many nuclear warheads a human radar operator could
track before overload set in. As we noted of simulation,
though, as games become ever more complex and
hybridized, the essential elements of realtime
strategy—control of multiple game pieces and tactical
calculus—may crop up in several other genres.
Real-time strategy games do not provide the instant
control and feedback of the more visceral videogame
genres, yet nor are they such leisurely affairs as God
games. Decisions about the disposition of troops and
units must be made in “real time”: if you don’t react
quickly enough, you’ll be overrun by the enemy. A
certain pleasurable level of sweating tension is thereby
induced. This median level of response requirement
makes strategy games perfect for the burgeoning field
of online play.
70
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
Owing to different modem connection speeds, it is
often difficult to play a satisfying game of Quake over
the Internet against someone on the other side of the
world, because that game is a very rapid-response
shoot-’em-up. But a real-time strategy game such as the
amusing alien wargame Starcraft (1998) is the perfect
vehicle for such global connections, and moreover can
handle far more than merely two players at a time.
Starcraft’s American server, at one point on its 1998
launch weekend, had thirty thousand players connected
simultaneously. Earth is truly humming, as you are
reading this, with the smoke and crackle of imaginary
warfare.
The cognitive demands made on the player of
realtime strategy games are among the most complex
any videogame offers, and the attraction of logical,
combinatorial thinking allied to often beautiful graphics
(such as in the extraordinary Commandos 2) makes for
a powerful experience. Wargames, too, are the most
complex and satisfying example of the videogame
pleasure of control: you are in charge not just of one
tank or airplane, but of an entire army. You are not to
be messed with.
71
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
Running up that hill
Perhaps the most perverse-looking class of videogame
on first inspection is the sports game. After all,
videogames are supposedly played in darkened rooms
by people who never get any real physical exercise. But
in their hovels they can be tennis demons, baseball stars
or gifted golfers, or control a whole football or
basketball team to world victory.
In its own sweetly abstract way, Pong, of course,
was the first sports game. Subsequent refinements of
the Pong engine claimed to simulate soccer with four
paddles and two sets of goalposts, but the games were
unconvincing. Chris Crawford understandably claimed
in 1984: “I suspect sports games will not attract a great
deal of design attention in the future”12 —just before
higher-resolution graphics on home computers saw a
new wave of sports games become highly successful.
Konami’s Track and Field, Epyx’s Summer Games and
Winter Games, and Ocean’s Daley Thompson’s
Decathlon were all early hits on machines such as the
Spectrum and Commodore 64, multi-event games that
required the player to control tiny but well-animated
_________________
12 Crawford, The Art of Computer Game Design, p. 28.
72
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
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. The promising sub-genre of
“futuristic sports,” where designers, freed from the
limitations of having to reproduce a messy, real sport,
could attempt to create the perfect physical game, threw
up a few fine moments—most notably the wonderful
Speedball, a violent, sci-fi kind of taghockey that is still
considered by many to be the best sports game ever
made. But the unbeatable advantage of “real” football,
soccer, basketball and hockey games is that the rules
are given and everyone knows them: you don’t have to
spend precious time studying a manual to learn how to
win.
When videogames cracked 3D representation in the
mid-1990s, sports games flourished as never before.
Today the world’s largest software publisher is the one
that has the most impressive stable of sports games:
Electronic Arts, which for the financial year 1998–99
broke the billion-dollar turnover mark. The soccer
game is one of the most popular videogame genres of
73
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
all, with one of the best being Konami’s ISS Pro
Evolution (see fig. 5). In EA’s World Cup 98, not only
are real players licensed, their faces digitally mapped
on to computer figures, but the actual French stadia are
lovingly rebuilt on the screen. Hoardings around the
virtual playing field carry real advertisements; hours of
soccer commentary are recorded by real TV
commentators, with suitable comments retrieved from
the disc to suit onscreen events; and slow-motion
replays from multiple angles allow the repeated
savoring of a goal.
Sports games have grown up, but in the process
they have almost defected to another medium. Of
course soccer videogames are in one sense continuing
the heritage of mechanical games like Subbuteo, but
now solid-looking players can run smoothly around the
soccer field or the hockey rink and be viewed from
different camera angles, just like on TV. The modern
sports game is no longer a re-creation of an actual sport
so much as it is a re-creation of viewing that sport on
television. With a little more involvement than simply
shouting at the players over your six-pack.
74
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
Fig. 5. ISS Pro Evolution: the beautiful game (‰ 1999 Konami)
It’s a kind of magic
Dungeons, dragons, elves and wizards, treasure,
trolls and spells. Yes, it’s the role-playing game (RPG),
the synthesis of classic text-based games like ADVENT
and the 1970s teenage-male leisure phenomenon,
Dungeons & Dragons fantasy boardgames. The
computer becomes the dungeon master and rolls all the
polyhedral dice to determine the outcomes of
incantatory duels.
75
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
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. If
you can’t be bothered to construct a new identity for
yourself, you can always buy one.
We can see immediately an instructive contrast
between the appeal of traditional RPGs and that of God
games. If God games hold out the opportunity of
transcending one’s individuality, RPGs offer the player
a chance to be fully individual in a world where an
individual has real power, where the inexplicable is no
longer actually supernatural but domesticated and
quantifiable (magic, assessed numerically, is stripped of
all its magicality), and where actions always have
deterministic consequences for character or events. It is
a seductive simplicity. But what RPGs really have
going for them is the sense (or perhaps the illusion) of
being involved in an epic, mythical story, however
clichÉd its details might be. In this way they also have
roots in the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks written by
76
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone (the latter is now
head of videogame publishers Eidos) in the 1980s.
Modern, complex RPGs owe their shared
paradigms to one game series in particular: Final
Fantasy, the first game of which was released in 1987.
It had detailed, colorful two-dimensional graphics, and
a traditional story line involving an ancient evil once
again on the loose, with rapacious pirates on the oceans
and demons in the bowels of the earth; the player was
required to choose four people to make up a team of
Light Warriors to save the world. The systems of magic
and fighting grew more and more complex with each
sequel, until Final Fantasy VII (1997) not only offered
sumptuous movieistic scenes to advance the plot, but
updated the milieu to one of magic futurism. Yet it is
still based on a remarkably old-hat “turn-based” system
of combat, with roots clearly in the dice-throwing game
played by unsocialized boys.
In essence, however, an RPG need not inhabit
exclusively such puerile, sub-Tolkien milieus. The
basis of any RPG is that the player “becomes” a
character in the fictional world. On a basic level, nearly
every videogame ever made is a role-playing game.
You play the role of a missile turret defending Earth
from the space invaders; you play the role of a
77
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
ravenous yellow disc being chased by ghosts. In
generic RPGs, however, character is not merely a
pretext to the gameplay, but part of it. Character is
defined by talents, strength, cunning and even certain
psychological traits, measured strictly quantitatively in
points. Whereas the player is constantly getting killed
in shoot-’em-ups, the survival and growth of an RPG
character, the acquisition of new skills, are paramount.
(Because of this emphasis on character, the RPG is the
nexus of developments in what is called “interactive
storytelling,” of which more later.)
Donkey Kong designer Shigeru Miyamoto’s Zelda
games are all RPGs. Even his phenomenal Legend of
Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998) is one, although on the
surface it is a seminal 3D exploration game, because
the character the player controls learns more about his
past and acquires numerous new skills according to his
success in the gameworld. One of the most
revolutionary home-computer games of the 1980s,
Elite, is usually thought of as an early 3D space game.
But it is just as much an RPG too, in that success
depends on carving out a career, over a period of
several real-world weeks or months, as an intergalactic
trader in minerals or narcotics. RPGs are the single
most popular genre of videogame in Japan, and
78
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
encompass a far wider and more creative range of
subjects, from gardening to schoolday romance.
Role-playing elements are creeping crabwise into
any number of other genres, as a way of bolting on a
framework of narrative drive to the old repetitive game
style. Even arcade-style driving game par excellence
Ridge Racer: Type 4 (1999) is an RPG, in that the
player is required to complete a full Grand Prix set of
races with a particular team manager, who comments
on your performance and reveals his or her own
fictional preoccupations. And ever more complex
roleplaying games will be possible with the increased
storage and visual capacities of future hardware. Sega’s
fabulously ambitious Shenmue (2000), which chooses
the 1980s as a historical period so that the characters
wear leather blousons and acidwashed blue jeans,
points the way forward. And Japanese software giant
Namco has set up a whole department dedicated to
producing RPGs for the PlayStation2. From the genre’s
trollish beginnings, wonderful things may yet emerge.
We can work it out
While playing videogames may not constitute an
intellectual pursuit, they do challenge the mind in a
79
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
more primitive, kinetic way—in much the same way, in
fact, as playing sports. Yet the closest thing to sport in
videogames is not necessarily a sports game. Reflexes,
speedy pattern recognition, spatial imagination—these
are what videogames demand. This is perhaps their
fundamental virtue. If so, the king of videogame genres
is arguably the most abstract, the least representational,
the most nakedly challenging: the puzzle game.
At the most basic level, a videogame puzzle
presents the player with a required action that cannot be
performed directly. You must therefore find the
intermediate steps and execute them in the right order.
Puzzle elements abound in all sorts of game genres. As
we mentioned earlier, Tomb Raider is in one sense a
puzzle game, in that it requires manipulation of blocks
in 3D space to unlock certain passages or secrets.
Object-manipulation or switch-tripping puzzles abound
in classic platformers like the early Mario games. Even
a shoot-’em-up like Defender in one sense poses very
high-speed puzzles measured in fractions of a second.
But a great puzzle game in its own right requires a
combination of perfect simplicity (both in terms of
rules and gameplay) and lasting challenge. Classics of
this particular genre are therefore thin on the ground.
80
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
The 1980s curio Sentinel was an intriguing attempt at a
sort of three-dimensional, simplified chess: the player
had to negotiate a checkered landscape, avoiding the
immolating gaze of the sentinel, until he occupied the
higher ground, at which point the sentinel could be
defeated by having its energy sucked out. A superb, and
much simpler, concept is that of Bust-A-Move (also
known as Puzzle Bobble). Brightly colored bubbles
hang from the top of the screen; new ones are slowly
added. Your job is to fire bubbles at them in such a way
that three of the same color meet; they then burst, and
take any others that they were supporting with them.
But really, to understand puzzle games you only
need one word: Tetris. Created by a Soviet
mathematician, Alexei Pajitnov, Tetris became the
subject of a fascinating intercontinental copyright war
(detailed in David Sheff’s excellent Game Over), and
Nintendo’s acquisition of the handheld rights to the
game helped to sell thirty-two million Game Boys in
one year, 1992.
The game itself is viciously simple. It’s raining
blocks. Some are square, some sticky-outy, some long
and thin, some infuriatingly L-shaped. In some unreal
universe of fractional gravity, they float down the
81
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
screen and must be rotated and laterally shifted so that
they all fit together at the bottom. When they do, the
horizontal line that they complete vanishes, and you
have a bit more breathing space. Your job is to clear all
the blocks away for as long as you can. Simple, but one
of the purest, most addictive videogame designs in
history. Where are you in the game? Nowhere. You are
pure mind, engaged in a purely symbolic struggle. As
in Space Invaders, you know that you can never win,
that eventually the blocks will descend so quickly that
the screen will be filled with a hideous jumble. Still you
try, for maybe this time you will do just a bit better.
Herein lies the demonic power, stripped naked of
graphical tinsel and story-lined misdirection, of every
videogame there is.
Family fortunes
This scoot around videogame genres is not meant to
be utterly exhaustive. But it’s a working sketch, a
snapshot. There isn’t room here for many videogames
through the years that defy easy genre categorization,
such as Deus Ex Machina, Parappa the Rapper, Skool
Daze, Nights or Ecco the Dolphin.
But one useful lesson is that the videogame
ecology is one rife with inter-species breeding: the
82
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
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 . . .”—so at the beginning of
thetwenty-first century we are offered driving-RPG
games,
RPG-exploration
games,
puzzle-
explorationshoot-’em-up games and more. And
increasingly, large-scale exploration games in particular
are incorporating “sub-games” of different styles within
them, as a reward for completing certain sections. Sonic
Adventure (1999) lets you play pinball or go
snowboarding; Ape Escape (1999) has a mini-boxing
game locked away inside.
But despite the myriad cosmetic and formal
differences, all videogames in fact share similar
concerns under the hood. When talking about racing
games, I mentioned a particular type that seemed very
serious and detailed: the simulation. Now, the concept
of “simulation” is actually rather pervasive in all sorts
of videogames. After all, God games and real-time
strategy games seem to present recognizable, real-life
phenomena like cities and armies, while exploration
games model seemingly realistic human beings
83
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
wandering through recognizable environments built of
stone or wood.
But how closely can certain videogames ever hope
to recreate something from the real world; and how
does another sort of videogame, one that is built around
a purely fantastic world, persuade us that it is in some
sense real?
How can you simulate what doesn’t exist?
84
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
3
UNREAL CITIES
Let’s get physical
You are playing a flashy, modern 3D videogame whose
theme is space combat. As your craft spins and yaws
around the fighting in response to frantic thumbpresses
and stick-yankings, the view from your cockpit shows
gorgeously rendered models of battlecruisers with
scarred gray hulls, detailed planet surfaces with moving
weather systems, accurately mapped constellations and
galactic dust-clouds floating serenely by in the distant
void. This must be the closest it is possible to get to
experiencing actual interstellar dogfighting. You feel
almost airsick, but exhilarated. Tracking, homing,
rolling, diving, firing, cackling in triumph. It’s pretty
real, isn’t it?
Actually, no. Consider this. You fight to get an
enemy craft in your sights, you fire off your lasers,
85
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
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).
But it’s wrong. Firing laser beams is not like skeet
shooting, because lasers are made of light,13 and light
travels very, very fast, at 300 million meters per
second. At the sort of distances modeled by
videogames, where fighting spacecraft are never more
than a mile or two apart, lasers will take about a
millionth of a second or less to hit home. It has been
demonstrated that the human mind cannot perceive as
separate events things that occur less than roughly three
thousandths of a second apart, so you will never have to
wait and watch for your lasers to hit home because, to
you, they will do so immediately.
But what of your enemy? Say he’s a nippy little
xenomorph, flying at thirty thousand feet per second.
That’s about twelve times faster than Concorde.
Unfortunately, even if he’s two miles away, and flying
directly across your sights (perpendicular to your line
_________________
13 Light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation, to be precise.
86
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
of aim) at that high speed, he will have moved a
pathetic total of four inches sideways in the time it
takes your laser beam to travel from your guns to his
hull. So unless he is very small, he is still very blown
up. Eat dust, little green man.
But perhaps our alien has very, very quick
reactions. Maybe he can spot your lasers firing, and
immediately engage some sort of warp drive to get him
the hell out of there in time. No, again. Because he
cannot see your lasers coming until some light from
your firing guns has traveled to his eyes. Unfortunately,
your lasers arrive at precisely the same time. As soon as
he sees you fire, he’s dead.14 And thanks to Einstein’s
theory of special relativity, one of whose principles is
that light appears to travel at a constant speed
regardless of the speed and direction of travel of any
observer, the alien is still fried the moment he sees you
fire even if he is running away in the opposite direction
as close to the speed of light as his little fusion engines
can manage.
That’s not all. Most of the time the lasers in this
epic space battle should be completely invisible. The
multi-hued rain of laser fire all around, a paradigm
_________________
14 This example is modified from one given in Lawrence M. Krauss’s, The
Physics of Star Trek, p. 165.
87
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
whose early apotheosis was defined by the beautifully
chaotic red and green laser bolt choreography in the
film Star Wars (1977)—that’s wrong too. A laser is a
very tightly concentrated ray of photons that have been
lined up so they are all traveling in exactly the same
direction (unlike a normal light source, which scatters
all over the place). Like any sort of light, a laser is only
visible if it reflects off something. At a club, for
instance, the low-powered circling laser beams are
visible because they are reflecting off small particles in
the intermingled clouds of dry ice and cigarette smoke.
However, anyone who tried to smoke a cigarette in the
interstellar void would have his brains sucked out
through his face (in fact, he wouldn’t be able to light
the cigarette in the first place, owing to the lack of
oxygen). There is no dry ice, either—space is, more or
less, a vacuum. Which means there is nothing that light
can reflect off on its way to the target. Hence, lasers are
invisible, unless they are coming straight at you, in
which case you are dead.
One corollary of this, of course, is that if the
cunning enemy aliens were to build their craft with
perfectly mirrored hulls, they would be impervious to
laser attack, because the light would just bounce off
them. You’d have thought they’d have worked that one
88
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
out in all the time they’ve had since Space Invaders,
getting thoroughly vaporized time and time again.
Why, then, do videogames get it so wrong? The
answer is they get it wrong deliberately, because with
“real” laser behavior it wouldn’t be much of a game. It
would be far too easy to blow things up. The challenge
of accounting for an enemy craft’s direction and speed,
of aiming appropriately off-target, and the concomitant
satisfaction of scoring a fiery hit, are artifacts of this
unrealism. Generally, the world-building philosophy of
videogames is one in which certain aspects of reality
can be modeled in a realistic fashion, while others are
deliberately skewed, their effects caricatured or
dampened according to the game’s requirements.
The most intriguing way in which videogames are
apparently becoming more “realistic” is in the arcane
world of physical modeling. Laser behavior may be a
fantastical paradigm, but such games nevertheless
enforce very strict systems of gravity and motion.
Videogames increasingly codify such natural laws,
such as those of Newtonian physics and beyond, in ever
more accurate ways. This sounds abstruse and
technical, but you have already experienced it if you’ve
ever played or seen a game even as old as Pong (1972).
Pong was modeled on simple physics: the way
89
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
the ball bounced off the bat obeyed the basic law “angle
of incidence equals angle of reflection.” Approach a
stationary bat at an angle of forty-five degrees, and
you’ll leave it at the same angle. Elementary stuff.
Similarly, Asteroids enjoyed a smattering of physics
modeling in the fact that your spacecraft had inertia:
you carried on moving across the screen even when
your engines stopped firing. And mastering this inertial
control system (later refined and made much trickier in
games like Thrust) was part of what made the game so
enjoyably challenging. Now processor speeds are such
that ever more tiny variables can be computed “on the
fly”—near instantaneously, as and when required—to
give the player a sense of interacting with objects that
behave just as they would in the real world.
At the vanguard of physics modeling is a company
called Mathengine. Their airy, relaxed Oxford
headquarters is crammed with casual young
mathematicians and physicists gazing intently at the
screens of muscular computers. One displays a crude
wireframe representation, in blocky green lines, of a
human calf and foot. “Modeling a simple ankle joint,”
the programmer confides. This sort of thing will soon
have applications in, for instance, soccer games: the
90
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
virtual players will respond to physical knocks and
tackles through a system based on detailed mechanical
models of the human musculo-skeletal system, rather
than through predetermined animations. Motioncapture
techniques, based on filming human actors and
digitizing the results, synthesize “realistic” movement
from the outside, and so in-game possibilities are
strictly limited to those that have been filmed in the
development studio. Physical modeling, on the other
hand, synthesizes movement from the inside, from the
interaction of fundamental parts, and so allows a
theoretically infinite range of character movement.
Other Mathengine demonstrations include a ball
bouncing onto a slatted rope bridge, whose resonant
swings and twists differ every time according to where
exactly the ball was dropped; and a string-puppet
articulated elephant, controlled just as in reality by a
wooden cross from which the strings hang, and which
can be tilted on two axes by manipulating a
motionsensing joypad attached to the computer. One
begins to have an ever stronger sense of moving
objects, rather than mere patterns.
Mathengine provides a software development kit
for games designers and other industries that allows
the developer to use “real,” very accurate and
91
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
processor-cheap physics in his or her applications. If a
game company is writing a racing game, for instance,
using a kit like Mathengine’s the car can be defined as
a certain mass resting, through a suspension system, on
four wheels, which have a certain frictional relationship
with the road. From this very simple mathematical
definition, it turns out that “realistic” car behavior, such
as oversteer and understeer, loadshifting and tilting,
comes for free. Whereas games developers used to have
to “kludge” the physics, to laboriously create something
that approximated to realistic behavior, physical
modeling makes it all happen as behavior emerging
from a simple set of definitions.
And this process directly affects the videogame
player’s experience. As Mathengine’s product manager
Paul Topping puts it, “Dynamic properties are a very
intuitive thing.” We are used to handling objects with
mass, bounce and velocity in the real world, and we can
predict their everyday interactions pretty well. You
don’t have to be Paul Newman to know roughly how a
pool ball is going to bounce off a cushion; you don’t
have to be Glenn Gould to know that striking a piano
key with force is going to produce a louder sound than
if you’d caressed it. And anyone who plays tennis is
92
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
automatically doing pretty complex parabolic calculus
without any conscious thought. Appreciation of
dynamic properties is hard-wired into the species—it’s
essential for survival. This, then, is one of the most
basic ways in which videogames speak to us as the real
world does, directly to the visceral, animal brain—
even as they tease the higher imagination by building a
universe that could never exist.
Furthermore, just as timing a good shot in tennis is
a pleasure in itself, there is a direct link between
convincing videogame dynamics and gameplay
pleasure. A game that is more physically realistic is
thereby, Topping says, “more aesthetically pleasing,”
because the properly modeled game enables us
pleasurably to exercise our physical intuition. “All
great games have physics in them—that’s what gives it
the lovely feel,” Topping points out. And this is just as
true for classic games such as Defender or Asteroids as
it is for modern racers like Gran Turismo 2000. In
Defender, you aim your ship to face left or right and
then thrust, and the simple inertia means that you can
flip around and fire at aliens while still traveling
backward; the subsequent application of forward thrust
takes time to kick in. Even a very simple puzzle game
such as Bust-A-Move exercises the intuitive
93
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
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 totally “realistic.” Just as with
the operation of lasers, videogames deliberately load
the dice one way or another. If you put a Formula One
racing driver in front of an accurately modeled racing
game, Topping says, he would still crash the car,
because of the gulf between controllability and visual
feedback. And an ordinary player would find the game
merely boring and frustrating. So, Topping explains,
“You’re gonna fake the physics. Increase friction, make
the car smaller— you choose what you model
properly.”
The lesson is that even with whiz-bang math
programming, a videogame in important ways remains
defiantly unreal. Videogames’ somewhat paradoxical
fate is the ever more accurate modeling of things that
don’t, and couldn’t, exist: a car that grips the road like
Superglue, which bounces uncrumpled off roadside
barriers; a massive spacecraft with the maneuverability
of a bumblebee; a human being who can survive, bones
intact, a three-hundred-foot fall into water. We
94
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
don’t want absolutely real situations in videogames. We
can get that at home.
Let’s stick together
Naturally, the player doesn’t mind this fakery, this
playing fast and loose with the laws of nature in the
name of fun. But a critical requirement is that the
game’s system remains consistent, that it is internally
coherent. Crucially, it is lack of coherence rather than
unrealism that ruins a gameplaying experience. This is
largely but not exclusively a phenomenon of more
modern videogames, whose increasing complexity in
terms of space, action and tasks clearly places a greater
strain on the designer’s duty to create a rock-solid
underlying structure.
Videogame incoherence has three types: it can
apply to causality, function or space. Incoherence of
causality, firstly, appears, for ex-ample, in a driving
game such as V-Rally (1997), where driving at full
speed into another car causes a slight slowing down,
but hitting a boulder at the road’s edge leads to a
spectacular vehicular somersault. Another example
crops up in Tomb Raider III, where a rocket-launcher
blows up one’s enemies into pleasingly gory, fleshy
chunks, but does no damage to a simple wooden door,
95
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
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.” You’ve got a rocket-launcher. If you
point it at the floor and then fire as you jump, you’ll be
catapulted much higher into the air by the recoil of your
foolishly potent weapon. Eminently reasonable.
Incoherence of function is more serious. In many
games one encounters “single-use” objects, such as a
magic book that only works in a particular location or a
cigarette lighter that can only be used to illuminate a
certain room. Resident Evil typifies this lazy approach
to game design, with all manner of special scrolls,
gems, books and other things that are used once as
puzzle-solving tokens and then forgotten about. Tomb
Raider’s rocket-launcher fails on this count too,
because its use is artificially restricted in the game. If a
game designer chooses to give the player a special
object or weapon, it ought to work consistently and
reliably through all appropriate circumstances in the
game, or the believably unreal illusion is shattered.
96
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
By contrast, perfect coherence of function is great
fun. It is just one virtue of Zelda 6415 that, despite the
colorfully huge gallimaufry of in-game objects, they are
hardly ever single-use items; it is an unprecedentedly
rich and varied yet highly consistent gameworld. The
titular ocarina, a clay flute, has a different function
according to what tune is played on it: if Link plays
certain songs he has learned (the gamer must physically
play the notes using the control buttons), he may cause
day to turn to night, invoke a storm, warp to a different
place in the gameworld or cheer up a miserable rock-
eating king. Link’s hoverboots can be used in several
different places for several different results. The bow
and arrow might be used to kill a far-away enemy, or
(in one brilliant problem) to melt a frozen switch by
firing an arrow through the flame of a blazing torch
while standing on a revolving platform.
But of course a bow and arrow isn’t going to open
locked doors. You wouldn’t expect it to. The hookshot,
a retracting chain device with a hook on the end, may
be used to kill enemies, but it is also a means to get up
to hard-to-reach places, Batman-style. Even here there
_________________
15 Shorthand for the remainder of this book for Legend of Zelda: Ocarina
of Time.
97
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
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.
The third type of incoherence is that of spatial
management. Tomb Raider III adds to its heroine’s
series of possible moves—which already include
implausibly high jumps and rolls—a crawl, so that the
player can move around in low passageways. But at a
certain stage in the game Lara finds herself at the end
of a low tunnel, giving out onto a corridor. Try as the
player might, it is impossible to get Lara out into that
corridor, owing to the game’s basic construction around
a series of uniformly sized blocks. If the tunnel
entrance were a full block above the corridor floor,
Lara could get out. But the getting-out-of-a-tunnel
animation requires her to lower herself fully down the
side of the block while hanging from her hands, and the
tunnel exit does not achieve the required altitude. So
the move becomes impossible. This sort of
inconsistency also rears its gory head in Resident Evil,
where the player is not allowed simply to drop
unwanted objects on the floor, but must stow them
98
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
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. As Chris Crawford says in The
Art of Computer Game Design, special-case rules
(which roughly map on to our causal, functional and
spatial incoherences) are bad: “In the perfect game
design, each rule is applied universally.” This is easy to
verify if you consider the situation in other types of
game—chess, for instance: Garry Kasparov would be
profoundly, glaringly unimpressed if his opponent
sought to stave off defeat by pronouncing that, actually,
at this particular juncture, the black queen was not
allowed to move diagonally.
Tomb Raider III also illustrates perfectly another
potential danger of trying to increase “realism” in a
game—in this case by adding extra ranges of
movement to a human character. Because the hero of
Manic Miner lives in such a resolutely bizarre world,
where flying electrified lavatories are the least of his
worries, we do not worry that our character is able only
to walk and to jump. But in the far more
99
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
naturalistic milieu of the Tomb Raider series, the
bolted-on possibilities of movement that are added in
each sequel only serve to remind the player how odd it
is that Lara can run, swim, crawl and jump, but cannot
punch or kick an assailant, for instance. She cannot
even sit down, although given her lecherously
siliconenhanced curves, it is probably just as well, for
she would never get up again.
This is not to say that expanded physical
possibilities in human characters are bad—in
themselves they are good—but their introduction poses
other problems of design that must be attended to. In
Zelda 64, for instance, Link’s inability to punch or kick
is never an issue, for by the time he is first in danger he
already permanently owns a sword. A sword is better
than a fist, so the player doesn’t feel that anything is
missing. By contrast, Lara Croft often goes about
unarmed among enemies, having had her guns
confiscated, and so her unwillingness to punch and kick
is frustrating.
To complain about these aspects in a game, of
course, is not incompatible with happily accepting that
the heroine must on occasion do battle with a slavering
Tyrannosaurus rex. There is a crucial difference
between axiomatic principles of the fantastical world
100
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
on the one hand—for instance, the laser behavior
considered earlier, or Manic Miner’s winged cisterns—
and inconsistencies in the fantastical system—such as
Lara’s rocket-launcher or Resident Evil’s item boxes—
on the other.
Life in plastic
Of Sweeney’s16 three certainties of life,
videogames have so far largely eschewed birth and
copulation. But, as if in sardonic compensation,
they are triply teeming with death. And their
particular reinvention of death is but one of a
whole lexicon of happily irrealist principles that
videogames have amassed over their history.
Death in a videogame is multimodal: it means one
thing for your enemies, another thing for certain
other types of enemies, yet another for you. Shoot
a space invader and he is gone for ever. Kill a
dungeon skeleton in Zelda 64 and it is dust—but if
you leave and then reenter the room, it has
horribly regenerated, there to be fought all over
again. But what does death mean for you, the
player? If the aliens’ rain of bombs becomes
overwhelming and one hits your ship, blowing it
to pixelated smithereens, it is certainly bad news.
But wait—suddenly a gleaming new ship
_________________
16 Protagonist of T. S. Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes, that is.
101
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
appears at the bottom of the screen, under your control,
and you can continue the never-ending battle from the
point where you left off.
We are used to thinking of “life” as a single,
sacred thing, the totality of our experiences. But
videogames redefine a “life” as an expendable,
iterable part of a larger campaign. In part this
resembles the brutal calculus of war, where a human
life, normally the definition of total value in
peacetime, is arithmetized as being worth, say, one
hundredth of the value of taking the next ridge. But
videogames offer a multitude of lives to the same
individual. It is instant reincarnation, though
reincarnation in a body indistinguishable from the
original. It is instant expiation for the sin of failure.
The standard number of lives granted at the
beginning of a game is three, which corresponds to
the paradigmatic number of tries allowed in many
other games, from a baseball hitter’s number of
strikes to a javelin-thrower’s attempts at the gold, to
the number of doors from which a contestant must
choose in the American gameshow Let’s Make a
Deal,17 or the number of “acts” or significant
subdivisions of the protagonist’s story in classical
_________________
17 Source of the amusing “Monty Hall Paradox” in probability theory. For
an excellent explanation, see Deborah J. Bennett, Randomness (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1999).
102
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
drama.18 In a universe where guns have infinite
ammunition and spacecraft infinite fuel, it is life itself
that becomes a resource whose loss is survivable.
Yet a videogame “life” is not just a resource but
also a possible reward. Games such as Defender or
Space Invaders offer “extra lives” when a certain score
is achieved (usually a multiple of ten or twenty
thousand). It resembles an ethically inverted form of
Buddhism. In the Eastern philosophy, if you commit
wrongs, your growing karmic debt means you are
constantly reincarnated into a new existence in order to
suffer anew. But whereas Buddhism’s final aim is to
jump off the exhausting carousel of constant
reincarnation and to be no more, life in a videogame is
always a good thing, and killing is the morally
praiseworthy action required to resurrect it. The fact
that simple survival edges the player closer, as the score
increases, to an extra life argues that—as Nietzsche
would have growled through his mustache after half an
hour at the Robotron controls—what does not destroy
you makes you stronger.
The concept of multiple videogame “lives,” then,
bespeaks an arena of strategic experimentation in
_________________
18 The claim that classical drama was born from the gameplaying instinct
is made persuasively in Johann Huizinga, Homo Ludens.
103
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
which a fatal mistake need not be your last; branches of
a system can be multiply explored until all the lives are
used up. But when that happens, the downside is grim
indeed. The result in this final situation is not a simple
death, but a violent ejaculation from the safety of the
entire game universe. The petit mort of Homo ludens:
Game Over.
Subsequent to this distribution of multiple “lives,”
videogames began to introduce another highly
unrealistic paradigm, again disguised in deceptively
ordinary language: that of “health.” Whereas in Space
Invaders or Asteroids the player’s ship is destroyed by
contact with one bomb, bullet or rock, later games
further subdivide a life with a colored bar representing
“health,” which is degraded (to use an ugly
latetwentieth- century military euphemism) by damage
to the player’s character. When the bar is completely
emptied, the life is gone. Applied to spacecraft or other
vehicles, this concept is understandable, as it could be
thought to measure the integrity of the craft’s hull or
other analog, flight-critical criteria. Yet from a
doggedly literal point of view, it approaches risibility
when applied to human characters. Lara Croft can take
several bullets in the torso, or get savaged by a tiger,
104
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
while losing only an eighth of her “health.” Modern
videogames, however, are so full of perilous situations
that such a sliding scale, rather than simply being alive
or dead, is crucial to the game’s playability.
Health is also the primary means of adjudication in
beat-’em-up games, where each combatant has an
“energy” meter that is depleted when the opponent
lands a punch or a kick. The player whose energy is
reduced to zero first is the loser. Of course this is
unrealistic in that an ax blow to the head—in Soul
Calibur, for instance—only takes off a fraction of your
“health.” Yet it is a causally incoherent system as well:
a punch to the face does the same damage as a kick to
the shin, although in real life it would be debilitating in
a completely different way. This is another obvious
future application for developments in physical
modeling, when the game will “know” automatically
that a jolt to the head will affect vision and balance,
whereas a leg trauma will affect locomotion and
kicking ability.
The first steps toward this kind of more complex
system have already been made in games like the
fascinating Bushido Blade (1997), a more “serious”
weapon-based game in which one well-aimed blow
with a katana or sledgehammer will—naturally—kill
105
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
the opponent, while severe blows to a limb will disable
him. The spectacle of two wonderfully animated virtual
fighters in beautiful oriental robes shuffling about a
cherry-tree garden on their knees because leg injuries
mean that they can no longer stand is hugely amusing.
The wittiest use of the “health” paradigm yet seen is
in Metal Gear Solid (1998), an exploration game that
initiated its own sub-genre, the “sneak-’em-up.” The
player has access to rafts of guns and bombs, but if she
simply runs about firing, the guards will call for
reinforcements and quickly go in for a kill. The
gameplay necessarily becomes stealthy: guards and
security cameras must be avoided wherever possible. In
the game, the player controls a soldier, Solid Snake,
who can be made to smoke a cigarette. The game
provides the mandatory tobacco health warning, and
while Snake is puffing away, his health meter slowly
goes down. If you smoke for long enough, health
reaches a minimal sliver on the bar, but it is impossible
in the game to commit suicide by cigarette.
This raises an important point. The programmers of
Metal Gear Solid have unfortunately not provided the
option of smoking several cigarettes at once, or eating a
whole pack, which would almost certainly kill you. It
106
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
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 possibilities of action. But a good
videogame will allow predetermined actions to be
combined in creative ways that certainly weren’t
deliberately predicted at the design stage. In chess, after
all, you don’t invent the forms of individual moves, you
choose creatively among them and string them together
in a strategy. This is the basic difference, if operating at
a far less complex level, that we touched on in the last
chapter, between beat-’emups, which provide many
hundreds of individual actions but little freedom of
combination, and something like Robotron, with two
basic actions— move and fire—and strategy aplenty.
Indeed, as Eugene Jarvis, programmer of Robotron and
Defender, told J. C. Herz about someone he watched
playing the latter game: “He was doing things I never
envisioned, never thought of, tactics I never dreamed
of.”
Meanwhile, back to smoking. Metal Gear Solid
stresses that it’s bad for you, but if Snake hasn’t found
some infrared goggles, he needs to smoke a cigarette in
107
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
order to render visible a web of security beams that will
set off alarms if he breaks them; and if he smokes while
using the sniper rifle, his aim is steadier. In this way,
with its alluring mix of peril and desirability, smoking
in Metal Gear Solid, as in life, is sublime.19 In a more
general sense, it is an example of how health can be
traded for other benefits concerning the game objective.
The idea of health sacrifice is a relatively new one; it
appears in a much cruder fashion in the Tomb Raider
games, where if Lara is in a recessed pit filled with
spikes or barbed wire, she can avoid injury by walking
carefully, but to get out of the pit she is forced to jump
and therefore lacerate her legs.
Most games featuring a health bar also provide
some means for the player to restore her health, rather
than face an inexorable slide toward loss of life. Pick
up a mystical “medikit” and bullet wounds are healed,
all injuries forgotten, stamina replenished. Medikits and
other health-restoring devices are further examples of a
class of items in the gameworld that usually obey none
of the gameworld’s normal physical rules: power-ups.
They can be items on the floor to be picked
_________________
19 See the intoxicating Richard Klein, Cigarettes Are Sublime (Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995).
108
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
up, or amorphous blobs of energy floating in the air to
be driven or flown through.
Power-ups in general enhance the abilities of the
player’s character in the game: aside from restoring
health or granting an extra life, they may also increase
speed, envelop the player’s ship in a temporary shield
(which mysteriously stops bullets from entering, but
allows the player to shoot outward) or furnish the
player with one of an arsenal of extra-destructive
weapons with which to meet the next enemy onslaught.
In their instantaneous and nakedly magical effect,
power-ups partake of a totally different ontology from
anything else on the screen. Their mode and effect is
purely relational, redefining the logic of how the
player’s character and the enemies interact.
Out of control
What’s the most glaringly unreal aspect of
videogames? It’s a cybernetic thing. Cybernetics is the
study of control systems (from the Greek kubernパtパs,
meaning “steersman”). And videogame control systems
are for the most part radically removed, in structural
terms, from what happens on the screen. I have so far
been talking about how videogames manipulate the
imaginative
involvement
of
the
player,
109
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
in the ruses and paradigms of their unreal worlds. But
the videogame is not simply a cerebral or visual
experience; just as importantly it is a physical
involvement—the tactile success or otherwise of the
human– machine interface. Some games recommend
the use of a peripheral: an extra piece of interface
hardware that plugs into the console or PC. For driving
games this would be a steering wheel, complete with
floor pedals; for Time Crisis the player buys an actual
lightgun with which to shoot at the television screen.
Yet most games are still controlled with curiously
alienating devices: a standard joystick or “joypad,” or a
computer mouse and keyboard.
We saw one way in which this can hobble
gameplay in the last chapter, when it was noted that
beat-’em-ups rely on memorized combinations of
button-presses to perform almost arbitrary series of
martial arts moves. Sports games, too, suffer from a
particularly limiting cybernetic dissonance. The swing
of a golf club, for instance, is accomplished in
videogames simply by pressing buttons at the right time
while observing “power meters.” All manner of ball
tricks, spins and tackle evasions are called up in a
football game by particular combinations of buttons.
This is clearly not ideal for convincing involvement
110
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
with the action. But there is no reason why such an
arrangement should persist.
Early sports games like Daley Thompson’s
Decathlon actually boasted a far more compelling
physical
interface
with
the
notorious
“joystickwaggling” method: the faster you could
waggle your joystick from side to side, the faster your
character would sprint or skate. This system has been
resurrected for Konami’s brilliant multi-player athletics
game International Track and Field 2 (1999), except
that the player must now press two buttons alternately
at very high speed. But Sony’s present-day controller
for the PlayStation, the Dual Shock pad with two
thumbcontrolled analogue joysticks, has so far been
woefully underused in just the types of game it could
revolutionize in a similar way.
An analogue joystick provides far greater sensitivity
and range of control. The old-style digital joysticks
only recognized “on” or “off” states of any particular
direction; the analogue joystick recognizes degrees of
change. You can move, for example, slightly right or
fully right, with degrees in between, which may
correspond to various velocities between a slow walk
and a run, or various rotational positions of
111
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
a steering wheel. The cybernetic possibilities are rich
and largely unexplored.
A tennis game, for instance, could use one stick for
your character’s movement over the court, and the
other to control directly the movement of the racquet
arm when playing a shot. Move the stick faster, and you
play a more powerful stroke; move it in a curve, and
you impart spin. Similarly, in a boxing game, each stick
could be programmed to control directly the movement
of an arm. This seems such an obvious idea that it is
astonishing that software companies do not so far
implement it generally. The first, and so far only, use of
the idea occurs in the splendid gadget-festooned
exploration game Ape Escape (1999), in which the
player must row an inflatable dinghy downstream by
rotating both sticks, each controlling a separate oar;
sub-games offer direct control of skis or, indeed, arms
in “Monkey Boxing.” Analogue control is becoming a
new standard. The standard controller for Sega’s
Dreamcast console only provides one analogue stick
instead of Sony’s two, which is a bad oversight,
although its dual triggers are both analogue. Sony’s
PlayStation2 controller, meanwhile, boasts analogue
response on all its buttons, opening up intriguing new
gameplay possibilities.
112
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
Another fairly recent cybernetic innovation has
certainly enhanced the “feel” of many videogames:
force feedback. Sony’s Dual Shock controller is so
named because the videogame can tell it to vibrate or
“rumble” in the player’s hands. This vibrational
feedback can be used in a driving game, to simulate the
shuddering of braking or a skid into a gravel pit; it can
add a physical dimension to damage done to the
player’s character by bullet or blunt instrument; in
Metal Gear Solid, a game that makes splendidly
creative use of this extra mode of information, it even
simulates the thumping of the main character’s
heartbeat when he is looking through the scope of his
sniper rifle—the rhythmical jittering of the control pad
justifiably makes it difficult to aim accurately. We can
expect that in the future controllers will provide more
subtle gradations of vibration, as well as physically
resisting the player’s movement and even, as
hypothesized in Kurt Andersen’s 1999 novel Turn of
the Century, changing temperature according to the
action onscreen.
Perhaps the most enjoyable recent cybernetic
novelty is that offered by Konami’s fabulously
eccentric Dance Dance Revolution (now known in the
West by the inferior title Dancing Stage), in which the
113
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
player must use her whole body to control the game. It
consists of actually dancing, on a pressure-sensitive
floormat, in time to pumping techno music blaring from
the speakers. The screen simply shows a bunch of
symbols floating downward, and they correspond to
squares on the floormat that must be hit by the feet at
exactly the right moment. This speedy techno version
of Twister provokes the thought that the best
videogame interfaces are indeed those that are most
intuitive (an idea that will crop up later in another
context). No one needs to learn how to stamp on the
floor, just as no one needs to learn how to turn a
steering wheel or shoot a play gun.
In general, cybernetic developments will always
increase the possibilities of closer and more
pleasurable interaction with a videogame. In just the
same way that a motor-industry journalist might say
one car “feels” nicer to drive than another, there is a
particular pleasure to be had simply from engaging in
a responsive control system, whether in videogames
or in real life. It is no accident, then, that Nintendo’s
Shigeru Miyamoto, widely regarded as the “God of
videogames” (in Jeremy Smith’s phrase), not only
designs software but actually designs the controllers
114
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
for each new Nintendo system in order to maximize
gameplay potential.
When I spoke to Richard Darling of British
developers Code-masters about what makes a game
“fun,” he echoed Paul Topping’s admiration of early
physics-based games such as Thrust: “You’re flying
that little space rocket around and you pick up a ball
and it’s on the end of a pole with a weight, and the way
it swings and the way your thrust and acceleration
affects the swing and the motion and everything is
extremely intuitive. It’s complex, but it’s intuitive.” But
more than that, according to Darling, Thrust was also
cybernetically clever:
The control system is deep—in that anyone can pick it up and
play it; you’ve got a thrust button and you rotate left and
rotate right. Now if that was move left, move right and move
forward, the gameplay would be extremely limited. But the
fact that what you’re actually doing is thrusting, which is
accelerating you, and you can rotate to any angle, and thrust
at any angle, means that the learning curve in becoming an
expert at the control system is very long.
That was true of Super Mario Bros as well. It seems like a
simple “press a button to jump, run left, run right” game,
but if you analyze it, you actually accelerated left
115
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
and right up to a maximum speed, and when you jumped, the
amount of time you held the button down for determined how
high you jumped. Therefore there was an awful lot of skill in
running along over a hole, jumping up on to a platform and
landing on it without falling off the other side. It was actually
an extremely skillful thing to do.
What about total immersion? Virtual reality systems
have been around for many years and no doubt will
soon be affordable and efficient. Some combination of
headset (such as Sony’s Glasstron monitors),
motionsensitive data gloves and so on will enable the
player to become totally immersed in a game, just as
the science fiction movies have been telling us for
decades. Will this, then, become the dominant means
of videogame control? Perhaps; but if so, the spirit of
Heidegger will rise again to warn that such cybernetic
hegemony will necessarily narrow the field of
possibilities. Immersive VR will be fine for
exploration games, driving games, 3D space shoot-
’em-ups and so on. But what happens to the
pleasurable unreality of human-body physics? How
will such a system enable the player to somersault like
Lara Croft, to climb sheer walls, to swim a hundred
feet down in icy Arctic rivers or to finish off a brutal
116
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
martial arts combination of smacks and punches by
floating six feet into the air and delivering a
roundhouse kick to the head?
Counterintuitively, it seems for the moment that the
perfect videogame “feel” requires the ever-increasing
imaginative and physical involvement of the player to
stop somewhere short of full bodily immersion. After
all, a sense of pleasurable control implies some
modicum of separation: you are apart from what you
are controlling. You don’t actually want to be there,
performing the dynamically exaggerated and physically
perilous moves yourself; it would be exhausting and
painful. Remember, you don’t want boring, invisible
lasers; you don’t want a Formula One car that takes
years of training to drive; and you don’t want to die
after taking just one bullet. You don’t want it to be too
real.
The purpose of a videogame, then, is never to
simulate real life, but to offer the gift of play. In a
videogame, we are citizens of an invisible city where
there is no danger, only challenge. And our videogame
metropolis, like any city, is teeming and multifaceted.
We have already sketched out a rough map of its
geography. Later in this book we shall look at its
architecture, dig below its tarmac to the pipes and
117
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
cables that keep it running, and stroll around in its
forest of signs. But for the moment we want to know
just what kind of industry buzzes behind those
imposing towers. Is this a city of words, a modern
Alexandria, or a city of images, a virtual Hollywood?
Look over on that street corner: a camera crew,
smoking under black plastic cloaks, huddled in the
neon-flecked rain. Let’s go and ask them.
118
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
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.” On the summer
1999 release of Silent Hill, a horror videogame in
which you play the character of a man searching a
deserted American town for his missing daughter, one
journalist claimed that this game “fully exploited” the
developments toward “fully interactive cinema.” The
media buzz is that cinema and videogames are on
convergent paths. If this is true, Hollywood ought to be
worried that videogames are going to swallow it whole.
Some of the world’s best videogame developers
happily admit that they lean heavily on styles of action
119
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
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. Konami’s publicity for Silent
Hill, meanwhile, claimed “cinematic quality” as a
virtue, noting that its developers cited David
Cronenberg, Stephen King and David Lynch as
aesthetic influences.
So what in fact makes Silent Hill like a film? Well,
it has an impressive introductory video sequence,
prerendered with high-quality computer graphics
workstations, which tells the story of how your
character suffers a car crash and wakes up in the
ghostly small town with his daughter missing. This
sequence is indeed very filmic, with fast cutting and
weird camera angles. However, it’s not part of the
game, even though one entertainment magazine that
featured a piece on Silent Hill clearly based its
judgment of the game’s “filmic” quality entirely on this
video sequence.
During the game itself, the part you actually get to
play, the graphics are of a far inferior quality, and
occasional scenes of scripted dialogue between
120
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
characters are incompetently written and amazingly
badly acted. Some films have a “so bad it’s good”
quality, but this hack attempt at drama is just so bad it’s
appalling. If it’s supposed to be like a film in this way,
it’s a film you wouldn’t ever want to see.
However, what Silent Hill does successfully breed
from its cinematic forebears is quite simple: a powerful
sense of atmosphere. Tense wandering in dark
environments is interrupted by shocks, sudden
appearances of blood-curdling monsters. Silence is
interrupted by grating noise, making you jump and
increasing your nervousness. The same sort of
atmospheric virtue is present in the Resident Evil series
of zombie videogames, which themselves are the
subject of interesting cross-media developments. It was
long rumored that George Romero was to make a live-
action film based on Resident Evil, which would have
been apt, not only because he directed a highbudget
television commercial for the second game in the
franchise, but because the Resident Evil games
themselves cheerfully lift wholesale the camera angles
and action sequences from Romero’s own classic
zombie flicks such as Dawn of the Dead.
Why is it particularly the horror genre, and to a
lesser extent science fiction, that largely provides the
121
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
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. The answer is that the horror genre can easily
do away with character and plot; it is the detail of the
monsters, the rhythm of the tension and shocks, that
matter. Plot and character are things videogames find
very difficult to deal with.
The fact is that Silent Hill and Resident Evil
resemble each other far more than they resemble any
film you care to name. But will this necessarily always
be the case, or could the much-hyped “convergence”
between films and videogames become a reality?
The gift of sound and vision
Videogames are superficially like films in one major
respect, which is that they communicate to the player
through eyes and ears. Just as film crews include
specialized audio technicians for the post-production
dubbing of sound effects, the sound design of
videogames too is a mini-art in itself, and development
companies also employ composers to provide musical
122
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
soundtracks. At first, this looks very like film industry
practice, but it soon becomes clear that deployment of
the audio arts cannot always follow similar lines in the
two media.
The reason sound design is important in
videogames is quite simple: if a laser makes a
pleasing, fizzy hum, and if an exploding enemy makes
a particularly satisfying boom, then the game is just
more fun to play. Defender (1980) had particularly
avant-garde sound design for its time, with its near
sub-bass rumblings and eldritch alien buzzings offset
by the heroic, almost melodic sound of your ship’s
weapon fending off the vicious hordes. Purely abstract
sonic invention such as Defender’s was partly
necessitated by the comparative crudeness, in those
days, of the videogame machine’s sound chip. But
now that videogame systems can read huge amounts of
digitally encoded sound straight off a CD, sound
design has largely moved in a more conventional
direction, using “samples” (digital recordings) to
reproduce actual, real-world sounds. A modern
development company might devote many hours to
accurate sampling of different cars’ engine noises for a
driving game, to make the whole audio-visual
123
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
experience as immersive and (deceptively) “authentic”
as possible.
This concentration on “real” sounds in general
parallels what movies do. But just as a film with terrific
abstract sound design, like David Lynch’s Lost
Highway, is highly refreshing to the ears, so I think this
attitude of “realism” is narrow-minded in a videogame
context. The best audio engineering now seems to be
constrained to highly generic videogames such as space
shoot-’em-ups or science fiction racers, where the
fantasy world can justifiably be accompanied by
fantasy sound, all manner of lovingly crafted blips and
whooshes. An instance of particularly good
contemporary work is in the otherwise rather shallow
shooter Omega Boost, where, if you bump into
enemies, a grating metallic clang enhances the
momentary discomfort, and spacecraft whoosh past you
to fabulously alien stereo effect. The sonic mayhem
(with these effects unfortunately competing with a
musical score of Japanese heavy metal) effectively
increases the level of sweating tension in the player.
Such a strong division between games that enjoy
“real,” sampled sounds and games with an invented
sonic architecture, I think, is unfortunate. Surely, if
124
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
videogame developers were to experiment, say, with
weird and unexpected sound effects to accompany
supposedly “realistic” visual action, this might open up
new avenues of strangeness and even comedy—the
amusing disjunction of small action with epic sound,
say—to future digital experiences. Videogames are best
at imagining whole new worlds of their own, so why
can’t they invent more new sounds to bring them to
sensual life?
Moreover, given that in real life all sorts of
information about our environment is constantly
flooding into our ears, videogames ought perhaps to
think of cleverer ways to let us use this gift in their
imaginary worlds. After all, a videogame player, unlike
someone watching a film, needs to use information
from the senses to decide what to do next. Any sound
can become a clue, a spur to action. One fascinating
new idea has been tried by Rare, which in Perfect Dark
(2000) has engineered a quasi–surroundsound system
that lets the attuned player know which direction
enemies are in purely by listening to their footsteps.
This is one example of sound design that is not
merely decorative, but functional. Many games,
particularly in the popular horror genre, are already
125
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
quite creative in using sound to enhance the player’s
involvement. Resident Evil, for instance, shows a
superb handling of sound effects that is directly
influenced by its movie forebears. One room is eerily
silent, whereas a large galleried hall is ominously and
stressfully dominated by the solemn ticking of a clock.
When the moans of zombies suddenly float out of
nowhere, or the silence is broken by the piercing sound
of a smashing window, you know you had better run.
Silent Hill, too, does this sort of thing very well. Early
on in the game, the player’s character is given a radio
that seems to be broken, but it emits a nerve-fraying
fortissimo jangling noise whenever a monster is
approaching. The evocation of fear is deliciously
heightened by this aural sign, as you run around
panicking when the alarm goes off, not knowing from
which direction the beast is going to approach through
the omnipresent fog.
Videogames’ musical soundtracks, too, are an
important part of the player’s aesthetic experience. But
oddly, in the far-off days of the Commodore 64 and
Amiga, videogame music was far more distinct as a
stylistic genre than it is now. The composers generally
had to wrestle with programming languages to force the
most sophisticated sound possible out of woefully
126
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
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. And because the
microcomputer’s sound chip didn’t have much inbuilt
information to speak of—unlike a modern synthesizer,
it didn’t boast banks of ready-made instrument
noises—the composer also had to invent the quality of
each of the sounds he used. The star of this era was the
musician Rob Hubbard, whose excellent soundtracks
for old games—with their airbrushed, joyfully artificial
aesthetic that mixed robotic beats with hummable
tunes—have now been collectively preserved on a
commercially available compact disc.
Nowadays, videogame soundtracks fall into
two main classes: the compilation of licensed pop
tracks, or the specially composed score. Slapping
an existing pop record over a videogame, or a
film, is a rather hit-ormiss affair: as we have seen,
it worked wonders for early PlayStation games
like WipEout, but it can equally be grindingly
inappropriate, the French heavyrock songs on V-
Rally 2 being an emetic case in point. The
alternative of a specially written score is now
127
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
blessed with total sonic freedom, because videogame
systems (apart from the poor Nintendo 64) now read
music directly off a CD, so soundtracks are recorded
with full banks of pro-quality digital instruments and no
restrictions on epic breadth. Sometimes the music may
even be recorded by a full orchestra of live musicians,
as is the case with Outcast.
The problem with such scores, even when—as is
increasingly the case—they are highly competent and
pleasing pieces of music in their own right, is that,
unlike the videogame’s visuals, they are not interactive.
A film score is written to accompany a predetermined
and unchanging visual story. So it is recorded once and
cast in stone. But videogames can change from one
moment to the next depending on what the player does.
One way round this is just to cut in a rather ugly
fashion from a light-hearted piece of music to a doom-
laden one when something bad happens onscreen.
Microsoft has developed a system called Direct Music
that hopes to automate this technique more smoothly.
But all this means in practice is that the composer
writes tiny little “cells” of music a few bars long that
are then algorithmically combined into longer episodes
by the processing engine. (Avant-garde classical
musicians had exactly this idea of combining cells in
the 1960s.)
128
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
The best videogame scores circumvent this knotty
problem altogether by not attempting to be continuous,
film-like soundtracks at all. Instead, music is used as
another kind of atmosphere-heightening information.
The rather beautiful title music of the Tomb Raider
games features undulating orchestral strings with a
lovely oboe tune. But within the game, the mood and
instrumentation change dramatically, according to the
fictional context. The celebrated Venice level of Tomb
Raider II, for example, features a superb piece of
pastiche baroque. In these games, music’s appearance
is much rarer than it is in your average film, and when
the speakers burst into a fast cello motif or a clatter of
electronic percussion, you know that something
exciting is going to happen and you look round rapidly
for an enemy to avoid, or watch in awe as another
fabulous vaulted ceiling stretches up above you, and
then the music fades away again, leaving you with the
drips of condensation from the walls or the rumbling of
some ominous nearby machinery. When music in a
game is this good, less is often more.
So music in a videogame does not work in exactly
the same ways as music in a film. In a game, sound can
be functional, a means of providing information that the
player then acts on. But what about the visuals? Do
129
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
videogames present information to our eyes in the same
way as films?
CinÉ qua non?
Since the upstart videogame form shattered film’s
monopoly on the moving image, the two media have
been engaged in a wary standoff. As their powers of
graphic realization have increased, videogames have
begun superficially to look a bit more like films, while
films have become more interested in videogames as
visual furnishing and conceptual subject matter.
Videogames have lovingly appropriated set-piece forms
from the cinematic milieux of horror, action and
science fiction (the enormous monster, the car chase,
the space dogfight), while films have stolen ever more
brazenly from videogames’ hyperkinetic grammar (the
exaggerated sound effects, the disregard for classical
gravitational laws) in executing those same forms on
the silver screen.
It is, of course, understandable that the mass media,
in having to deal with the vast but to them
incomprehensible culture of videogames, naturally
reach for the vocabulary of film—apparently the
nearest medium in visual terms—in order to describe
such games as Silent Hill. But before we start positing
130
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
a hybrid future of “interactive movies,” it would be as
well to take a cold mental shower by looking at what
actually exists in film videogame crossover form.
Disney’s Tron (1982) was the first film actively to
engage in an aesthetic dialogue with videogames,
arguably as a symptom of Tinseltown’s increasing
insecurity about its silicon rival—for at the time, just
before their first market crash, videogames were
grossing more in America than the Hollywood cinema
and gambling put together. Tron is still probably the
best film of its kind. The shallow, primary-color fable
about a gameplaying wunderkind beamed into
cyberspace to do battle with an evil programmer was
based around live-action interpretations of existing
videogame formats (most notably the “light cycle”
race), and then soon became a licensed arcade
videogame in its own right.
For videogame companies, film licenses are often a
sure winner. Studios generally acquire the videogame
rights to a film, such as Batman, Rambo, Aliens, or
Raiders of the Lost Ark, and then produce a painfully
substandard platform game or shoot-’em-up that might
borrow a certain visual style from one or two of the
film’s scenes but has nothing to do with the story line.
In 1983, famously, Atari, having acquired the rights to
131
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
produce an ET videogame, was so confident of its
success that it produced nearly six million copies. One
fly in the ointment: the game was terrible. Gamers
aren’t stupid. Most of the cartridges were eventually
buried in a landfill site in New Mexico, where one
hopes they will eventually provide some amusement for
archaeologists in the distant future.
Films based on videogames are even worse, as
anyone will testify who has giggled throughout the
truly spectacular artistic abyss that is Street Fighter:
The Movie, starring sex symbol Jean-Claude Van
Damme and renowned pugilist Kylie Minogue. Mortal
Kombat was not much better, and Bob Hoskins
displayed rather less animation than his pixellated
counterpart in Super Mario Bros. Meanwhile, the 2001
film of Tomb Raider, starring Angelina Jolie,
abandoned the essence of the videogame character’s
graceful movement through space, seeking instead to
batter the viewer into submission with fast cutting and
special effects.
Postproduction computer manipulation of the film
image is increasingly common; director George Lucas
even prefers to modify his actors’ performances
digitally, so that a performer’s frown in take six might
be mapped onto his forehead in take three.
132
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
Interestingly, some of the first technical demonstrations
of Sony’s PlayStation2 console in Tokyo concentrated
on animating the muscles of a highly detailed human
face in exactly the same way. In this purely cosmetic
respect, it is true that videogames are converging with
films.
The commercial praxis of the two industries is also
looking more and more similar. The relative simplicity
of computer and videogame systems in the 1970s and
1980s meant that a game was often written by just one
person over a period of a few months. The graphics
design, gameplay design and programming were all
done by the same red-eyed multitasker, and some of
them—Matthew Smith, Andrew Braybrook, Geoff
Crammond, David Braben—became wealthy stars.
Videogames had a relatively long period in which the
auteur theory was actually true.
But now all that has changed. Just as a film is a
collaborative
specialists—director,
effort
between
cinematographer,
many
different
actors,
composer, set designer, costumier, dolly grip, best boy
and so forth—so videogame “studios” today employ
concept designers, animators, 3D artists, tool
developers, programmers, composers, writers, character
designers and a host of other experts in
133
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
relatively hermetic fields. The first stage in
development of a videogame at British designers Core,
for example, consists of the writing of several hundred
pages of a “Game Design Document,” which is rather
like a (nonlinear) script for a film: the game’s
characters are introduced through drawings and verbal
sketches; the gameplay concept is elaborated; and
example situations are described. A top game will now
take around two years to develop, with a budget of
anything up to tens of millions of dollars—which is
Hollywood blockbuster money. And the rewards can be
equally impressive.
Meanwhile, Japanese videogame giant Square
moved the other way, making an entirely digital feature
film based on its best-selling Final Fantasy games.
Videogames and the cinema nowadays certainly look
like close media competitors.
Perhaps this perceived competition is one reason
why, when videogames themselves feature in films,
they are so often shorthand for moral or cognitive
vacancy, or actual destructive tendencies. Russ Meyer
shows a woman playing Pong at the beginning of
Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens precisely to
indicate her anomie and lack of sexual interest in her
partner. Meanwhile, the superb slice of 1980s teen
134
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
paranoia Wargames features a young geek hero who
hacks into the Pentagon’s military computer system
because he thinks he’s going to get to play some cool
videogames; in fact, he nearly starts a global nuclear
war. Generally, if a movie shows a child playing
videogames in his bedroom, the message is that this
antisocial kid needs to get out more.
Other films extrapolate some hypothetical
videogame future in order to make more or less
successful points about man’s increasingly intimate
relationship with technology. The abomination that is
The Lawnmower Man typifies Hollywood’s prurient
fascination with the oxymoronic and irremediably
adolescent concept of “virtual sex.” More thoughtful is
David Cronenberg’s orthographically eccentric
eXistenZ, which pictures a biomechanical future whose
characters jack into an animal game “pod” via a slimy
spinal socket, and toys in a rather facile but entertaining
way with the problems of competing realities.
But preeminent in this filmic tradition is The
Matrix, which, despite competition from The Phantom
Menace, was most people’s choice for science fiction
film of 1999. With a cunning script incorporating a
kaleidoscope of Homeric, Christian and Gibsonian
135
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
references, it starred Keanu Reeves as a computer
hacker who learns that the world is something like an
enormous game of SimCity run by computers to keep
us enslaved. In its exaggeratedly dynamic kung fu
scenes, in which actors float through the air and smash
each other through walls, The Matrix contains the most
successful translations to date of certain videogame
paradigms to the celluloid medium. (This film also
reminds us that the concept of “virtual reality” is itself a
very old idea, for Descartes conceived of a malin gÉnie,
or evil demon, which, exactly like the computers in The
Matrix, caused him to have the thoughts and
perceptions he ordinarily believed to be signs of a real,
external world.)
The primary influence on The Matrix’s sort of
hyperkinetic action is still a filmic one: the Hong Kong
guns’n’kung-fu movie apotheosized by such cult
directors and performers as John Woo and Chow Yun
Fat. But the increasingly unrealistic dynamics of such
films through the late 1980s and 1990s clearly owe a lot
in turn to the rise of the videogame beat-’em-up such as
Street Fighter, and in one such film this is explicitly
acknowledged. The star of City Hunter, Jackie Chan, is
at one point knocked into an arcade beat-’em-up
machine,
initiating
a
comic
sequence
in
136
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
which Chan, dazed by the blow, imagines his assailant
as different digitally generated characters from the
videogame itself, finally winning the fight in the virtual
world and so in the real one. Videogames repaid the
compliment with Tekken 3 (1998), which contains,
although the makers Namco explicitly deny this,
playable characters that look as if they might be heavily
influenced by Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan himself.
For their part, films have been very successful in
influencing the look of certain types of videogame. The
first great film tie-in (still only one of a handful today)
was the videogame Star Wars (1983),
a
threedimensional space shoot-’em-up that abstracted
elements from certain battle scenes in the film and
turned them into simple game objectives. The most
impressive visual aspect of these action sequences in
the film was the shower of red and green laser bolts,
and it is these that were most easily translated into early
videogame graphics, while John Williams’s pompously
brilliant score, mixed with high-pitched R2–D2
wibbles, pumped from the arcade speakers. The game
did not replicate the movie, but stole those parts of the
movie (the action sequences) that could be
137
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
successfully reimagined as videogame forms. And the
lure of the Star Wars franchise is such that every
console and computer-game platform since then has
been home to a game based on the film. They have
covered nearly every conceivable genre: platform, 3D
shooting, role-playing—even, lamentably, beat-’emup,
in Masters of Teras Kasi for the PlayStation.
One of the most seminal modern influences, not just
on videogames but on all forms of science fiction, is the
film Blade Runner. This is partly due to aesthetic
considerations—the popular style of futuristic
technoir— but for videogames it has also had, until the
current generation of extremely powerful machines, a
technological payoff. For the vision of neon-soaked
streets at night in a skyscraper-studded, futuristic
Tokyo was particularly amenable to videogames’
limited powers of representation. The nighttime setting
meant the processor had less to draw, could fill large
areas of the scene with black; neon lighting is gaudy
and luminous in a way that computer graphics can
easily imitate; and the absence of vegetation freed the
machine from the very processor-hungry task of
creating a convincing tree with hundreds of leaves and
different shades of green. A game such as G-Police,
one of the most blatant videogame homages to the
138
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
visuals of the Blade Runner city yet, welcomed these
in-built visual limitations of the tech-noir genre
thankfully, since it had so much else on its silicon
mind.
As well as influencing hundreds of other
videogames, mostly futuristic shoot-’em-ups, Blade
Runner has also been made into a rather successful
adventure game in its own right. But we have seen
already that influential currents between the two media
do not run only one way. And this turns out to be true
even of Ridley Scott’s own remarkable film: one of the
production designers on Blade Runner has said that his
work was inspired by the cabinet art on—what else?—
an arcade videogame.
But while creative aesthetic interpollination
between films and videogames may have positive
results, the attempt at wholesale translation from one
medium to the other is usually doomed. If you make a
film based on a videogame world, you instantly lose
what is most essential to the videogame experience.
One problem is that pleasurably unreal visual qualities
will be lost. Good software simulation of grass, for
instance, can, in its necessary stylization, be more
aesthetically interesting than a field of real grass on
film. Jeremy Smith, managing director of Core Design,
is very decided on this point:
139
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
For me, driving a touring car in a race game, I don’t want a
photo-realistic car in there, I want a computergenerated car. I
think it would spoil it as soon as you put a proper car in there.
I think in that, the interaction between the movie and the
videogame is a step in the wrong direction. These things need
to be generated by a computer. Okay, you can get them
looking absolutely gorgeous, with fantastic shading and all
these beautiful effects, but fundamentally I’m still looking at
an arcade game.
And the difference works the other way: even Bob
Hoskins in a padded suit is not as lovably squat as the
real Mario.
Yet even if you make your film entirely digitally,
along the lines of Toy Story or A Bug’s Life, a second,
major problem remains. In Star Wars, Episode 1: The
Phantom Menace, the plot stops for ten minutes for the
technically remarkable “pod-racing” scene, in which
the young Anakin Skywalker races a turbo-charged
hovercraft around the rocky Tattooine desert. Critics of
the film complained that this was just like a videogame,
but the point is precisely that it wasn’t anything like a
videogame. Because the viewer is not in control. The
pod-racing sequence was nothing more than an
extended advert for the actual videogame that
140
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
was based on it. You couldn’t play the movie, so it was
far inferior in terms of high-speed thrills.
Of course, films become works of art in their own
right by involving the spectator emotionally. But there
is precious little emotional material in an actionoriented
videogame for the filmmaker to latch on to. A film
based on a game, therefore, is likely to be utterly
impoverished in two ways: not only by failing to
provide the fundamental attraction of the videogame
experience, but by failing to exploit what the medium
of film itself is best at doing.
Videogames, in fact, have the better of this strange
relationship, in that they are able to suck into
themselves more aspects of the filmic art without
compromising their raison d’Être. For one thing, more
and more videogames now contain mini-“films” in their
own right. Known as FMV (“full-motion video”)
sequences, these are almost always computergenerated
scenes that advance the plot around which the game is
based, such as in Final Fantasy VIII or Tomb Raider:
The Last Revelation. The visuals might be digital, but
they are voiced by real actors and graced with filmic
scores. They function like the proverbial carrot and
stick: the player must successfully complete a portion
of the game before the next “film” sequence
141
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
is activated, providing an opportunity to relax and rest
those tired wrists. FMV sequences can be graceful and
beautiful in their own right (especially in the Final
Fantasy games, where they alone can eat up $4 million
of the budget), but they are something of a red herring.
These sequences are simply there to be watched; they
cannot be played with. They are merely tinsel around
the real gameplay.
The question remains: what kind of cinematic
action happens, not as self-contained intervallic
episodes, but in the thick of videogame play itself?
Camera obscura
When videogames were flat, two-dimensional affairs,
the player was furnished with a God-like objective
viewpoint. The gameworld of Pong or Space Invaders
is laid out flat before the eye; everything takes place in
the same horizontal plane. You can see everything at
once, because you can see the entire universe. The
problem once three-dimensional games became the
norm was that in a solid world every viewpoint is
subjective, and no viewpoint enables you to see
everything. So videogames began to offer the player a
choice of windows on their worlds that could be
switched at will, depending on the task in hand. In a
142
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
seemingly robust analogy with film, they are known as
player-controlled “cameras.”
If it can be argued that the film camera in some
sense creates the onscreen world rather than passively
recording it,20 such a theory can be taken rather more
literally with videogames. For, of course, there is
nothing really there for the videogame “camera” to
shoot in the first place. Instead, there is a complex
mathematical model held in computer memory that
only ever erupts into visual “solidity” for an instant,
before fading away and being replaced with the next
frame. The world is drawn perspectivally from one
moment to the next, depending on the camera settings
the player has chosen.
Videogame cameras (“cams” for short) have fairly
recently settled into a group of standardized viewpoints.
“Follow cam” is usually offered in driving or flying
games, and sets the viewpoint to a position behind and
slightly above the vehicle under the player’s control.
Sometimes this is differentiated from a “chase cam,”
the latter taking a tighter and lower
_________________
20 While AndrÉ Bazin famously likened the film image to a “window on
the world” on the analogy with Renaissance theories of geometrical
perspective, other film critics, such as Pascal Bonitzer, insisted that the film
world could never extend outside the frame and so constituted a
microuniverse in its own right.
143
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
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. Threedimensional
exploration games, meanwhile, generally offer elevated
cams at each point of the compass that may be switched
at will. They will also offer the player either a
temporary first-person viewpoint—as in Mario 64,
where you can look through Mario’s eyes to line up a
tricky narrow path—or a “shoulder cam,” as in Tomb
Raider. The latter is a curious invention that provides a
viewpoint that is very near to the character’s own, yet is
still an external one, peeping impishly through the eyes
of a virtual stalker over Lara’s shapely trapezium.
Why is it important for modern 3D videogames to
provide this multiplicity of viewing angles? There are
two answers: one functional and one aesthetic.
Consider a real-life experience—say, watching a tennis
match. If you watch it from the side and near the
ground, you will see different aspects of the game from
someone watching higher up at one end of the court.
The spectator watching from the latter viewpoint, the
144
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
classic television angle, has an averagely good view of
all the lines and can appreciate cross-court angles. By
contrast, the side-on spectator has a limited experience
of these aspects, but he is much better placed to
appreciate the varying arcs of the balls through the air,
the niceties of topspin and slice, and the sheer length
and speed of the shots.
Given that viewing angles have such an effect on
the experience of spectatorship, how much more
important must they be when you are actively involved
in the game? Imagine if you were asked by an eccentric
scientist to play a game of snooker wearing a VDU
headset wired so that your point of view was situated
on the ceiling, looking straight down onto the table. It
would be a completely different experience, because
you wouldn’t be able to sight down the line of the balls
while cueing. In fact, before the advent of efficient 3D
realization, several videogame versions of snooker and
pool were produced that replicated exactly this thought
experiment, with a top-down view.
Such games were pointless, but what is more
interesting is that owing to this viewpoint differential
they didn’t merely fail to replicate accurately the
experience of snooker or pool, they actually became
entirely different sorts of game. Martin Amis expertly
145
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
catches this point when he dismisses one early
example, Video Hustler, as “like playing marbles.” A
similar sort of disjunction might be argued to operate in
G-Police, where the multiplicity of viewpoints on offer
creates different game styles within the same
environment; the aerial cam, especially, which is more
useful than the standard perspectival cockpit cam for
lining up bombing raids on ground targets, harks back
to classic two-dimensional top-down shoot-’em-ups
such as Xevious.
Normally, of course, we don’t encounter these sorts
of problems in real life, because our eyes are (sensible,
prescient Nature) hard-wired into our bodies. It is only
the creative alienation of videogames, which translates
physical action here (on this piece of plastic, in my
living room) into visual effect there (in this
otherworldly arena, at once viewed through my eyes
and mediated through the prosthetic, virtual eyes of the
videogame camera), that throws up such novel
perceptual conundrums.
But ignoring for the moment the difference
between watching the action of a film and
implementing the action of a videogame, presumably
this “camera” analogy between the media still holds to
some extent? No, it does not. Videogame camerawork
146
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
was developed in order to enable the player to see the
action from the most useful angle. In Mario 64, for
instance, the player must often rotate the camera to a
different compass point, or select a view from slightly
farther away, in order to guide the rotund plumber
across a particularly narrow bridge or up a series of
tough platforms.
Cinematic camerawork of the kind that is
immediately noticeable or stylish, however, often
depends for its effect on hiding something from the
viewer, not letting you see everything. When the
detective mounts the staircase of the Bates Motel in
Psycho, Hitchcock deliberately chooses a very tight
shot on his hand moving up the banister, inducing
tension through dramatic irony, as we know what
awaits him at the top of the stairs, although he does not.
But there can be no dramatic irony in videogames,
because dramatic irony depends on a knowledge
differential between spectator and protagonist—yet in a
videogame the player is both spectator and protagonist
at once.
True, some videogames attempt to replicate this
kind of stylized shot choice, most notably Resident Evil
2 (see fig. 6). But in a videogame, as opposed to a
movie, this becomes a fraudulent and frustrating
147
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
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. As with film, shots are done to
you. Silent Hill, meanwhile, sometimes lets the player
control the camera when walking around the streets, but
dive into a dim alley and the tilted overhead shot is the
only perspective you’ll get. And this shows how a
purely filmic notion of camerawork cannot work in a
videogame context. Film manipulates the viewer, but a
game depends on being manipulable.
There is an even more fundamental formal
distinction to be made between the structures of visual
imagery in films and videogames. Modern film relies
for its storytelling and conceptual effect on a highly
sophisticated grammar of montage, a technique
invented in cinema’s youth, and perfected by Sergei
Eisenstein. In simple terms, it describes the process of
“cutting together” discontinuous shots—something so
common now in dynamic visual media that we hardly
notice it at all.
148
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
Fig. 6. Resident Evil 2: claustrophobic camera angles don’t
always help your battle against the undead (‰ Capcom/Virgin
Interactive Entertainment)
Here is an example from any standard television
commercial. A car turns a corner, coming toward the
viewer, seen from a helicopter’s altitude; in the next
shot our eyes are at fender level and a car is moving
away. Because we are culturally attuned to montage,
we automatically see this as the same car performing
one continuous movement. Yet it is easy to imagine
that a person who had never seen film or television
149
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
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. This is
essential for easy, intuitive navigation; if the camera
cuts to a different position so that your vehicle appears
to be going the other way, the physical videogame
controls will suddenly be reversed in their effects.
You’re going to crash nastily.
Sometimes videogame camera positions change
automatically rather than at the player’s behest; even
so, when they do, they are not performing traditional
montage but trying to give the player a better view of
the action under his control. This is the case in the
Tomb Raider games, for instance. Such changes of
view, however, can and often do employ other
quasifilmic techniques such as tracking and panning.
Metal Gear Solid is given a particularly “cinematic”
feel by touches such as these: whenever the hero backs
up against a wall to hide from an enemy guard, the
camera, which normally takes a functional aerial
viewpoint, swoops in to about shin level to frame the
player’s character and the guard walking past (see fig.
150
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
7). But function always takes precedence over such
stylish touches: when the hero moves away again, the
camera reverts to its normal view, enabling the player
to see more of the environment. True montage,
meanwhile, is still not used. An action movie would,
for instance, cut from a close-up of the hero’s face to
his point of view of approaching enemies, then back to
a mid-shot of the hero with gun drawn, whereas such
scenes in Metal Gear Solid’s gameplay necessarily take
place in long shot. Metal Gear Solid is a great
videogame with quasi-filmic visual gimmickry, but it is
nothing like an interactive movie.
Most of the work done by automatic videogame
cameras, indeed, is largely modeled on a different
medium altogether, and this brings us to the second,
aesthetic rationale for such visual systems. The kind of
montage seen in a car commercial does crop up in
videogames, but only after the action has finished. This
is the burgeoning phenomenon of the videogame
“replay.” Gran Turismo enables the player to watch a
race he has just driven, with virtual cameras placed at
spectacular angles on every bend. The reins are handed
over to the digital director. The effect is thrilling, and
clearly drawn not from film but from the style of
television sports coverage. Similar replays accompany
goals scored in the soccer game World Cup ’98, and
151
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
slavering slow-motion reiterates the final, lethal
combinations of kicks and punches when a fighter in
Tekken 3 is brutally floored. Television sports directors
have understood for a long while that, when it comes to
the electronic mise-en-scÈne of fast movement in three
dimensions, several heads are better than one; the
cutting together of different viewpoints gives a better
and more visceral understanding of the action.
Here, however, the term “replay” is particularly
misleading. Play is still primary; what comes next is not
a “replay,” a playing again, but a watching. The
carnival of camera angles in a videogame replay does
not impinge at all on the basic functional requirements
of in-game viewpoints. The two are properly separate
“modes” of the game. But this is exactly what I meant
earlier when suggesting that videogames are potentially
a more flexible form than film. Such borrowings from
cinematic techniques can indeed enhance the visual
experience of a game without compromising its unique
intensity.
152
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
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.
Goldeneye 007 (1997), for instance, is a firstperson
shooter that casts the player as James Bond. You are
required to complete certain missions that are loosely
based on the plot of the film: infiltrate an underground
compound and blow things up; reprogram
153
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
a satellite; rescue Natalya from a speeding train; and so
on. Such sections of the plot generally happen at the
end of a mission, and they happen to the player. The
game does not let the player change the plot: for
instance, to the dismay and fury of many addicts, you
cannot decide that vulnerable, annoying Natalya has
outlived her usefulness and shoot her in order to make a
quick getaway. The game signals failure and forces you
to play the mission again. Such plot nuggets, therefore,
mean little more in the videogame context than excuses
for the action of the next mission to move elsewhere.
But Goldeneye’s strength is that it manages to cut
and paste all its filmic influences—the faces of actors
Sean Bean, Robbie Coltrane and so on are digitized
and mapped onto the in-game characters—onto a
mode of action that is pure videogame, with the accent
heavily on stealthy shooting, and nothing in the way of
sipping Martinis or seducing Russian women.
Particularly successful is the way in which locations
from the film, such as the main satellite control room,
have been not just represented but fully recreated in
three dimensions in the game. This fully investigable
architecture is what the videogame can uniquely offer.
When watching a movie, you cannot go and look
154
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
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.’” In the movie theater, the world is projected at
you; in a videogame, you are projected into the world.
This virtue of videogames is so seductive that on
occasion it can override all other formal deficiencies.
Games like Myst and Riven were rightly derided by the
videogame cognoscenti for having tediously simplistic
gameplay properties, yet they sold in their millions
precisely because they are rather beautifully pure
exploration games. The player wanders around
gorgeously designed virtual environments with
fabulously detailed landscapes, water lapping against
jetties and mysterious dark buildings. J. C. Herz is
exactly right in labeling the appeal of these games as
that of “virtual tourism”: “Myst put you into a world
you might actually want to visit, if you only had the
money and time. . . . It was an escape destination.”
The fundamental point in comparing this aspect of
videogames with the movies is that, for instance,
Goldeneye the videogame offers a different and
155
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
incommensurable sort of pleasure to that of Goldeneye
the film. For the moment it is hard to see how
videogames and movies could ever converge without
losing the essential virtues of both. The cinema—
especially good action cinema, which, as we have seen,
has the closest links with videogames—is first and
foremost a ride, like a fairground rollercoaster, part of
whose pleasure is exactly that you are not steering, and
you cannot decide to slow down. A videogame, on the
other hand, is an activity. Watching someone else with
a videogame, to non-players, is terribly boring. And
even watching the most “cinematic” of videogames is
still like watching a really bad, low-resolution film. A
videogame is there to be played.
There is one exception to the rule that videogames
are boring to watch, and it is exemplified by the
inventive beauty of the Crash Bandicoot games. Here it
is apparent that, for all the talk of war between
videogames and movies, the former have already won a
stunning victory over one genre of film: the animated
cartoon. The golden age of Looney Tunes was always a
fertile ground from which videogames could reap
certain mechanical ideas: the comedy of Mario and
156
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
Luigi bashing their enemies with huge mallets in the
1980s is a direct homage to such exaggerated cartoon
violence as that found in Tom and Jerry.
Now, with vastly increased graphic power, the
multi-million-selling Crash Bandicoot 3 (see fig. 8) is
as gorgeously colored, smoothly animated and
thoroughly entertaining as many Warner Bros.
examples. (While it is a very simple game to play, it is
superior to cleverer examples like Ape Escape, Donkey
Kong 64 or Spyro 2 in terms of sheer visual splendor.)
Crash 3 is particularly successful in replicating and
extending the tradition of humorous cartoon deaths—
which, like videogame deaths, are only ever temporary.
The eponymous orange marsupial, Crash, can get
flattened into two dimensions by a rolling boulder and
will wobble around piteously; he can get blown up by a
mine and jump, singed and yowling, into the air; he can
fall down a crevasse and have his ghost hauled
heavenwards by an angel; or he can bump into a malign
puffer fish and suddenly balloon to twice his size.
157
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
Fig. 8. Crash Bandicoot 3: a cartoon you can play with (‰ 1998
Sony Computer Entertainment)
It is perhaps no coincidence that since videogames
have been able to offer a detailed world of humorous
action similar to that of the traditional cartoon, with the
added killer ingredient of control,animated cartoons
themselves have changed in order to survive. Cartoons
such as South Park or The Simpsons no longer rely
solely on pure kinetic comedy, but excel in the scabrous
comedy of situation and character. Hence it is easy to
see how the disgraceful videogame adaptation South
Park (1998) totally missed the point, offering as
158
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
it did boring first-person shooter sequences with
weapons such as the cow-launcher.
If film, as Jean-Luc Godard said, is “truth, twenty-
four times a second,” then modern videogames are lies
that hit the nervous system at two and a half times the
frequency. Videogames, as we have seen, have
borrowed from movie visuals. But films, too, have
borrowed from videogame dynamics. Such proximities,
however, are purely cosmetic, far outweighed by the
structural dissimilarities. Videogames, far from being
an inferior type of film, are something different
altogether. The comparison between the forms—
initially so inviting because they both look like they are
doing similar things—is in the final analysis an
informatively limited one.
Here is one description of the cinematic experience
itself—Walter Benjamin’s poetic appreciation of the
perceptually liberating effect of early film:
Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our railroad stations
and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly.
Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by
the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the
midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and
adventurously go traveling.
159
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
Videogames are still a very young medium. Yet
videogames already—it can hardly be denied—
constitute a type of entertainment every bit as
revolutionary, in its form, as cinema was for Benjamin.
If it’s adventurous traveling the chthonic prisoner is
after, videogames can deliver in spades, for the player
is free to wander at will around an imaginary world,
meet interesting people and burst things asunder by the
dynamite of the sixtieth of a second.
Benjamin’s reference to “far-flung ruins and debris”
is, of course, far more deeply ambivalent about the
desirability of such a detonation. And there is more to
say about the negative interpretation of such destruction
in videogames. For the moment I should point out that,
though the videogame world may currently be enslaved
to Hollywood aesthetics, there is no reason why this
should not change in the future. Director David
Cronenberg has said: “In the graphic sense, many
videogames can already be viewed as art, but overall I
see a propensity to imitate Hollywood, which could be
termed the ‘anti-art.’ Great videogame designers may
have to struggle against this trend.”
If Hollywood is home to the anti-art that
videogames must resist, where better to continue our
investigations?
160
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
5
NEVER-ENDING STORIES
A tale of two cities
Los Angeles is a game of SimCity played by a maniac.
Six-lane freeways gridlocked with sports utility
vehicles pump out untold cubic tons of exhaust fumes,
enveloping the city in a permanent yellow smog. It’s
more or less compulsory to drive any distance more
than ten yards, but you’re not allowed to smoke a
cigarette. In fact, thanks to designer Will Wright’s
inbuilt bias toward public transport, it wouldn’t actually
be possible to build Los Angeles in his videogame. This
satirical dystopia is too weird to be anything but real.
It’s also the venue for the world’s largest annual
videogame trade show, E3. The bustling steel-
andconcrete cathedral of the Los Angeles Convention
Center is roaring with the combined sound effects and
161
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
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. Sony’s triumphal stand
features thirty-foot-high inflatable models of cutesy
game characters Spyro the Dragon and Um Jammer
Lammy (a cartoon girl who plays heavy-metal guitar,
obviously). Nintendo’s section of the hall projects the
playable images of Star Wars, Episode I: Pod Racer
onto, yes, a cinema-sized screen, while a room given
over to Perfect Dark features helpful blond women
gliding among the gamers, dressed in black PVC and
white jodhpurs and suggestively stroking their leather
whips (Perfect Dark, an espionage-themed first-person
shooter, is strictly speaking not a game about
horseriding, but I don’t see anybody complaining).
Elsewhere, a Planet of the Apes videogame is promoted
with the help of a bamboo cage imprisoning semi-
naked women in animal-skin bikinis.
Refreshed or repeled by such marketing schlock
and an endless supply of burgers, hot dogs, soft drinks
and coffee over the four days of the show, journalists,
designers, retailers and publishers scurry around the
162
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
vast acreage of the various videogame halls to meet and
do business, and to play as many of the games as
possible in five- or ten-minute bursts. People happily
wait in line for twenty minutes to try out the most
promising new videogames, and the constant bustle and
electronic noise starts claiming victims alarmingly early
on in the course of the event. The popular outdoor cafÉ
area is regularly full of half-comatose men and women
sprawled in plastic chairs with a small mountain of
promotional carrier bags strewn over the ground. Many
of them suck hungrily on cigarettes with an expression
of bliss peculiar to the Californian tobacco aficionado,
everywhere hounded by the law. I notice this, of course,
because that’s where I stagger myself every few hours.
Everybody who’s anybody in the industry turns up at
E3. So I have gone to Los Angeles too, in an attempt to
take the temperature of the videogame industry. And in
one way, it’s running pretty high. This year, producers
are more concerned than usual about the question of
“violence”; parental lawsuits are in the air, and federal
interference with their industry is thoroughly
undesirable. Hence, the Dreamcast version of zombie-
shooting game House of the Dead 2 is on
demonstration without the game’s cybernetic sine qua
163
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
non, the lightgun. And as I wander the halls speaking to
designers showing off their latest games, there is a
marked tendency for them to make excuses. Yes, they
say, this is a cutting-edge first-person shooter where
you can put bullets through people’s heads and blast
their limbs off individually in gushes of beautifully
animated blood, but that’s not the point. You see, it’s
basically a really good story.
Storytelling is the second oldest profession. Epic
poetry, drama, the novel and the cinema have all
become expert in their different ways at the craft of
telling a story. Why should videogames, then, be any
different? Modern videogames have plots; they use
voice actors for different “characters”; there is usually a
main protagonist who must accomplish specific tasks;
the games boast self-contained, carefully scripted
“movies” in them.
So far, so once-upon-a-time. But as we’ve seen,
videogames have an important quality that militates
against easy conjunctions with other media such as
film. That quality is interactivity. Of course, in one
sense books themselves have always been highly
interactive, depending on the reader’s imagination to
flesh out their worlds in color and detail, but, unlike a
164
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
film or a book, a videogame changes dynamically in
response to the player’s input. Surely this must mean
something drastic for the traditional concept of a story,
authored jealously by one godlike writer? Two extreme
responses, for example, might be: videogames are so
radically different from stories that there can be no
comparison; or videogames have the magical, catalytic
ingredient that will change our very conception of what
a story is.
Now some theorists, such as the designers I met in
L.A., cleave to the latter view. They see in the unique
quality of videogames a potential revolution, a
liberation from the shackles of old, “linear”
storytelling. How? Well, according to a speculative
essay by Chris Crawford, “because the story is
generated in real-time in direct response to the player’s
actions, the resultant story is customized to the needs
and interests of the audience, and thereby more than
makes up for any loss in polish with its greater
emotional involvement.” (But the telephone directory
is “customized to the needs and interests of the
audience” about as much as anything could be, yet it
still doesn’t make me cry or laugh. There has to be
something more to the idea of storytelling than that.)
Interactive narrative, or interactive storytelling, it is
165
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
argued optimistically, is the entertainment medium of
the future.
Well, the proselytizers are right in at least one weak
sense, because it’s certainly not the entertainment
medium of the present. Not only has no convincing
example of this new creature called “interactive
storytelling” yet been spotted in the wild, no one is
even sure what it might look like. Like Albrecht DÜrer
and his confident rhinoceros, perhaps they’ve stuck the
horn in the wrong place. Still, “interactive storytelling”
sounds like a fascinating idea. That disyllable “active,”
in particular, makes us feel very modern. Intrapassive
storylistening doesn’t sound like half so much fun.
So how do videogames use stories? What kind of
stories are they? And most importantly, is interactive
storytelling the glorious future of videogames, or is it
an imaginatively seductive entry in some fabulous
illustrated bestiary?
Back to the future
The word “story” itself covers a multitude of sins.
Think of the cinema concept of the “back story.” A
back story happened in the “past,” and it determines the
conditions and sets up the concerns of the present
166
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
action. For instance, the back story of Blade Runner is
the invention, programming and rebellion of the
replicants; the “present” story is Deckard’s attempts to
find and kill them. Some movies in fact are all about
attempts by the characters in the present to find out
what the back story actually is—for instance,
Hitchcock’s Vertigo, or The Usual Suspects (What went
on at the wharf? Who is Keyser Soze?).
For the purposes of talking about videogames, the
“back story” is the diachronic story, and the story that
happens in the fictional present is the synchronic
story—an ongoing narrative constituted by the player’s
actions and decisions in real time.21
Now synchronic and diachronic modes of story in
other media are very often combined in the same
narrative. For example, in the Oedipus Rex of
Sophocles, the synchronic (present) story is about
Oedipus as the King of Thebes trying to find out why
his city is cursed. The diachronic (background) story,
gradually revealed through Oedipus’s dogged
investigations, is that in the past Oedipus himself killed
his father and slept with his mother. (This is the
_________________
21 Of course, even what I am calling a “synchronic” story unfolds over
time, but since that period is far shorter—usually, in the fictional videogame
universe, a few hours or days—I will let the term stand.
167
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
model, indeed, for all detective fiction: whodunit is the
diachronic story, while the process of investigation is
the synchronic story.) In general, because a story in any
medium must limit itself to a finite period of time, and
cannot tell the entire history of the universe leading up
to the events it describes, it must nearly always refer to
some diachronic story—old Hamlet was murdered
while asleep in the garden; a Jedi turned to the Dark
Side and the Empire grew22—in the process of
elaborating the synchronic one.
What does this mean for videogames? Well, it turns
out that the delicate balance of story types is skewed in
videogames: it is very heavily weighted toward the
diachronic. Perhaps surprisingly, videogames have
nearly always had a back story, however simple.
Robotron acquits itself diachronically with a post-
nuclear fable about evil machines and saving the last
human family; Doom’s back story is that the moon has
been invaded by aliens; Donkey Kong is predicated on
a princess’s kidnapping.
_________________
22 The theoretical problem with George Lucas’s prequels is exactly that
they plan to elaborate synchronically what was so suggestively mythical in
the back story of the original Star Wars films: how Anakin Skywalker
became Darth Vader.
168
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
Some diachronic stories, even in old games, are
very complex, dipping freely into the myth kitty by
basing themselves on Arthurian legend (Excalibur),
Celtic sagas (Tir Na Nog and Dun Darach on the ZX
Spectrum), Norse sagas (Valhalla), or Tolkien’s Middle
Earth (The Hobbit), not to mention science fiction and
fantasy derivatives of these basic templates. But notice
that these kinds of stories are, formally speaking,
mostly more like folktales than novels. And folktales,
according to Russian theorist Vladimir Propp, adhere to
one of a handful of simple formulae. They are highly
plot driven and predicated on strong actions; what there
is of a purely “literary” character can be readily
stripped away. That’s ideal for computers. (It is hardly
surprising, though obscurely disappointing, that no one
has tried to make a videogame out of Nabokov’s Pale
Fire.)
But what kinds of synchronic stories do such games
have? Very little to speak of. The “story” of what the
player actually does during the game would be merely a
list of movements (up, down, run, shoot, open door,
jump)—hardly something you’d want to sit down and
actually read. At its most sophisticated it will be a
highly skeletal version of a quest narrative. You look
for something; you find it. The situation is
169
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
even thinner with more action-oriented games whose
diachronic stories are less rich with suggestion: the
story of what a player does during a game of Robotron
will just be a tedious list of movements and shootings,
or more generously a higher-level, but still highly
abstract—and uninvolving to anyone who is not the
player—cyclical narrative about patterns of attack and
rhythms of success and failure.
If these games can be said to have a “story” at all, it
is untranslatable—it is a purely kinetic one. The
diachronic story of a videogame, however complex, is
merely an excuse for the meat, the videogame action;
while the synchronic story, as a story, is virtually
nonexistent. This is not a criticism of videogames, not a
sign of their impoverishment—it is simply pointing out
that, in general, they are doing something totally
different from traditional narrative forms.
But since a diachronic story is by definition
unchangeable—remember, it happened in the past—it
surely must be the synchronic story, the thing that the
videogame player is able to change at will, which is
essential to the possibility of “interactive storytelling.”
But we have just decided that many videogames so far
don’t have synchronic stories at all. So what’s going
on?
170
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
Well, Robotron and Valhalla are pretty old games.
Things on first inspection look somewhat different with
the modern multimedia extravaganzas. Gamers familiar
with epics such as the Final Fantasy series will quickly
voice this objection. For every so often in such games,
an FMV (full-motion video) sequence—the computer-
generated “movie” nugget—pops up and moves the
plot along. The narratives of the FMV sequences and
the actual gameplay are contemporaneous: that is, the
FMV is a synchronic story line, and a very involved
one it is too. The same thing occurs in Metal Gear
Solid23—where the highly entertaining plot is as tightly
scripted and twisty as most Hollywood action movies—
in Zelda 64 and, to a lesser extent, in the Tomb Raider
games. Here are games that do have synchronic stories.
Do they constitute some form of interactive
storytelling?
As we touched on in the last chapter, the thing
about FMVs is that they are completely predetermined.
The player must watch them, cannot take part in them
interactively. These sequences are also known as
“cutscenes”—appropriately, because they signal a
_________________
23 Although here they use the game engine’s normal graphics, rather than
the superior rendering of FMV. FMVs are just the most popular type of cut-
scenes.
171
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
discontinuous break between gameplaying, which still
has no story to speak of, and watching, which bears all
the narrative load. In general the player runs around
fighting, solving puzzles and exploring new areas, and
once a certain amount of gameplay is completed, he is
rewarded with a narrative sequence that is set in stone
by the designer. This alternation of cut-scenes and
playable action delivers a very traditional kind of
storytelling yoked rather arbitrarily to essential
videogame challenges of dexterity and spatial thought.
Why “arbitrarily?” Well, it is as if you were reading
a novel and forced by some jocund imp at the end of
each chapter to win a game of table tennis before being
allowed to get back to the story. Actually, with some
games it’s worse than that: it’s the other way around.
You really want a good, exciting game of Ping-Pong,
but you have to read a chapter of some crashingly dull
science-fantasy blockbuster every time you win a game.
Where’s the fun in that?
How many roads must a man walk down . . .
Several videogames, however, are a little more
sophisticated (in a purely narrative sense), in that they
decide which FMV sequences to play at any particular
time according to what the player has done so far. This
172
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
is a small step toward narrative interactivity—but only
a small one. In the space-combat game Colony Wars,
for example, every few missions the player gets an
FMV sequence detailing how the war is going: if
gameplay has gone badly, a player’s side is in disarray;
if gameplay has gone well, a player’s side is making
victorious incursions into the enemy’s solar system. But
note that this overarching synchronic story is an
extremely simple one: one side wins, the other fights
back, somebody emerges as the war’s victor. The plot
in fact only branches in two directions at any given
point, and there are only a handful of possible endings
to the saga, depending on the player’s overall skill.
One reason for this is that it would be prohibitively
expensive and time-consuming for a studio to make the
bank of hundreds or thousands of different cut-scenes
needed to create satisfyingly complex stories by
stringing together permutations of a handful of them.
This problem of data intensiveness is likely never to be
overcome. It is not a question of data storage, but data
creation in the first place. It is simply impractical to
write and pre-render that much FMV video.
The amount of work involved is not peculiar to the
videogame form, either. Imagine an author writing an
“interactive story.” Let us say this story will be
173
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
composed of only nine short chapters; at the end of
each chapter (except the last), the reader will be offered
a choice of eight different directions in which the story
might go. That sounds pretty simple. Eight, nine—
they’re pretty small numbers. Unfortunately, if each
possible plotline is to be truly independent of all the
others, the number of chapters required by such a
scheme is eight to the power of eight, or sixteen
million, seven hundred and seventy thousand, two
hundred and sixteen. Show me a writer who wants to
work that hard and I’ll choke on my Martini.
If you begin to adulterate this hyper-purist concept,
though, and allow the different story paths to cross each
other or converge, so that they can “share” chapters
with each other, the numbers do get more manageable.
But that in turn throws up its own unique storytelling
problems. And they have already been encountered in
prose writing. As noted earlier, the popularity of the ZX
Spectrum and Commodore 64 computers in the early
1980s coincided with the rise of the Fighting Fantasy
gamebooks by Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson, as
well as the American Choose Your Own Adventure
series (by various authors).
Each numbered story nugget of a few hundred
words ended with something between two and four
174
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
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. Global sales eventually totaled more than
fourteen million. (Ian Livingstone, now chairman of
Eidos, in 1998 released the Tomb Raider–style
videogame version of one of the early gamebooks,
Deathtrap Dungeon. Steve Jackson, meanwhile, was
involved in the design of God-game supremo Peter
Molyneux’s Black and White [2000].)
Now these books are entertaining children’s
pastimes, but as examples of “interactive storytelling”
they too are instructively limited. To keep the numbers
manageable, very many sections of story in these
gamebooks are shared by different plotlines. Yet, if an
episode can be reached by means of several different
previous ones, there is no way it can ever refer to its
past—because it has no way of knowing what its past
is, which is to say what particular route the reader took
to get there. You end up with a species of story that is
totally amnesiac, that has no sense of its own history.
Try to think of a film or a novel in which at no point
175
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
does a character reflect upon previous events within the
synchronic story. Not easy, is it?
A second problem with shared story nuggets is
increasing familiarity. The reader of a particular
Fighting Fantasy book, after just a few “plays,” would
soon learn to avoid number thirty-four if it was an
option, because the Ganges demons lived there, and the
game would end horribly. In such a situation, the
player/reader’s own memory is taking advantage of the
book’s amnesia to the detriment of the story-telling
experience. A very similar sort of situation obtains in
the sort of videogames that reward the wrong choice
with instant death. You get killed in Tomb Raider, you
reload the game and this time you don’t run heedlessly
down the path because you know about the spike-filled
pit that killed you last time. Or you get shot to pieces in
Metal Gear Solid and next time you remember to creep
nervously past the security camera. If you know the
consequences of your choice in advance, it is no longer
a choice. A corner of the imaginary world has been
cordoned off.
Erase and rewind
Knowledge gained through a previous play throws up
a deep problem with the whole notion of “interactive
storytelling”: what the fact of videogame
176
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
replayability—in that you can always try again—
means to narrative. One problem is that great stories
depend for their effect on irreversibility24—and this is
because life, too, is irreversible. The pity and terror that
Aristotle says we feel as spectators to a tragedy are
clearly dependent on our apprehension of
circumstances that cannot be undone. If Oedipus, on
learning of his unintended parricide and philomatria,
were able to go back and undo his deeds in another
“play” of the story, there would be no tragedy, for he
would live happily ever after. If Raskolnikov were able
to undo his murders there would be nothing for
Dostoyevsky to write about. The argument is, of
course, equally true of farce. If Basil Fawlty had
surreptitiously banked his horse-racing winnings so that
Sibyl couldn’t commandeer them, he wouldn’t have
been driven to such hilariously doomed attempts to
keep the cash, and we wouldn’t laugh at him. But in a
videogame we can go back and change our actions if
they turn out to have undesirable consequences.
Secondly, some choices just make better stories
than others. If you are the hero in a videogame version
of Oedipus Rex and you think, “To hell with it, I don’t
_________________
24 This argument is suggested by Alain and FrÉdÉric Le Diberder in
L’Univers des jeux vidÉo.
177
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
care why my city is cursed, I’m off to the hills with
Jocasta to live out my days in luxury,” you’re not going
to get much of a story out of the game.
Some kinds of irreversibility, indeed, are actually
anathema to good videogame design. A good
exploration game, for example, should never let the
player get irreversibly “stuck” in a space from which
there is no escape (because, for example, he or she
hasn’t collected the right key yet), forcing her to switch
off completely and reload. Although this is a feasible
real-life situation for behatted and whipped
adventurers, it is merely frustrating and boring in a
videogame. The Tomb Raider games are admirable
examples in this respect, as the level designers have
always been careful to provide a way back to the more
open environment: when the player gets stuck, she can
be confident that there must be some way out that
hasn’t been spotted yet.
The fact that the videogame form is predicated
strongly on such types of reversibility is one
explanation, then, why the action tells no very
compelling synchronic story. On the other hand, the
FMV cut-scenes that move the plot along in the more
ostensibly “cinematic” types of game are full of
irreversible factors that are out of the player’s
178
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
control—and it is precisely because of these
irreversible factors that a videogame story can become
involving. The death of a certain character in Final
Fantasy VII is often cited as an example of
videogames’ power to induce emotional reactions—
and if a player does so react, this is clearly because the
death occurs in an FMV scene, and is irreversible: the
player does not get a chance to resuscitate him.
Similarly, the player’s discovery in Zelda 64 that Link
is not, as he thought, a real Kokiri elf is potentially
poignant only insofar as the player can do nothing
about it.
Such storytelling as so far exists in videogames,
then, is not really very interactive. The player may
interact with the environment in which the story takes
place but may not change the story at will. A good
theoretical reason for this is pointed out by Olivier
Masclef, the cheerfully erudite project director for
Outcast (1999). “You need to have talent to write a
story,” he says with a grin. “I’m not saying
[videogame] players don’t have any talent—but it’s not
their job.” Over Diet Sprite and watery coffee in the
Los Angeles Convention Center, he tells me about the
way in which his own game approaches these
problems.
179
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
Outcast is a fine example of the sort of quasi-
“cinematic” narrative sweep that a videogame with a
three-million-dollar budget can create. The player’s
character awakes in a strange alien world, and is
identified by the inhabitants as a long-awaited prophet.
He must win the trust of people in the game while
embarking on a quest to find five religious artefacts.
While exploring the game’s gorgeously rendered
organic-looking planets, the player may ride a
twolegged camel, slap a robed elder, and now and then,
of course, shoot enemies with very big guns. Masclef
enthuses that such a game should ideally be like being
“thrown into a big, exotic movie.” The appeal of this
sort of epic videogame is “to be an action-movie hero.”
The game’s specially written two-hour musical score
was recorded by the Moscow Radio Symphony
Orchestra; twenty hours’ worth of character dialogue
was provided by sixteen different voice actors; as a
reward for finishing the game, the player is given a full
half-hour cut-scene to watch. There’s a lot of story
going on in this game, but how much of it is the
player’s business?
Our blond Belgian expert insists that a designer
cannot simply leave the whole story up to the player.
“A totally open world is okay,” Masclef muses, “but if
180
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
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). Nonlinearity, Masclef agrees, leads
to non-urgency: the player has no particular reason to
do one thing rather than another. “You’ve got to hook
the player again. So when, say, ten percent of the game
is completed, we throw in a preplanned event that
changes things in a certain way. Generally [the story] is
scripted and possibilities are locked in time.” This,
then, is the traditional solution thus far in videogame
history: the drama is provided by the prescripted story,
the virtual exploration is interactive, and never the
twain shall meet.
Cracked actors
But what makes Masclef’s game more sophisticated
than most is its approach to character. Now, of course,
stories involve people (or at least intelligent, sentient
life forms), and so any videogame with narrative
pretensions must be populated with people other than
the main character (the one under the player’s control).
These are known generally as NPCs, or non-playable
181
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
characters. And just as it is largely the interactions
between people that make a story interesting, so a good
storytelling videogame ought to simulate believable
exchanges between characters.
Character interactions can happen in cut-scenes as
much as the designer likes, but a greater feeling of
being immersed in the videogame world would
naturally result if other characters reacted to the
player’s actions in a real-time, organic sense. Outcast is
one game that is just beginning to scale this
computational mountain. It is a problem of AI, of
artificial intelligence: how do you make the
computergenerated characters behave in a convincingly
lifelike fashion?
Masclef’s solution was found in the AI theories of
Marvin Minsky. Outcast’s “Gaia” computational
engine uses Minsky’s concept of “agents.” These are
little mental homunculi with specialized jobs: one
agent is for hunger, another agent is for curiosity,
another is for fear, and so on. Weave enough of these
agents together and you have a fairly crude model of a
consciousness, but one that leads to surprisingly
complex sets of behavior. In Outcast the effects,
though rudimentary, are enjoyable to see. As Masclef
describes it: “Say you make a big noise. If its agent of
182
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
curiosity is bigger, the creature will investigate; if its
agent of fear is bigger, he’ll run away.” Meanwhile, if
the player accidentally or deliberately kills a friendly
alien, the rest of them have their agents of helpfulness
instantly adjusted downward: they will be far less
inclined to help the player in his quest, or even to talk
to him. Sure you can have a little fun with the
rocketlauncher, but then Outcast quite surprisingly
makes you feel guilty for having done so. Joyous
deathdealing À la Quake this is not. In order to regain
your friends’ trust after such an aberration, Outcast
sentences you to the equivalent of community service:
giving money to beggars, for instance, or helping with
agricultural work.
In the future, Masclef would like to see computer
algorithms such as the agents expand and take on an
ever larger role. “We’ve developed very clever AI for
the behaviors and the life cycles of the characters, but
sometimes the player doesn’t see it,” Masclef says.
“Speech is one of the things that is not generated on the
fly [in this game]. They speak this funky English—
why not generate it on the fly? And then other
characters’ responses would be a continuum depending
on your reputation and actions in the game.”
183
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
What a huge challenge for programmers. But the
results would be worth it. It’s all very well to try to
script every possible interaction, but then—as we have
seen—the game’s story engineer has to write an awful
lot to approach any semblance of interactivity. The
artificial intelligence algorithms that are present
embryonically in Outcast, however, while being very
hard to set up initially, result thereafter in interesting
and believable behavior “for free.” The videogame
designer, like a deity, sets up laws of behavior for his
creatures, and then lets the processor do all the
calculation to create the actual behavior at any given
point in the game. Algorithmic processes solve our
problem of storytelling data intensiveness at a stroke.
In a certain crude sense, this has been the case for a
long time. For instance, the enemy machines in
Robotron are programmed with simple movement
algorithms that tell them either to hunt down the player
or go straight for the other humans on screen. But now
that such movement rules are being combined with
simulations of curiosity or fear, and if in the future they
may even be accompanied by rules for communication,
the illusion of other “life” in the gameworld will be
vastly enhanced.
184
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
A fascinating corollary of this arm’s-length
approach—set it up and let it roll—is that what happens
in the videogame, though not random, then becomes
highly unpredictable. This idea is seconded at Core
Design’s development studios, during the early stages
of work on a beautiful PlayStation2 game that requires
the player to herd eccentric cartoon wildlife. Never
mind the humans; every creature in the forest, from
insects to deer and cows, has its own specific web of AI
algorithms. And this complexity leads to very rich and
varied possibilities of behavior. “We may have written
the game,” a programmer insists with amazed pride at
his creation, “but we don’t know what’s going to
happen.”
These developments are analogous to Mathengine’s
work on the physical modeling of dynamic properties.
And just as convincing feelings of bounciness, heft or
inertia in virtual objects increase the aesthetic pleasure
of the game, so will more convincing simulations of
other wills, whether enemy or ally. The Holy Grail now
for story-led videogames is nothing less than the
physical modeling of personality.
Yes, this sounds like a tall order. But note that we do
not need to believe in the cognitive science project
185
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
of “Strong AI” in order to become excited by these
possibilities for videogames. “Strong AI” is the
position, much postulated in science fiction from Blade
Runner and Terminator to The Matrix, that one day
computers will be able to think for themselves. Now,
just as with physical modeling, with NPCs you only
ever need as much realism as is appropriate to the
game. Remember, an accurate simulation of Formula
One racing would be a bad game, and simplifications
and elisions are part of the process of good game
design.
Some simplifications, however, are more
impoverishing than others. And as much as the
behavioral possibilities of videogame NPCs (whether
flesh, fish or fowl) are increasing, dramatic interactions
are still going to be pretty one-sided unless the
videogame player is allowed greater freedom and
creativity in the exchange.
Outcast requires the player actually to “speak” to other
characters in the game; their responses vary from the
helpful to the belligerent. Yet how are the player’s lines
chosen? You cannot simply say anything you like.
Instead, you call up a menu screen that offers you a
handful of possible conversational gambits, and you
simply choose one with the joystick or keyboard. It is
186
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
clear that, even if Olivier Masclef’s ambition to have
the computer generate the characters’ responses
automatically is fulfilled, the process will never feel
like a conversation to the player as long as he is
constricted by having to choose from a set of
predetermined speechlets.
Superior though Outcast may be, the player can still
only choose between conversational options that are
offered to him by the computer. Whether these choices
are predetermined by the designer or computed in real
time by the processor is irrelevant. The fact remains
that the player still cannot do something that the game
is not prepared to allow.
Talking it over
How could such freedom even be possible? To let a
player “say” anything he or she liked in a videogame
conversation, the machine’s processor would need, in
short, to be able to parse natural language, to
understand and respond to whatever was said to it in
English (or American, Japanese, German, Finnish and
so on), either via a keyboard interface or by analyzing
speech waves. This is such a massively difficult thing
to get a computer to do that it actually constitutes one
minimal requirement of Strong AI: the Turing Test.
187
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
And, needless to say, it hasn’t been achieved yet.
There are anecdotal reports of “bots”—little mobile
computer programs that roam the Internet25—fooling
people in chat rooms, but given the depressing level of
conversational aptitude in such places, that is hardly
surprising. But a computer that speaks your language,
like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, is still—so far—a
pipe dream.
In fact, videogames deliberately turned their back
on the most promising avenue for success in this field
in the late 1980s, for that is around the time when the
classic text-based “adventure” game was replaced by
versions with pictures alone and no typing required.
(This move was made for two largely commercial
reasons: firstly, videogame manufacturers reckoned
pretty moving pictures sold better than boring old
words; secondly, videogames were increasingly played
on consoles, such as the Nintendo Entertainment
System, which didn’t come with keyboards.) The
adventure game, remember, is a puzzle game whose
static problems are solved by rudimentary textual
“conversation.” The computer says something like,
“You are in a dark cavern. There is a door to the east,
_________________
25 The term “bot” is also used for the speechless but artificially
“intelligent” enemies in games such as Quake III.
188
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
but it is locked. An orc appears, snarling hungrily.” The
player would then type in unlock door. go east, thus
getting out of the way of the monster and calling up the
computer’s stored description of the next environment.
The input language available to the adventuregame
player began as a very rudimentary set of verbs:
ADVENT’s commands involved little more than
directions, compass points, attacking, picking up and
dropping things. Yet by the full bloom of the
microprocessor revolution of the 1980s, the parsing
engines of adventure games had reached a higher level
of sophistication, able to respond accurately to
prepositional and pronoun constructions, and inviting
simple speech exchanges with NPCs. Players of the ZX
Spectrum version of The Hobbit might remember
frustratedly trying to use a wizard’s muscle with the
command: tell gandalf “break door.” At such times, of
course, the bearded one was singularly unhelpful.
Richard Darling specifically remembers one
program, Eliza, which was the fruit of early attempts
to pass the Turing Test. It was originally written in the
1970s but cropped up on several home
microcomputers in the 1980s: several versions of it are
still available on the Internet. It played the part of a
189
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
virtual psychotherapist. The user had a rudimentary
conversation with it by typing answers to its questions,
and Eliza would then respond to those answers and ask
for further elaboration. “Eliza was one of the really
exciting events throughout the computer industry,”
Darling recalls, “because you could type to it and it
wrote back to you. It’s interesting, I think, that in the
games world, AI hasn’t to me actually exceeded that
excitement level.”
With current videogame hardware thousands of
times faster and more sophisticated, great strides could
have been made toward in-corporating more fluent
language engines in games, and even steering them
toward something approaching true conversation. But
that evolutionary path was not taken. “Unfortunately,”
Richard Darling says, “I think we’ve gone through a bit
of a dark age as far as communication AI is concerned,
but we’ll hopefully come out of that soon.”
Instead, the kind of static puzzles that used to be
typical of adventure games persist in what some call
“action adventures” (they belong in our genre of
exploration games). How does this work? Well, a game
such as Resident Evil, for example, is built on exactly
the same kind of puzzles that were the meat and drink
of text adventures in their heyday. A nasty
190
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
plant monster bars the way: go find some weedkiller
that you can splash on it. You must collect three books,
or some crystals, or combine some herbs, or get more
ammo for your gun. The only difference is that instead
of typing in commands, you directly control the
movement of your character, select items and use them
by pressing specialized buttons on the joypad.
Resident Evil is in this way somewhat less
sophisticated than Zork or Snowball, or any number of
classic text adventures. Nostalgia aside, the comparison
is instructive because of the ways in which each game
executes aspects of a story. Adventure games on first
sight seem to be very close to traditional stories. They
were, after all, in the same medium: text. And their
descriptions of locations and scenes (often very well
written) stimulated the mental imagination in exactly
the same way that the prose of a novel does.
Yet even they did not tell an “interactive plot”:
locations were all prescripted, and though you had
certain freedoms to explore, you were still exploring a
determinate, linear world. And just as with more
modern games, the uses and combinations of objects
available were only those that had been deliberately
foreseen by the designer. Resident Evil, on the other
hand, imitates a different medium altogether: as we’ve
191
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
seen, it tries to be like a film, making use of certain
horror-movie camera angles and so on. And its most
evocative language is the incoherent moaning of
zombies.
The play’s the thing
So what might the future hold? It is clear, for one thing,
that mainstream videogames will never go back to the
keyboard. (Games played on personal computers rather
than on keyboard-free consoles such as the PlayStation
account for only about 10 percent of the total sold
worldwide.) The text adventure, therefore, is dead as a
dodo. But future games will probably start to
incorporate accurate voice recognition and eventually,
no doubt, sophisticated language parsing, so that you
can actually “talk” to other characters in the videogame
world. Richard Darling agrees. “And then with AI
systems as we are now, that could be a huge leap in
excitement levels, where you could actually
communicate with AI people in a way that you believed
to be pretty close to realistic.”
Sega’s beautiful and fascinating oddity Seaman
(2000), for the Dreamcast system, is an admirable first
step to reclaiming this higher path for videogames.
Described as a “voice recognition pet,” it requires the
192
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
player to rear a hilariously bizarre fish with a man’s
head (straight out of Monty Python’s The Meaning of
Life) that swims around a digital aquarium. The player
can speak into a microphone peripheral that plugs into
the joypad, and Seaman answers back. For the moment,
however, only half the job is done, for Seaman’s
responses are still all pre-scripted. Dynamic voice
synthesis and language creation in response to a
player’s conversation is still, it seems, a long way off.
When it happens, it will certainly be a wonderfully rich
form of interaction. But I don’t think it will achieve the
dream of interactive narrative. What it will
revolutionize instead is Olivier Masclef’s ambition of a
“dramatically interesting virtual world”: it will bolster
the illusion of actually being a character in an
imaginary social context. Yet for the game to be able to
surprise and move the player with its story line, it must
necessarily still keep certain plot developments out of
the player’s control. (“Could there be a truly
interactive, democratic art form?” David Cronenberg
wonders. “My films certainly aren’t democratic—their
creation is more like a dictatorship.”)
Like
Tom
Stoppard’s
Rosencrantz
and
Guildenstern, the future gameplayer might be an actor
193
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
in a drama over which he has no control—for only
then, as we have seen, is it a drama. The author, pace
Roland Barthes, is not quite dead yet.
Pending some future computational revolution,
then, in which a machine might be programmed to
simulate a real human author, with a real author’s
consciousness, creativity and life experiences, truly
interactive narrative is going to be out of reach. These
are the (very difficult) minimum requirements, and they
go beyond even the requirements of Strong AI. There
are heuristic “story-writing” programs already, but their
output, although impressive in its syntactical
sophistication, is worthless in literary terms. There is as
yet no reason to think that solving the data
intensiveness problem by applying algorithmic
processes to the actual plot, rather than to character
behavior, will result in anything a human gameplayer
would be interested in, emotionally or otherwise.
But this should not be surprising, or even
disappointing. Because stories will always be things
that people want to be told. If everyone wanted to make
up their own story, why would they buy so many
novels and cinema tickets? We like stories in general
because they’re not interactive.
194
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
Tie me up, tie me down
So should videogames totally abandon their current
model of prescripted story line interrupting interactive
play? Not necessarily. While it certainly does not
amount to “interactive storytelling,” it can still work
remarkably well on its own account, under the same
circumstances as any good story: when it is well
written.
A good videogame story provides a powerful
external motivation (external to the actual gameplay
mechanics) for continuing to try to beat the system. A
well-scripted game, such as Metal Gear Solid, keeps
you playing because fundamentally, as E. M. Forster
remarked of the primary appeal of the novel, you just
want to know what happens next. It helps that Metal
Gear Solid’s cut-scenes of vocal dialogue are generally
well acted, and the multiple twists and turns of the
thriller plot are highly enjoyable, dropping little hints as
to the true nature of your mission and the organization
you work for, keeping you guessing as to how it will all
turn out.
But Metal Gear Solid’s true brilliance lies in its
touches of humorous self-consciousness. It knows
it’s a game. One of your opponents, a pink-
195
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
bodystockinged martial arts cyborg called Psycho
Mantis, comments sarcastically on the other
videogames you play (by reading the memory card in
your console, which contains data saved from other
games). And a helpful character will tell you at one
point to pull your controller out of the PlayStation and
put it in the other socket, so that Psycho will no longer
be able to predict your movements and kill you quickly.
Such clever devices ensure that the player is a happy
slave: though he has no freedom to change the story, he
has a lot of freedom in the gameplay itself, where many
different creative solutions can be found to the game’s
problems. The unique pleasure of a videogame, after
all, the one that no other medium can offer, is always
going to be what happens between the episodes of the
story.
The videogame industry knows just how successful
this approach can be—and, increasingly, professional
scriptwriters are being hired to work on high-budget
productions for exactly these reasons. In the future,
videogames will no doubt have much better stories, but
it seems unlikely that we will be given much more
freedom to change them than we already have in games
like Perfect Dark, Zelda 64 or Metal Gear Solid. And
above all, there will still need to be interesting
196
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
tasks for the player to perform. Sega’s Dreamcast game
Shenmue, for example, looks absolutely gorgeous and
has a suitably epic story line, but the gameplay is
somewhat limited.
What we want in general from a videogame story is
not interactive narrative at all, but a sophisticated
illusion that gives us pleasure without responsibility.
Sure, it might be nice to feel like we really are
infiltrating a terrorist compound in Alaska, or going on
an exotic quest to find an archaeological artefact, and if
prescripted story scenes can enhance this feeling of
involvement, then they serve a useful purpose. If we
can further choose to do certain things, and so see
certain episodes of the story in a different order, then
fine—but we don’t want to have to make crucial
narrative decisions that might, in effect, spoil the story
for us. We want to have our cake and eat it too.
A great deal of cake, not to mention roast chicken,
salads and pizza piled high on hundreds of trestle
tables, was consumed at Sony’s 1999 E3 party, held in
the lots of Sony Pictures in Culver City. This is where
the throngs at the Los Angeles videogames fair went to
wind down one evening—at least, those lucky enough
to secure invitations. Before the stage was taken for a
197
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
live performance by slacker-country rocker Beck, Ken
Kutaragi, the engineering genius at Sony Japan who
designed the PlayStation and its successor, gave an
intriguing speech that concentrated on the advantages
of “new worlds” and “characters.” He was cheered to
the echo by the audience.
Kutaragi’s concentration on “character” rather than
storytelling was informative. Developments in Los
Angeles and elsewhere show a new pragmatism among
videogame designers: concentrating on what they alone
can provide, rather than chasing the fashionable dream
of interactive narrative, or uncritically seeking
convergence with the cinema. Instead, especially in
their concentration on character, videogames are
carefully strip-mining our conventional notions of
narrative and storytelling for what can be usefully
simulated in their own, utterly different, medium.
But how do videogames build the worlds that their
characters inhabit?
198
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
6
SOLID GEOMETRY
Vector class
The world is made of glowing green and red lines. You
are seated in a cockpit, grasping a sculpted black lever
in each hand, thumbs hovering over the twin red fire
buttons on top. You are in a tank. Audio rumblings and
sonar-like pings go off around your ears as the other
tanks on the battlefield seek to destroy you. It’s kill or
be killed. It’s a dream of perfect destruction. You’re
playing Battlezone.
This arcade game, released by Atari in 1980, in
which the player must shoot other tanks and flying
saucers while surviving as long as possible, was a
milestone in the history of videogame imagery, and in
the construction of videogame space itself. It was the
first really successful “first-person” game, where the
screen showed the action from a perspectival point of
199
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
view, as if you were actually there. (There had been
previous attempts at perspective in games, notably in
Night Driver, which used moving white blocks on a
black screen to evoke cats’ eyes and side bollards on a
road, and in Star Raiders [1979], a rudimentary 3D
space shoot-’em-up, but Battlezone provided an
environment where the player had complete freedom of
movement over the ground in any direction.) And
Battlezone was also the defining moment of a style of
graphic representation whose influence is still felt, even
in the most modern games of the new millennium.
The ghostly images of enemy tanks and flying
saucers were drawn in vector graphics. Whereas a
television screen or a modern computer monitor is a
“raster” display, consisting of hundreds of horizontal
arrays of dots that are drawn one at a time, so that a
diagonal line on screen always looks “stepped,” vector
screens enabled a perfectly straight line to be drawn
between any two points on the screen. Battlezone’s
universe was one of sharp-edged perfection.
But the most immediately noticeable thing about
the game now is that its tanks and mountains are drawn
only in luminous outline. You can see right through
everything. This method became known as “wireframe
200
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
3D.”26 Where two planes of an object meet, a line is
drawn, but the planes themselves have no surface, no
solidity. Every object is drawn from simple geometrical
objects such as triangles and rectangles. These are
generally known as “polygons.”
Wireframe 3D caught on after Battlezone, and
several arcade classics borrowed this technology while
making the leap from pervasive green to full color,
most notably Star Wars and, in excelsis, Tempest,
whose abstract pyrotechnics drove one of the greatest
shoot-’em-up games ever conceived.
The peculiar ascetic attraction of wireframe
graphics (whose apotheosis coincided with the last days
of vector displays, but persisted after they had gone, as
raster monitors now had sufficient pixel resolution to
draw pretty straight-looking diagonals) enabled the
player to concentrate purely on the action in a defiantly
alien, unreal and still featureless arena. For many
people growing up on these machines, the pinpoint
glowing geometries of these worlds became a new
metaphor for the terrain of the imagination—the
_________________
26 The first 3D wireframe computer animation had actually been created
nearly two decades previously, by Edward Zajac, an engineer working at
Bell Labs, as part of an experiment to see whether an orbiting satellite could
be stabilized so that one of its surfaces always faced Earth.
201
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
structures of logical thought incarnated in a beautiful
dance of electrons.
Martin Amis wrote that Battlezone has “the look of
op or pop art and the feel of a genuine battlezone.” This
intriguing comparison is instructive in its shortcomings.
For unlike op art, which produces an illusion of
movement in the abstract, static image, Battlezone has
partly representational ambitions (that is a tank, that is a
flying saucer), and produces an illusion of movement
by stringing together simple static images at high
speed. Battlezone’s defining aesthetic (owing in part to
technical limitations at the time), on the other hand, and
in contrast to pop art, is one of purely imaginary
surfaces. Where pop art glories in colorful flat shading
and razored curves, Battlezone evinces contempt for
color, for material, for substance itself. Such qualities,
it murmurs seductively, are illusory anyway. The edge
is everything: the frontier where one plane meets
another, where turret joins body, where missile meets
flank.
The look of Battlezone or Tempest was at the same
time shockingly weird and comfortingly familiar, not
from Warhol or Riley but from a much nearer and more
disturbing medium. It was as if high school
mathematics lessons had come to life, benignly. No
202
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
doubt Battlezone and its ilk had some influence on
William Gibson’s seminally incandescent descriptions
of the Matrix (whence the 1999 film got its title). In
Neuromancer,
Gibson
describes
this
computersimulated world, where corporations are
represented by “green cubes” or a “stepped scarlet
pyramid,” where the landscape consists of “lines of
light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and
constellations of data. Like city lights, receding . . .”
Battlezone was the first game to draw with those
familiar schoolroom objects, polygons—and in that, it
prefigured the firework geometries of cutting-edge
games in the late 1990s and beyond.
Battlezone was at once fantastically complex, in the
demands of reaction and strategy it placed on the
player, and reassuringly simple. Here was a universe
devoid of clutter, eternally shiny and new. Early dreams
of virtual reality were always expressed visually in
wireframe graphics for these very reasons (see Tron),
and now that videogame graphics have moved on to fill
in the wireframe skeletons with textured surfaces, and
to smooth their hard-edged outlines, the wireframe
aesthetic can be seen as one of the great futurist dreams
of the late twentieth century.
203
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
Modern videogames themselves understand the loss
and even grieve it, in witty ways: Metal Gear Solid, for
instance, provides the player with a delicious “VR
Training Mode,” in which strategies for the game
proper are practiced in a wireframe world, and moving
among these glowing green rectilinear constructions
feels, in a funny way, like a sort of homecoming.
The art of the new
From Space Invaders to the creation of space itself.
For many years the Holy Grail of videogame graphics
engineers was a system of true three-dimensional
action, a “virtual” space that the player could inhabit.
The problem of representing three dimensions on a
flat plane (in this case, the television screen) had
already been worried about by painters for thousands of
years. The earliest attempts at perspective that we know
of are found in scenery painting for the Dionysian
theater at Athens in the fifth century B.C. (the Greeks
called it skenographia), and foreshortening and shading
developed with increasing sophistication up to and
through the medieval period. But an exact theory of
perspective in painting was not codified until circa
1420, when Filippo Brunelleschi systematized a
204
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
mathematical method for what became known as
“scientific perspective.”
You know it already. Objects in the distance
decrease in apparent size according to strictly defined
ratios. Parallel lines converge at one or more
“vanishing points.”27 Scientific perspective is
universally familiar today, at least in the West. It is
everywhere, and it just looks “right.” When a child is
taught to draw railway lines converging as they roll into
the distance, she is learning scientific perspective. We
are familiar with Escher’s unsettling distortions of it.
And scientific perspective is the kind on which most
modern 3D videogames are constructed. In games such
as Doom, where the screen supposedly shows the
player’s point of view in an imagined, putatively solid
environment, the computer calculates—precisely
according to the rules first devised by Brunelleschi and,
later, elaborated by Alberti in his On Painting (1436)—
the appropriate size and shape for all objects on the
screen, depending on their distance from and angle to
the hypothetical “viewer.”
_________________
27 This familiar term was not, in fact, coined (by Brook Taylor, in Linear
Perspective) until nearly 300 years after the discovery of scientific
perspective by painters.2
205
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
But along the way, videogames have rehearsed
other histories of pictorial representation, and come up
with imaginative and original visual strategies
themselves. Moreover, as has been made abundantly
clear in the mid- to late 1990s by the industry’s
numerous abortive attempts to convert old
twodimensional game paradigms into 3D space,
videogame possibilities often depend totally on the
form of representation chosen. It is hard to imagine a
workable true-3D Asteroids or Defender. The critical
problem is this: you can’t see behind you. Of course,
you can’t in real life either, but then in real life you
don’t often find yourself piloting an arrow-shaped
spaceship and blasting big rocks. The latest reiteration
of Asteroids (1998), in fact, finally recognizes this
problem. The ships and rocks are reimagined as “solid,”
multifaceted objects, but the playing area is a good old
two-dimensional plane.
So what is the story of videogames’ visual
refinement? What shapes of world have sprouted from
the silicon, and what might the future still hold?
Pushing the boundaries
The very earliest videogames, such as Spacewar
and Pong, represented objects on a flat plane, the
boundaries of which were those of the screen. The
206
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
environment had no characteristics of its own: it was
not terrain, but simply a function of the relations
between objects (such as the perilous gravitational field
surrounding the sun in Spacewar) or a means by which
time could pass while one object traveled across the
screen (the ball in Pong), so that everything did not
happen simultaneously.
This was a mode of space purer than any that exists
in the real universe. Its laws produced no frictional
resistance, and it offered no decorative matter to
distract from the task in hand. It was a pure dream of
unhindered movement and harmonious action. More
modern games have diluted this primal passion in a
mania of hyper-representation. Certainly it is clear that
as soon as more advanced graphic systems become
available in the history of videogames, it is space that
gets filled up, terraformed, converted into a game
object itself. Perhaps in the end there was something
disturbing about the alien vacuum.
In the early flat-plane games, the boundaries of the
TV screen limited the play arena to a fixed, small size,
and thus limited the type of action available to game
designers. (Just as in real life, a game of football
requires more space than a game of tennis.) The screen
was a prison. But it didn’t take long before ways were
207
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
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. Now space was
curved. Your disappearing ship would sail “over” the
top and zip around the (imaginary) back
instantaneously
before
coming
“under”
and
rematerializing at the bottom. Topologically, the spatial
arrangement of Asteroids, though it looked flat, was
actually equivalent to the surface of a torus (a doughnut
with a hole in the middle). While this curvature
afforded
the
player
greater
freedoms
of
maneuverability, it also cunningly increased the sense
of entrapment. For anyone who has watched their
Asteroids ship career repeatedly across the screen time
after time at full speed knows that there is no escape,
however far you travel, from the implacable boulders.
The superficial limits of the screen were further
eroded by the invention of scrolling. The term was
borrowed, with semi-conscious irony, from that
precodex literary technology, the scroll, which may be
unfurled horizontally or vertically, according to the
208
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
dispensation of characters, in order to uncover more
text than is currently viewable on the open section. We
are now all familiar with the process of smoothly
scrolling down a word-processing document or Web
page: videogames got there first.
Early scrolling games were mostly of the vertical
shoot-’em-up genre. Rather than sit waiting for aliens
to come knocking at one’s defenses, as in Space
Invaders (1978), the player was in constant motion,
rushing forever upward on a long, linear strip of space,
dodging and fighting enemies along the way. But most
revolutionary was a type of space delineated by the
combination of horizontal scrolling with a variation on
the wraparound concept.
This idea in fact featured in one of the earliest
scrolling games, Defender (1980 [see fig. 9]), for many
reasons a classic of radical design, in which the player’s
ship is free to fly left or right, or simply to hover,
spitting lasers at the evil hordes. When the ship is in
motion, it remains in the center of the screen;
everything else scrolls by to give the illusion of
movement. But fly far enough in one direction and the
player approaches the original starting point, from the
opposite direction. Horizontally, then, the play area is
finite but unbounded.
209
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
Videogames had, with such forms as Defender’s,
somehow acquired a new dimension of action. It is
certainly not the same space as in the old, static,
onescreen games. Yet nor is it three-dimensional, for
the player cannot fly “into” or “out of” the screen. The
game demands, moreover, that the player watch two
representations of the same space: one on the main
playing area, and one on Defender’s innovatively
complex radar, a small subscreen that shows a wider
section of the game universe at any one time so that
attacks can be planned and threatened humans rescued.
The arrangement of space on the primary screen is
rather as if we found ourselves in the center of a large
circular strip, onto which is projected the battle action;
when we scroll sideways, we are metaphorically
turning our heads to investigate another area of the
scene.
This spatial arrangement is indeed the perfect,
unforeseeable fusion of two pre-cinema visual
technologies: the Cyclorama of the 1840s, in which the
viewer stands inside a circular drum painted with a
continuous image; and the Kinematoscope, patented by
Coleman Sellers in 1861, in which a series of
photographs arranged around the inside of a revolving
drum presents the illusion of movement to an observer
210
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
Fig. 9. Defender: swoop low over the mountains and defend the
human race. The radar (top) shows the whole level space in
miniature (‰ 1980 Williams)
focusing on a fixed area of the interior. Defender
marries the endless, wraparound vista of the Cyclorama
with the flickering animation of the Kinematoscope,
although the vista itself is different in purpose. It is not
the visual depiction of the cycloramic space that is
important in the videogame—Defender’s space is still
mostly unindividuated—but the strategic opportunities
it offers, the chance to come up behind the enemy.
211
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
Later games, such as R-Type (1988), took
advantage of spare power to create an inventive
impression of depth with “parallax” scrolling. Imagine
the viewer inside the circular strip described above,
only now it is not one but several concentric circular
strips, revolving at decreasing speeds as they increase
in distance from the viewer. In a train, the observer
notes that trackside posts flash by in an instant, while
distant scenery rolls past in a more leisurely fashion. In
order to imitate this effect of moving perspective, the
game screen background now acquires several different
flat planes, so that objects in the foreground plane
sweep by more quickly than objects in the middle-
distance plane, which in turn pass more quickly than
objects (mountain ranges, clouds and the like) near the
horizon. The term “parallax” itself was, fittingly for a
family of games that usually featured alien worlds,
borrowed from astronomy.
It is important to emphasize again at this point that
innovations such as wraparound and scrolling did not
at once render earlier forms obsolete. The limitations
of a fixed, bounded screen, for instance, are
reimagined as positive gameplay virtues by the tense,
claustrophobic design of Robotron (1982), in which
the player’s post-apocalyptic hero must do battle in a
212
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
confined space with twenty, fifty or a hundred
bloodthirsty automatons in order to save the last nuclear
family on Earth. As the game’s designer, Eugene
Jarvis, explained to J. C. Herz: “It was kind of about
confinement. You are stuck on this screen. There’s two
hundred robots trying to mutilate you, and there’s no
place to hide . . . You can’t run down the hallway. You
can’t go anywhere else . . . A lot of times, the games
are about the limitations. Not only what you can do but
what you can’t do.”28
Points of view
In 1980, Battlezone’s scientific perspective was still
only one of many competing modes of representation
available to the videogame designer. Games continued
to perform on two-dimensional planes, scrolling in one
or more directions, for years. In 1982, however, another
new mode, which came to be known as “isometric
perspective,” was popularized by Zaxxon (see fig. 10),
a
shoot-’em-up
that
scrolled,
not
simply
_________________
28 Jarvis’s point is further backed up by the fact that nine years after
scrolling and perspectival representation were invented, along came Tetris,
an ultra-simple affair that featured neither, but almost instantly became the
world’s most popular videogame. The modern success of Grand Theft Auto,
too, has not been limited by its “old-fashioned,” top-down viewpoint.
213
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
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. In other words, parallel
lines do not converge, and equal emphasis is given to
all three planes. In videogame terms, this means that an
illusion of solidity is created while preserving an
external viewpoint. You could see three sides of an
object rather than just one. And now, crucially, the
game screen was not just a neutral arena; it had become
an environment.
By means of simple jagged lines, Defender had
created an illusion of planetary surface by sketching a
mountain range; below the level of the mountains it
was safe to drop off rescued humans. But the
mountains worked only to delimit functional areas of
the arena in this way; they were otherwise
metaphorically “behind” the player and did not have to
be negotiated. Later derivatives of the scrolling 2D
shoot-’em-up, such as Scramble, did require the
navigation of tortuous tunnels, but this design only in
effect limited the play area, which remained as fluid
and empty as ever. The player’s ship in Zaxxon,
214
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
Fig. 10. Zaxxon: isometric perspective and terraformed space
(‰ Sega 1982)
however, while having as usual to deal with enemy
aircraft, could also explode if it crashed into any of the
numerous barrels, pylons and buildings poking up out
of the ground. Movement was now nearly in three
dimensions, with the introduction of controls to vary
“height” above the ground. Only the fact that motion
was automatically one-way (a function of the scrolling)
inhibited complete freedom of movement.
215
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
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. In
this case it is irrelevant that isometricity doesn’t
resemble the way we see things in real life.29 In
videogames, isometric perspective enjoyed a phase as
the most technologically sophisticated means of
building a 3D world, for example on games such as Ant
Attack, Highway Encounter and Knight Lore for the
ZX Spectrum.
Foreshortening implies a subjective, individual
viewpoint, so its absence in isometric graphics, along
with the elevated position of survey, conspired to give
the user a sense of playing God in these tiny universes.
God could not yet move around—he was still glued to
his chair—but he could see everything, he was in
control, and he saw that it was good.
_________________
29 At any distance, that is. In fact, according to modern psychologists, when
scrutinizing objects that are very close in our visual field, convergence
doesn’t operate, and what we “see” actually resembles parallelism more
closely.
216
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
Isometric perspective still prospers in the huge
genre of strategy gaming. In SimCity and Civilization
or Command and Conquer, the player controls
numerous units (people, tanks, factories and so on)
within a vast playing area. Construct this world in
scientific perspective, without an omniscient overview,
and you’d be totally lost among the details. In such
games, you don’t need to peer behind at the hidden
surfaces of an arms factory, for instance, because it is a
functional counter in the gameplay, defined solely by
its use and potential.
Scientific perspective is not just one alternative
mode of representation among others; it is not just an
arbitrary artistic “convention,” but is wired into true
theories of physics and biology. And its lure was
irresistible to videogame designers who were searching
for ever more elaborate ways to convince the player
that he or she was not merely watching, but was really
in that world.
Being there
People usually say that the first true “immersive”
3D game was Wolfenstein 3D, released by iD in 1992.
This did indeed kick-start a blossoming genre, the first-
person shooter, where the screen displays the
217
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
supposed viewpoint of the player’s character wandering
around an enemy-infested arena with a battery of
projectile weaponry.30
Yet Battlezone, more than a decade previously, was
in effect a first-person shooter, and the first-person
viewpoint had even been crammed into a game released
for the Sinclair ZX81 home computer, 3D Monster
Maze, in which the player had to negotiate a black-and-
white maze (drawn in a very low-resolution
approximation of wireframe) while avoiding a
marauding Tyrannosaurus rex; the entire game, a
beautifully terrifying experience for any nine-year-old
of the day (me, for instance), ran in a mere 16 kilobytes
of code, which wouldn’t be nearly enough to run even
the joystick drivers for modern games.
Yet it was Wolfenstein that first situated the player
in “rooms,” connected by doors, with walls receding
realistically into the distance and other humans
wandering around to be killed. (In this case they were
Nazi officers, so no compunction need be felt about
blasting them to their doom.) Wolfenstein’s illusionism
was rather crude: there was no texture to the floors or
ceiling to aid the impression of forward
_________________
30 With wry names. In the follow-up, Doom, the most potent weapon was
known by the acronym BFG: “big fucking gun.”
218
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
movement—only the walls of the room moved; and the
enemy soldiers were constructed by bit-mapped sprites,
which means they were basically flat drawings. When
the enemies got nearer, they grew perspectivally by the
simple means of enlarging every pixel in the drawing,
so that they looked fuzzy and “blocky.” But another
innovation Wolfenstein made has been copied by every
first-person shooter since: at the bottom of the screen is
a representation of hands clutching a gun, drawn
foreshortened so that the gun appears to be pointing
“into” the screen. This was a clever effort to try to cross
the barrier between onscreen action and the player’s
physical situation— those are my hands, so my head
must be in this world too—and the animations of recoil
and reloading have become ever more impressive.
But the purpose of this gun onscreen is purely
cosmetic and psychological, rather than operational. It
is not used for aiming, for while Wolfenstein and Doom
have the gun pointing straight into the center, other
first-person shooters, such as Goldeneye, have it
coming into the screen at an angle (usually from the
right, which sadly compromises believability for
lefties), so it is impossible to judge its precise direction
and range. Of course, anyone actually using a gun
219
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
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.
The makers of Wolfenstein went on to release the
far more successful Doom, which added floor and
ceiling textures as well as external locations, and then
Quake, which further enhanced the illusion of a solid
environment with solid, polygonal monsters. Suddenly,
videogame space was inhabited, occupied by the
enemy.
And it was all done with geometry. The triangles
and oblongs of Battlezone are the same objects that
make up a level of Half-Life (1998), only in the latter
they are massively more numerous, and the surfaces are
filled in. So why did polygons become the ubiquitous
virtual bricks of videogames? Because, whatever the
interesting or eccentric devices that had been thrown up
along the way, videogames, as with the strain of
Western art from the Renaissance up until the shock of
photography, were hell-bent on refining their powers of
illusionistic deception.
220
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
Wireframe 3D was a nice start, but now it’s old hat.
Real tanks don’t look like that. In two dimensions, you
join the dots; in three dimensions, you join the lines. It
was time to color in the surfaces, and in the early 1990s
game types such as aircraft combat simulators, driving
games and more tank games began to do this, while
polygonal animated human forms first appeared in
videogames with the martial arts game Virtua Fighter.
Remember: a polygon (“many sides”) is any flat shape
drawn with straight lines. A triangle, a square, an
icosahedron—they are all polygons. Easy to draw.
Easy, with a powerful chip, to draw an awful lot of
them.
The bloody, rotting zombies in House of the Dead 2
(see fig. 11) are constructed from many differently
shaded and shaped triangles, which foreshorten and
morph when the figure moves exactly according to the
rules of scientific perspective. The play of virtual light31
off these baroque constructions gives them the
appearance of solid objects in space in a way that flat
graphic drawings (sprites) never accomplished. Shading
of light and dark on a flat, static surface (for instance,
in a painting) is sufficient to suggest depth
_________________
31 Another coinage by William Gibson, in his novel of that name (New
York: Bantam Books, 1994).
221
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
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.
Fig. 11. House of the Dead 2: be afraid of geometry (‰ Sega
1999)
The fact that solid forms can be described by simple
geometry (geometry literally means “measuring the
world”) is an idea as old as Western civilization. In
222
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
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. Numerological essays in cabbalism spring
from the same idea, and from medieval times onward
religious thinkers hoped that applying geometrical
analysis to the universe would enable them, in Stephen
Hawking’s retrospectively apt phrase, “to know the
mind of God.” In the thirteenth century, Roger Bacon
praised the religious power of the developing tradition
of “geometric figuring” in painting; making the figures
in religious scenes as lifelike as possible, he argued,
could induce in the pious a sense of actually witnessing
the events depicted.
Artists began to experiment with geometrical
analyses of that most important form, the human body.
Engravings by artists such as DÜrer and SchÖn show
how an understanding of corporeal proportion is aided
by reducing the body to simple geometrical building
blocks. But this method was not just a device or a
trick. The Dutch artist Crispyn van der Passe, for
instance, produced in 1643 a large encyclopedia of
223
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
geometric figurings for such common subjects as stags
and birds, and argued that the fact that all animals are
reducible to simple Euclidean forms is attributable to
divine Providence. The geometrical method revealed to
the artists a deep, Timaean truth about the nature of the
universe: as Ernst Gombrich describes it, “The regular
schema which we call an abstraction was therefore
‘found’ by the artist in nature. It belongs to the laws of
its being.”
On the one hand, then, polygonal videogames are
using a very old tradition of illusionistic construction;
on the other hand, they have revolutionized it. Because
these polygons move. Every videogame, you see,
constructs not only a space but a space-time. All 3D
games are in this sense four-dimensional. And now the
polygons become animated—literally, given a soul. A
machine soul. Virtua Fighter 2 looks as though the
figures in SchÖn’s etching have suddenly come to life,
participating in an epic ballet of crunching tibia. The
pious geometrical idealism of the ancients has been lost
along the way, replaced by the banally unphilosophical
late twentieth-century idealism of the perfect body:
fighting men with horrifically overdeveloped trapezoid
muscles; fighting women with long legs, wasp waists
and unfeasibly pert breasts.
224
Download from Www.Somanuals.com. All Manuals Search And Download.
Trigger Happy
But though human beings do not actually look like
this, they do move like this, and the tangible solidity of
one leg sweeping in front of another, of a fist slamming
into a chest, is a magic wrought by Plato’s four
numbers.
Just as Timaeus argues further that the four
numbers (or atoms) that make up the cosmos
correspond to the four elements in ancient Greek
cosmogony (earth, wind, fire and water), so modern
polygons can be made to draw every kind of substance
|
