Free your purchased eBook form adhesion DRM*! * DRM = Digtal Rights Management
Trigger Happy VIDEOGAMES AND THE ENTERTAINMENT REVOLUTION by Steven Poole Published 2000; revised 2001, 2004. This 2007 web download edition from http://stevenpoole.net/ License: Creative Commmons BY-NC-ND 3.0. If you enjoy this book, please consider leaving a tip. Paypal: tips@stevenpoole.
Contents ACKNOWLEDGMENTS............................................ 8 1 RESISTANCE IS FUTILE ......................................10 Our virtual history....................................................10 Pixel generation .......................................................13 Meme machines .......................................................18 The shock of the new ...............................................28 2 THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES ....................................35 Beginnings ...........
Out of control.........................................................109 4 ELECTRIC SHEEP ...............................................119 The gift of sound and vision ..................................122 CinÉ qua non? ........................................................130 Camera obscura......................................................142 You’ve been framed...............................................153 5 NEVER-ENDING STORIES.................................161 A tale of two cities .......
Power tools ............................................................276 Veni, vidi, lusi........................................................282 Get into the groove.................................................291 You win again ........................................................298 9 SIGNS OF LIFE.....................................................307 I am what I eat........................................................308 Deep in conversation..............................................
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.
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 editions to: trighap@hotmail.com.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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 humanversusmachine competition, the racing game is the purest expression of machine-mediated human-versushuman competition.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, tragicalcomichistorical-pastoral . . .”—so at the beginning of thetwenty-first century we are offered driving-RPG games, RPG-exploration games, puzzleexplorationshoot-’em-up games and more.
Trigger Happy wandering through recognizable environments built of stone or wood.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’s 16 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Trigger Happy up, or amorphous blobs of energy floating in the air to be driven or flown through.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, twentyfour 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?).
Trigger Happy model, indeed, for all detective fiction: whodunit is the diachronic story, while the process of investigation is the synchronic story.
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.
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.
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 computergenerated “movie” nugget—pops up and moves the plot along.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 . . .
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Trigger Happy supposed viewpoint of the player’s character wandering around an enemy-infested arena with a battery of projectile weaponry.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Trigger Happy polygons’ very ubiquity will lead to their immolation. Sony’s PlayStation2 draws about seventy million polygons per second, which is roughly equivalent to the total number of pixels on the screen.32 Hardware is thus getting very close to being able to provide so many polygons that to all intents and purposes they will soon vanish, collapsing back into the original cosmic building blocks. They will become, in effect, the modest, invis-ible atoms of videogame reality.
Trigger Happy In the real world, we perceive depth because we have two eyes: each receives a slightly different perspective on the scene and our brain blends them into a stereoscopic image.
Trigger Happy relative size. Most of these are self-explanatory, apart from the term “aerial perspective.” This was coined by Leonardo da Vinci; it has nothing to do with geometry but describes the effect of distance upon color.
Trigger Happy range of vision (and thus what the computer has to draw) is markedly limited. Objects or monsters can loom out of the mist with stylish effect, passing smoothly from blued-out fuzz to sharp delineation. Often, fog and general darkness make an effective means to heighten tension in horror-related gameplay, for instance in Silent Hill (see fig. 12), a good example of how technical limitations can be turned to positive aesthetic effect. Some technical limitations, however, run deeper.
Trigger Happy size you would draw the snoozing cat on the garden wall if you traced her outline on the window. Now usually, any object B that subtends a larger view angle than object A has a correspondingly larger plane projection. This is common artistic sense: it looks bigger, so you draw it bigger. But there are certain cases where view angle and plane projection do not tally. The simplest instance is a drawing of a sphere that is to one side of our vision.
Trigger Happy Fig. 12. Silent Hill: fog and snow heighten the tension ( 1999 Konami) In general, painting avoids the confusions of marginal distortion by two methods: combining several slightly different viewpoints (especially in large canvases), or keeping the angle of vision relatively narrow.
Trigger Happy looking directly at it for a fraction of a second, we would confirm that its outline really is round and not elliptical. Videogames presented in a first-person viewpoint thus far have failed to overcome these problems, and their hyperbolic claims to a sort of “realism” must therefore be qualified. Perspectival limitations are far more salient and noticeable in first-person shooters, which unlike most paintings are predicated on fast, aggressive responses.
Trigger Happy make sure you are not going to tread in some fatal ooze, break a trip wire or fall down a satirical pit. While videogames are still played out on flat television screens or monitors, therefore, and while the interface remains so doggedly mechanical, a critical level of realism will never be achieved, and the experience of playing Quake and its siblings will always be more like remote-controlling a robot with tunnel vision rather than being there yourself.
Trigger Happy Tomb Raider games (see fig. 13), this is a perspectival construction in which the player can see the character under control, and the representational viewpoint itself is a completely disembodied one. Disembodied? I mean that the view we are given corresponds to no actual pair of eyes in the gameworld. The point of view from which we see Lara Croft is constantly moving, swooping, creeping up behind her and giddily soaring above, even diving below the putative floor level.
Trigger Happy from the cinema: the player’s point of view is explicitly defined, as we saw, as that of a “camera,” whose movements can often be controlled as if the player were a phantom movie director, floating about on an invisible crane. The external view of the player’s character, although putatively less “realistic,” is very often more desirable in gameplay terms than the fashionable firstperson view.
Trigger Happy Fig. 13. Tomb Raider 3: the third-person perspective—we watch Lara watching her surroundings (here, an imaginary London wharf) ( and ™ 1998 Core Design Limited; all rights reserved) Brave new worlds This brief history of the construction of space in videogames has suggested two things. One is that videogames have to some degree repeated histories of representation in art, on jittery, caffeine-fueled fastforward.
Trigger Happy that development, for by the eighteenth century in painting the classical ideal of beauty based on some cosmic mathematical order was already being challenged, and the shortcomings of perspective were already being identified. Videogame scenery, being an artifact of computers, is clearly still in thrall to the god of mathematics. Of the myriad post-perspectival ways of seeing such as impressionism or cubism, there is as yet no sign in the apprentice draughtsmanship of videogames.
Trigger Happy dimensions that we are currently assured constitute reality. There is no question that such a game could be built; it is a question of whether there exists the vision to build it—and, of course, whether anyone would want to play it. Such a mixture of styles in our hypothetical game, of course, would—and this is the second thing we have learned—necessitate a mixture of different sorts of gameplay.
Trigger Happy example, in software for the Gameboy, the most successful videogame system ever made. The choice of spatial mode, of course, which includes the choice even of whether or how far to be representational at all (Doom versus Tetris), is bound up intimately with the question of what kind of game the designers intend to make.
Trigger Happy 7 FALSE IDOLS Dress code Chiba City: a sprawling, industrial town in the humid, rainy Japanese spring, where downbeat pockets of hardware shops, Pachinko parlors and lean-to noodle shacks are carved up by multilane highways. Cars don’t stop to admire the view; they are always going somewhere else. Usually to the south, to Makuhari, Japan’s own vision of the future now.
Trigger Happy except a symbolic one: to emphasize and celebrate the area’s gigantism of scale. Makuhari, in its odd flatness of texture, its aggressively rectilinear architecture and its constellation of rosy aircraft-warning lights winking from the buildings at night, looks just like a city out of a videogame. It is a shrine to techno-optimism.
Trigger Happy of character in videogames. So I’m going to brave the crush and see for myself. Inside Makuhari Messe, the vast national exhibition center (whose undulating roof gives it the appearance of eight hi-tech railway stations shoved together), more than a hundred and sixty thousand Japanese men, women and children have come over the two public days of the exhibition in March 1999 to see and play the newest videogames, the ones that will be launched in the next six months.
Trigger Happy huge inflatables of Spyro the Dragon and Crash Bandicoot, in Japan it offers a live stage show, with a rock band fronted by performers in the cuddly, furry costumes of Um Jammer Lammy and Parappa the Rapper.
Trigger Happy character can be an idol as much as a pop star or an actor in the West. One of the major criteria, therefore, for a game’s success in Japan is that it contains good characters. Here, by the way, is another important difference between videogames and films. The star of a movie is chosen from a pre-existing pool of actors; you can dress them up in black Prada, shave their hair or teach them kung-fu (ideally all three), but at bottom you know what you’re getting.
Trigger Happy anime (animated cartoon films)—the massive Japanese toy and videogame corporation Bandai, for instance, is a major sponsor of animated programming. Whole books have been written about “Japanimation” alone. But the most pertinent aspect of these comic forms for our purposes is their peculiar style of character drawing, which has a very strong influence on Japanese videogames.
Trigger Happy Miyamoto says: “Mario was born of rational design in the days of immature technology.” More generally, both with Mario and with later characters, such considerations meant that, since the face and eyes are the richest physical loci of “personality”—we concentrate on them in real life when talking to people; we commend portraits when they get the “look” and expression right—it was natural to devote more resources and more space to them over the more purely functional parts of the physique.
Trigger Happy produce proportionally more realistic avatars of human characters. When Japanese fans got their first look at Final Fantasy VIII there was palpable outrage, because it seemed the characters had been “Westernized”: no longer the cute, deformed people of FFVII but longerlimbed and more “adult”-looking.
Trigger Happy But what is it about the deformed aesthetic that makes it so desirable? To most Western eyes, such characters look merely childlike and childish: “cutesy.” But remember that unrealism in videogames need not be a handicap; it can be a positive, deliberate pleasure. The Japanese preference for “deformed” physiques, in this case, is a logical extension of this idea to the human form itself. Unearthliness is part of the charm.
Trigger Happy media stars for this reason: desire that can never in principle be reciprocated is thoroughly safe and free of any possible disappointment. This phenomenon is known in Japan by the term of disapprobation nijikon fetchi—literally, “twodimensional fetish,” though it more generally covers devotion to any form of manga, anime or threedimensional videogame characters.
Trigger Happy are that they are too overdetermined and prescripted (just like preset “combo” moves in beat-’em-ups, and just like prescripted “narrative” interactions in story games). With Kyoko Date, we see further that motion capture is also aesthetically impoverishing, as it limits the achievable virtual movements and gestures to those that are physically possible in real life. But if all you are getting is “realistic” movement, far better to watch an actual human dancer.
Trigger Happy Statistical insights into videogaming in Japan are richly furnished by the 1997 CESA36 Games White Paper. It reports that attendance at the 1997 Tokyo Game Show was 82 percent male (while very heavily male-oriented, then, this still means nearly a fifth of attendees were female), while the median age of attendees was 25 to 29, and the most common occupation was that of “office worker.” (Videogames, then, are not just for kids in Japan any more than they are in Britain or the United States.
Trigger Happy than three times as many women as men nominated the PokÉmon (“Pocket Monster”) series (12.7 percent versus 3.9 percent). These games, unleashed upon the British and American market in the 1999 Christmas season, are cartoonish virtual bestiaries, in which lovable monsters may be reared, played with and battled against each other. Generically, they are more like God games (in the sense that they are “process toys”) than action games.
Trigger Happy “Game Grrlz” movement in America that proves that women can frag37 with the best of them. What we can infer so far is just that these Japanese women simply have different aesthetic tastes: their preferred videogames are in general more quirky or brain-taxing than the straight-ahead genre preferences (driving, fighting, dungeon games) of the men.
Trigger Happy men. But Brenda Laurel of Purple Moon Software, an American development studio that produces videogames aimed at young females, does exactly this: “Girls’ objection to computer games isn’t what you’d expect. It’s not that they’re too violent, it’s that they’re too boring. They’re extremely bored by them.” Are they? Not according to Game Grrl Nikki Douglas, who retorts: “What exactly is boring about creative strategy and 3D virtual environments? . . .
Trigger Happy depressingly adolescent, sexist advertising)39—from any posited “innate” preferences. Now that many more women are involved in the videogame design process worldwide, we may see in the near future that this fact, allied with better marketing, will erase it completely. According to some American statistics, in fact, the perceived “gap” has already vanished. In 1999 in the United States, nearly 43 percent of gamers were female. Nearly half of online gamers are female.
Trigger Happy industry as a whole is not meeting their needs and not taking their interests and preferences into account. Given the enormous buying power that women have and will continue to have, this is a shortsighted mistake,” according to one writer.40 So what kinds of games do women prefer? The Japanese women polled preferred games with good characters—the lovable personalities of Crash or Parappa.
Trigger Happy Home Video Game Software,” in which respondents were asked what kind of games they would like to see. Girls of 7 to 12, for example, would like “a chatting game,” while 16- to 18-year-olds envisage “a game in which a user creates various stories and can be a leading role.” As with so much else, the potential success of both types of posited game of course depends on massive advances in computer artificial intelligence.
Trigger Happy was ranked overall favorite by equal proportions of men and women CESA respondents). Videogame developers in the future will appeal to more men and to more women only as long as their games mature aesthetically. Character building Let us return to one clear aesthetic preference of the female (and many of the male) CESA respondents: for videogames which have good characters.
Trigger Happy A really successful character is not just a moneymaker for software developers, either: as we’ve seen, it enables hardware companies to sell consoles. Witness the fact that Nintendo’s N64 machine was delayed for a whole year while the finishing touches were put to the game Super Mario 64. Good characters become extremely valuable “properties” in the industry.
Trigger Happy Fig. 14. Lara Croft: a beautiful abstraction ( and ™ Core Design Limited; all rights reserved) Now at first sight there is a world of difference between Pac-Man and a modern videogame character such as Lara Croft (see fig. 14).
Trigger Happy you regard them as traditional static pictures. But as we must keep reminding ourselves, videogames are a kinetic art form: many of their pleasures can only be realized through time. And on a very basic level, PacMan and Lara do in fact share one important attraction. If you swing the joystick to move Pac-Man around his maze, he opens and shuts his mouth automatically while on the move.
Trigger Happy Witness the beautiful bounces and skids of Mario in Mario 64, or the graceful, arcing somersaults and handstands of Lara in Tomb Raider III. Good characters are good largely by virtue of having a wide range of physical abilities, and by having those physical abilities particularly well animated.
Trigger Happy Fig. 15. Sonic the Hedgehog: cat and mouse (from Sonic Adventure, Sega 1999) More proportionally humanoid “good characters”—such as Lara Croft, Jin Kazama from Tekken 3, or Solid Snake from Metal Gear Solid— work (on this purely static, visual dimension) in a slightly different way, in that they borrow from cinematic conventions of costume and coolness.
Trigger Happy 3 is an idealized amalgam of body-building action grunts such as Schwarzenegger and martial arts movie heroes. A good videogame character is one that the player, because of a fulfilled combination of dynamic and iconic criteria, likes—just as we like cartoon characters such as Sylvester the Cat or Cartman. But since the character is under our control, if we like him (or her) we must also feel somehow protective, and anxious lest we cause the character harm through our own manual inadequacy.
Trigger Happy gonna really work.” Well, at that point, it really didn’t make any difference.
Trigger Happy surely be careful never to let Lara become too individuated. If she were to look photorealistic, too much like an actual individual woman, what seductiveness she possesses would thereby be destroyed. Smith agrees: We feel that we can make Lara significantly different to the way she is now, without making her sort of real-life, by only going up to say twelve to fourteen hundred polygons.
Trigger Happy like Lara Croft or Mario is, in these ways, inexhaustible. Some say life’s the thing . . . . . . but I prefer playing videogames. Time to dive once again into the bleep-ridden throngs of Makuhari, because it’s not just in terms of character design that the Japanese industry is instructive. We can also learn from the esoteric flora and fauna of its videogame biosphere that never make it to the West.
Trigger Happy carrying out the ceremony are as intricate as they are because the point is to feel the beauty involved in each and every movement.” So, the point is not the flowers themselves; the point is not the tea. Form is its own content. And the Japanese words that describe such an aesthetic—ma (timing) and aida (balance)—are also used of forms of play such as Sumo and judo wrestling.
Trigger Happy And the remit of videogame “simulations” in Japan is sure to expand.
Trigger Happy except for the wealthy. Yet in a culture where the form of an activity is held in such high esteem for its own sake, being able to recreate that form in a videogame context is, it seems, a decisively valuable pleasure. This is not so different from a Western driving game. Most of us will never be able to hurl a Dodge Viper at two hundred miles an hour through the Tokyo suburbs.
Trigger Happy 8 THE PLAYER OF GAMES Tiny silver balls After the luminous hi-tech orgy of Makuhari’s videogame exhibition, let’s stop off at a Pachinko parlor in Akihabara, or “Electric Town,” the Tokyo district that constitutes a paradise on earth for devotees of denki seihin, or consumer electronics. In the West, we have slot machines built around spinning wheels inscribed with cherries and numbers. In Japan they have Pachinko, a simple yet intriguing game played with tiny silver balls.
Trigger Happy stylish businesswomen on their lunch hour, lean elderly men in tatty suits dropping cigarette ash into the machines’ integral ashtrays. Lined up in endless rows like workers on a factory conveyor belt, the players are nevertheless all alone, gazing intently at the machines in front of them. The air is electric with a thunderous clacking: the result of thousands upon thousands of silver balls hitting each other in a mesmerizing dance.
Trigger Happy the machine into a big plastic basket. From there they can be scooped back into the machine for more plays, after the initial hundred have been used up. Now if you amass a great many balls, and you have the self-discipline not to shove them straight back in the machine, you can go to the back of the shop and exchange them for real stuff, like a toaster or a microwave oven. In fact, most Pachinko parlors operate a shady back room where balls can be converted into cash.
Trigger Happy With Western slot machines, the bottom line is how much money the thing spews out at the end. With pinball, with which Pachinko obviously has a lot in common mechanically, the object of the game is to amass a different kind of currency—the social capital (in French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s terminology) of the arcade or bar: a high score. (Remember, the first successful arcade game was sited next to a pinball machine in a bar.) But Pachinko is purer than either of these alternatives.
Trigger Happy Some Pachinko experts roam the halls with a gaze so intuitively attuned to the game that they can pick out machines whose pins are slightly bent from the constant battering of balls. These, they know, will pay out more often. But to minimize this advantage, parlor operators go around at closing time with a hammer, knocking all the bent pins back into line. So the Pachinko system can never be rationally mastered.
Trigger Happy randomness with a continuous control over one important variable of the system. So do videogames. That one variable is the behavior of the player’s own character (animal, humanoid or mechanical), battling in an otherwise unpredictable virtual world. As the Pachinko control is analogue, furthermore, the tiniest variation in its position can produce large effects in the chaotic system.
Trigger Happy videogames are also part of a different lineage. The arcade, which today is normally a fluorescently lit space crammed with the latest monster videogame cabinets and their ever more inventive control mechanisms—lightguns, life-size kayak oars, motorized snowboards, electronic drumkits, big plastic horses—has changed little from a sociological point of view in around a hundred years.
Trigger Happy previously been causing an unimaginable upheaval in the lives of millions, forcing people out of work and instigating the formation of resistance groups such as the Luddites.41 The lesson was quickly learned. By the 1890s, the fruits of applied science were deliberately offered to the public in a markedly different way: not as labor-replacing devices, but simply as entertainments. Progress, the arcades argued, could be fun. High technology today is thoroughly domesticized.
Trigger Happy In this, videogames are again part of a larger tradition: this time, that of the technological prostheticization of play in general. Tennis, for example, has been transformed over the past few decades by material racquet technologies and stringdampening. Serious chess players routinely use computer analysis and million-game CD-ROM databases to prepare for matches, or to work on correspondence games.
Trigger Happy some pretense of monetary exchange—you might shoot enough ducks and win a cuddly toy—Time Crisis finishes the job begun by Pachinko, and offers nothing but purely sensual and psychological rewards for your cash. Another lightgun game, Point Blank, explicitly acknowledges this heritage by including a number of fairground-style shooting ranges to play at.
Trigger Happy try again. (The relative safety of high-speed collisions, moreover, turns most racing videogames further into digital versions of the fairground dodgems.) So the rollercoaster and the videogame both offer the pleasurable, adrenaline-surging experience of danger, with none of the risk. Other technologies have enhanced (or at least changed) games and sports, and videogames have enhanced (or at least built upon) the basic concepts of board games and fairground attractions.
Trigger Happy Videogames’ special virtue of interactivity, though, vastly increases this technological dependence until it attains a quality of symbiosis. You are perforce a happy accomplice. For though you can appreciate a photograph or watch a film quite happily without being able to operate a camera or movie projector, you cannot play a videogame without using the technology yourself. Now as far as we can tell, human beings have been playing games for a very long time.
Trigger Happy refining them. They are exactly those skills exercised by modern target videogames such as Time Crisis 2. Games of chance, meanwhile, seem to have originated from a belief that divine will could be glimpsed through seemingly random machinations; the I Ching, for example, is a book of wisdom in which hexagrams are consulted according to a random sequence of twig manipulations.
Trigger Happy direct forerunner of the twentieth-century board game Risk, and in turn, technologically prostheticized and expanded, of real-time strategy videogames such as Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun. Here is an account of the “judicial duel” in medieval English law: Though sometimes fought to the bitter end, the judicial duel shows a tendency to assume the features of play. A certain formality is essential to it.
Trigger Happy the fighting is performed on the player’s behalf by a digital “substitute”; here, too, unequally skilled human players may have a sporting match by tweaking the videogame’s built-in “handicap” device. Not only has bloody violence been transformed into a choreography of light, but the animus between contestants that gave rise to the judicial trial is now but a folk memory underlying cheerful competitiveness.
Trigger Happy must construct larger shapes—except the videogame challenge is again a dynamic one, introducing time pressure on the player. And children have always made up their own “exploration games,” playing, for instance, in a deserted house and imbuing it with magical qualities.
Trigger Happy Martin Amis astutely pointed out in 1982 that the burgeoning criticism of videogames even then was simply a repeat of “the heated debates about snooker and pool earlier in the century.” Games are not serious, runs this argument, they are somehow intellectually degrading. Play, anthropologist Johann Huizinga happily concedes, is at base “irrational.
Trigger Happy society. His final, polemical chapter holds that the modern world (he was writing in 1938) is anomic and impoverished precisely because games have been torn from their organic place at the heart of community and neatly cordoned off into such spheres as that of professional sports.
Trigger Happy beating your friends and competing with your friends than doing the same thing with computer-controlled opponents.” This is similar to the pleasure of playing doubles in tennis, or playing a rubber of bridge; perhaps it is closer, however, to that of board games, which have always been advertised as social tools, fun for friends and family. Indeed videogames might be seen in this way as the logical next step from board games.
Trigger Happy connect games such as Quake III, Half-Life or Starcraft to an Internet server and play in real time against hundreds or thousands of other people all over the globe. Sega’s Dreamcast, of course, now incorporates a modem to facilitate precisely this activity. Richard Darling sees immense possibilities for this phenomenon in the future, especially when it is widely available to more people than can afford thousanddollar PCs.
Trigger Happy enough people for you to arrange with friends at work to all log on at eight o’clock in the evening and play selectively, just against each other. So it doesn’t have to be the way Internet communication is portrayed in the media, with people who are rather sad and lonely communicating with strangers on other continents. Videogames, clearly, are embedded in a deep and long tradition of play, and they borrow formally from many other games.
Trigger Happy absorption in which the dynamic form of successful play becomes beautiful and satisfying. How exactly does such an experience come about? One highly influential attempt at a logical interpretation of “fun” has been made by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, with his concept of “flow.
Trigger Happy experiences are attained when there is a perceived match between the demands of the activity and the subject’s skills. Now why else would many videogames such as Metal Gear Solid let you change the difficulty level? Clearly it is boring to play a game that is too easy, and frustrating to play a game that is too hard.
Trigger Happy Pleasure increases up to a point according to difficulty. So it seems very likely that one crucial component of videogaming pleasure is in fact a certain level of anxiety. This sounds counterintuitive but is supported by simple experiments that report increased heart rate and adrenaline levels among videogame users.
Trigger Happy in that small movements of the fingers result in beautiful music. But musicians know that there is another phenomenon at work, which is also appropriate to a discussion of videogame playing: muscle memory. When a pianist attempts a new piece, most of her attention is focused consciously on playing the right notes according to what is printed on the manuscript page, and working out precise fingerings for particularly difficult passages.
Trigger Happy flow or anything else: cognitive scientists have shown that practicing complex sequences of finger movements actually rewires neuronal connections in the brain until they become automatic. A reduction in selfconsciousness is naturally pursuant upon the observation that my critical “self” is no longer controlling my mechanical finger movements, so that I feel to that extent absorbed into the music itself. And exactly the same process operates in videogames.
Trigger Happy it is so much harder to get past the initial mechanical demands.
Trigger Happy which contestants from all over the world compete for prizes of hundreds of thousands of dollars.) But now we have uncovered some sources of videogame pleasure, it remains to be seen just how that pleasure is manipulated. How, in other words, does the machine play the man? You win again Videogames give you their full attention. They don’t ignore you or say they’re busy; they concentrate with rock-solid focus on what you “say” to them through the mechanical interface.
Trigger Happy Amis quotes the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, invoking both the above motivations: “Kids like the computer because it plays back . . . it’s a pal, a friend, but it doesn’t get mad, it doesn’t say ‘I won’t play,’ and it doesn’t break the rules.
Trigger Happy How do videogame designers achieve such a delicate balance? Such considerations are very important to Richard Darling. He argues that what makes an action game (driving, sports or shooting) fun is precisely this: “The player’s efforts being rewarded by achievements.” It’s not so simple, however; Darling continues: And those achievements need to appear to be worthwhile to the players, they need to be visible and valuable.
Trigger Happy things to be cropping up. So really our goal is to make sure that there’s enough there to start off with so that people find our game exciting and interesting, but then the more they play the more they achieve, and they can’t constantly be getting new rewards for all those achievements. This is what the psychologists call “partial reinforcement.
Trigger Happy In other words, there would be no great incentive to play the game and to get better at it. But the videogame must not be too difficult: there must be some initial reinforcement for the player to want to keep going. Darling agrees: “You need to be given rewards in a short enough timespan in order to encourage you to carry on and improve yourself.” Sailing between these two perils is no easy business. It’s a very difficult balance to strike.
Trigger Happy and stay at the back of the pack so all the computer cars slow down, and then on the last straight just put your foot down and cruise past them and win. You’ve got to be very careful with the logic of what’s happening to make sure that a better driver will always do better. One problem that videogame designers are very aware of is the wide spectrum of gameplaying skill among their potential customers.
Trigger Happy Trivial Pursuit, Risk, tennis, dominoes, chess or football, your increased sense of power and selfrespect is the only reward on offer. The game remains the same. (The transaction of capital in the coin-op arcade game seems to be a positive if still strictly extrinsic phenomenon. The psychologist authors of Mind at Play, Geoffrey and Elizabeth Loftus, wrote that paying money for a videogame actually increases the pleasure one derives from it.
Trigger Happy “stealth” suit, so that you can have enormous fun playing through the environments as an invisible, death-dealing hero. Beat-’em-ups such as Tekken 3 or Soul Calibur, meanwhile, cleverly spread rewards between their two-player modes (two humans fighting each other’s digital surrogates—the genre’s raison d’Être)—and their solo modes (player versus machine), in that success in the latter unlocks new characters that can be pitted against each other in the social context.
Trigger Happy interact with videogames. So what exactly are the nuts and bolts of this process? When we talk to videogames and they talk to us, what language is this conversation in? By its signs shall you know a city.
Trigger Happy 9 SIGNS OF LIFE A jaundiced figure floats across the screen. He is constantly searching for things to eat. We are looking at a neo-Marxist parable of late capitalism. He is the pure consumer. With his obsessively gaping maw, he clearly wants only one thing: to feel whole, at peace with himself. He perhaps surmises that if he eats enough—in other words, buys enough industrially produced goods—he will attain this state of perfect selfhood, perfect roundness. But it can never happen.
Trigger Happy It is one of the fascinations of videogames as a form, indeed, that they constitute a kaleidoscopic, prestissimo exercise in semiotics, which is the everchanging interaction of signs. More than advertising or the Internet, videogames, in their immense speed and complexity, have to that extent become the most sophisticated systems of communication of meaning that the culture has yet seen.
Trigger Happy disks and what looks like a brace of cherries. Now, considering this image solely as a picture, why do some paths in the maze have dots while others are empty? Why is there one disk inside the maze and others, slightly smaller, outside it? And what has all this to do with fruit? It is confusing, arcane. The game screen is inscrutable when approached as simple representation; it demands to be read as a symbolic system. Take that little disk.
Trigger Happy Fig. 16.
Trigger Happy But we know that an important part of any videogame character is its dynamic form, and, sure enough, Pac-Man’s animation lets him partake of another kind of sign. As he moves around, the missing “slice of pizza” expands and contracts, resembling a schematic mouth in profile. It actually looks like a mouth that is opening and closing. In this way, PacMan is also to some extent an icon. Peirce defines an icon thus: “Likenesses, or icons . . .
Trigger Happy instance, is an index, in that it shares in and points to deep structural features of the landscape it describes, but it is also an icon, in that it simply looks like the terrain as seen from the air. The illuminated first letter of a medieval manuscript is both a symbol, in that it functions as a component of language, and an icon, in that it is an illustration. An Egyptian hieroglyph is an icon, in that it is a pictogram, but it is also a symbol, in that it has an agreed meaning.
Trigger Happy Japan, that at the time was just beginning to claim a role as a global financial power—as a satire on a different kind of consumption: late-twentieth-century capitalism. Hence our parable at the start of the chapter. For Pac-Man, consumption cannot end; no conceivable quantity of dots is enough. He will continue to search them out and eat them until he dies.
Trigger Happy there is nothing left of him at all. In his mania of consumption, he has eaten himself.) What about Pac-Man’s little cousins below the playing area? By videogame convention, these represent the number of lives he has in reserve. While the Pac-Man in play is almost entirely symbolic, therefore, the smaller ones function both symbolically and indexically. As a group, they constitute an index of “how many,” in the same way as counting beans.
Trigger Happy signs about signs. The blob itself is an agreed symbol for “power-up” according to Pac-Man’s game design, but the power-up itself has no independent existence. Funnily enough, this is one context in which a phrase from postmodern theory is particularly appropriate: a power-up is a “floating signifier.” The power-up’s meaning consists entirely in a change of the potential relations between the rest of the signs in the game over a predefined period of time.
Trigger Happy Look at the cherries below the playing area, for instance. They seem iconic (like fruit), but in fact they are indices: they indicate that shortly some cherries will appear temporarily in the middle of the screen. If PacMan eats those, they earn him 100 points, or ten times the value of a single dot. Now imagine that your score is 9,900, there are only three dots left in the maze, and there is a cherry sign below it.
Trigger Happy importantly, it does in fact explain at one level what it means to play a videogame. Because it helps to reconstruct something the player is doing automatically—there can be no doubt that to play the game well she must understand how all the signs on the game screen interact, in just the ways we have described. Human beings are very good at reading complex systems of signs without having to describe to themselves what they are doing. Now Pac-Man is twenty years old.
Trigger Happy whereas Pac-Man is abstract, largely symbolic, Voldo (left) is a triumph of iconic or pictorial representation. Now what does this do for the player’s sense of involvement with the game? The unique feature of videogames, after all, in terms of the structure of their consumption as a medium of mass entertainment, is that we are not merely spectators but participants. And we participate by identifying with “our” character on screen.
Trigger Happy Fig. 17. Soul Calibur: fabulously iconic fighting ( 1998, 1999 Namco Ltd; all rights reserved) This is not to say, of course, that iconic arts such as photography and cinema do not stimulate the imagination at all. Of course they do (or can). But there is a difference in the faculty exercised. Looking at a photograph, one may invent a story around the scene, give the subjects inner lives and histories.
Trigger Happy processes of a character by reading an actor’s face. This process is hermeneutic: it is about interpretation. But the imagination that videogames require of the player is a different process: it is pragmatic. It can be subdivided into two parts: “imagining into” and “imagining how.
Trigger Happy exercising the pragmatic imagination. And indeed, we can say that a videogame is better as its symbolic conversation becomes more interesting. The aesthetic importance of symbols to videogames is played on in the commercial sphere too, in marketing imagery. The four “action” buttons on the right of the PlayStation control pad are identified purely by abstract symbols: circle, square, triangle and X.
Trigger Happy Time, gentlemen, please Remember that a videogame is not a static “text”; it is a dynamic form. And since videogames operate through time, another constituent of good symbolic conversation is obviously going to be its rhythm, or how the symbols combine over time. The importance of rhythm is exemplified most nakedly in a style of videogame that was hugely popular at the 1999 Tokyo Game Show, which relies completely on it, combining a handful of symbols with complex temporal interaction.
Trigger Happy combinations of these must be manipulated in time with their corresponding symbols floating down the screen. Other “rhythm games,” as they are known, include Parappa the Rapper, in which the player must help a paper-thin rapping dog undergo musical training from an onion; Guitar Freaks, playing on the Japanese penchant for heavy metal by requiring the user to strum a simplified rock ax; and Drummania, in which the player sits on a stool and hits electronic drum pads in time with symbols.
Trigger Happy Dance Dance Revolution and Beatmania are very literal applications of videogame rhythm. But rhythm is also important in games that are not explicitly predicated on musical interaction. Giving the keynote speech at the 1999 Game Developers’ Conference in San Jose, Shigeru Miyamoto emphasized this point exactly: “I feel that those directors who have been able to incorporate rhythm . . . in their games have been successful.” We can break this idea down into three components.
Trigger Happy the sudden appearance of grenades flying toward us in Time Crisis 2, and we “duck” by lifting our foot off a pedal before they hit. The expansive exploration game Shenmue, meanwhile, utilizes a “Quick-Time Event” system for certain periods of gameplay, which in contrast to the game’s breathtaking visual sophistication is a revealingly crude instance of symbol manipulation through time.
Trigger Happy to start with, you must use them to your best advantage, in the situations where they will be most effective. That is strategic timing. The fact that destroying things earns you more points, and at certain scores you win another smart bomb or an extra life, makes a correct calculation even more potentially rewarding. As Martin Amis puts it: “The score is actually part of the game, and the shape of many a ticklish gamble is determined by whether your score is, say, 20,980 or 29,980.
Trigger Happy reactions are subordinated to the intelligent deployment of resources over time. The third way in which time and rhythm operate in videogames is at a high structural level, where I’ll call it “tempo.”47 This describes, for instance, the ebb and flow of anxiety and satisfaction through the gameplaying experience. As games have become more complex and longer experiences, tempo plays an ever more important role in their pleasure.
Trigger Happy become predictable, and the element of pleasurable surprise is lost. A videogame designer must therefore consider the large-scale distribution of such aspects of his game and organize them to the best effect—then it will have good tempo. A brilliant example of this aspect of design is Resident Evil.
Trigger Happy Fig. 18. Resident Evil: a shocking moment ( 1997 Capcom) built up—they also have temporal resolution, which describes the fluidity or otherwise of the image’s movement through time. Now if a videogame suffers from “jerky” animation, in that there are too few frames to the second, the player’s absorption into the temporally based semiotic conversation will be injured; it is analogous to having a conversation with a friend who pauses briefly after every word he utters.
Trigger Happy see the road in snapshots every twenty yards, you cannot drive very accurately. However powerful a computer processor, its resources will always be finite, so there will always be a trade-off between temporal resolution and graphical resolution. You can have very richly defined pictures that move jerkily, or slightly less detailed ones that move smoothly. Quake III: Arena, for example, is a beautiful example of how very high temporal resolution really sucks the player in.
Trigger Happy a different lock. A Tomb Raider door, therefore, operates as a symbol for “exit” or “threshold,” a means of policing movement between predefined spaces, and a key operates symbolically a little like a minor powerup, a second-order sign denoting “ability to use door.
Trigger Happy The virtue of Tomb Raider is that, although the variety of symbolic interaction that it offers to the player—manipulating keys, doors and switches—is quite rudimentary and uninteresting, the way the player is required to interact with such symbols in the three dimensions of space is what makes the game a pleasurable challenge.
Trigger Happy within the gameworld. But the ghosts inside suddenly come to life with a demonic chuckle. The player realizes that he must shoot them with an arrow before the painting turns blank and the ghost flees to the painting behind him. So the pure icon has suddenly become a symbol to be fought. A different part of the same Temple, meanwhile, sees the player facing another ghost portrait.
Trigger Happy melodies according to which button on the controller is pressed, keyboard-style. Once you have learned certain melodies, you may cause day to turn to night, or invoke rain, or talk to your friend in the forest. The game helps the player by showing the tune on a stave, in traditional symbolic musical language, and also indexically showing, or pointing to, the particular button-symbols that will cause each note to sound.
Trigger Happy functionally they remain the same sort of animal as the large blobs in Pac-Man: they are second-order signs effecting changes in the possible symbolic relationships of the game. The ocarina works in this way by expanding the player’s symbolic language. Another Zelda 64 gadget, for instance, the hookshot (a sort of retractable grappling hook), enables the player to reach previously inaccessible areas by swinging up. Now in general one wants to say, “The more gadgets the better.
Trigger Happy controlled car. When you are first given this gadget, you just play with it, as you would with a real one. The form is identical. Herein lies one secret of the videogame’s enormous potential: it is the universal toy. (Indeed, 1999’s RC Stunt Copter is a videogame simulation of playing with a real radio-controlled helicopter, while No ClichÉ’s Toy Commander lets you play with something like fifty different types—toy planes, tanks, race cars and so on—spread over an imaginary house.
Trigger Happy Fig. 19. Ape Escape: monkeying around in the ice age ( 1999 Sony Computer Entertainment) an exquisite head shot to a bad guy. A virtual environment that reveals more detail when viewed telescopically is naturally more convincing than one which only works on one informational scale. The exception to the rule that more gadgets are better is the bad case of the single-use object, which we came across earlier.
Trigger Happy power-up, but as we saw it’s also a special case of the dreaded “functional incoherence.” By contrast, Metal Gear Solid superbly combines a large number of gadgets with a delicious freedom as to how they are used and reused in various situations. You may use a simple cardboard box to hide in, or to get yourself transported unwittingly by the enemy in a truck.
Trigger Happy Information overlord Now as signs are basically vehicles of meaning,48 a videogame will, for its own part in the conversation, need to erect highly efficient, semiotic systems as it tries to present ever greater quantities of raw information to the player. That information can be broken up into different signs in different areas of the display. Consider the screen of G-Police (see fig. 20). It shows a perspective construction of solid-looking buildings, roads, cars and other aircraft.
Trigger Happy Fig. 20. G-Police: the information superhighway ( 1997 Sony Computer Entertainment) Look at the screen. Top right is a number surrounded by a segmented, shaded ring. The number, a symbol, denotes the “health” of your gunship: when it reaches zero, the craft is destroyed. Similarly, the words at bottom right are symbols for the available weapons.
Trigger Happy gradually turning to red for minimum. The shaded brackets at either side of screen center, meanwhile, are indices: at left for craft speed (colored above the middle for forward speed, below the middle for reverse); and at right for engine thrust. Again color is overlaid symbolically, with a bright yellow for high forward velocities or accelerations, red for low ones, descending into blue and purple for reverse.
Trigger Happy enjoy a greater importance in the business of providing feedback to the player on the basis of which he can determine his next action. It is more intuitively and speedily understandable to “read” an indexical shape such as the remaining health segments than to read the numerical symbol, especially since the index provides, as the number does not, an instantly comprehensible representation of current health or speed as a ratio of the possible maximum.
Trigger Happy that provide a map of the current environment. In Zelda 64, the player must find a map: it is an object in the gameworld that functions as a power-up.
Trigger Happy choose game modes or to save and load game data or preplay mission briefings—all the prerequisites to play (which Shigeru Miyamoto calls a game’s “labor”) that surround the action at the heart of even the simplest modern game. G-Police 2: Weapons of Justice (1999), for example, is full of glowing green grids that sketch out a virtual graph paper background to screens full of weapon and mission information; text spells itself out letter by letter accompanied by rapid high-pitched beeping.
Trigger Happy no one wants to come home, turn on a game and feel like they’re still working at the office PC.50 But the particular aesthetic phenomenon of techno-nostalgia is also working a very clever, stealthy trick.
Trigger Happy good game. Conversely, a game built entirely from abstract visual symbols can be a bad game if those symbols do not interact in interesting ways. Tic-TacToe, played by arranging the abstract symbols X and O, is a boring game for exactly this reason, as well as the more general competitive reason that it is always a draw. Beatmania, however, combines a mere four symbols in compelling rhythmic ways and so is a good game.
Trigger Happy pragmatic imagination for the symbolic interaction. The semiotic demands of videogames are becoming greater all round. One irregular videogamer, an habituÉe of Pac-Man and Tetris, told me on playing Tomb Raider for the first time: “I found I was looking at Lara rather than worrying what was going on in the game.” This is revealing: iconic modern games certainly hit you first with their pictures.
Trigger Happy very “real”-looking people; for the game to remain innocent, visceral fun, they must remain partial symbols, retain that “computer look.” Modern videogames are in this way more seductive than ever, as thanks to their visual enhancement they challenge us doubly. The same gameplayer who couldn’t help just watching Lara for a while also mused that she found it more disturbing when Lara died than when Pac-Man died, because she saw the character drown in a “realistic” fashion.
Trigger Happy Core enthuses over the possibilities offered by the next technological standard: There are far more things you can do with Lara’s hair, and with her clothing . . . The leaves that you’re going past or the vines are all moving and animating, and there may be water dripping off them on to a pool which is making a ripple effect. PlayStation2 can do this camerablurring where you can home in on the central character and the view-distance at the back is blurred.
Trigger Happy videogame at bottom is still a highly artificial, purposely designed semiotic engine. And its purpose is not to simulate real life, but to offer the gift of playing a game. When we are at play, whether in front of a videogame screen, in a chess cafÉ, at the bowling alley or in the park, we are citizens of an invisible city, built of signs. We should not find that so surprising, because man, after all, is the symbolic animal. And this is exactly what videogames celebrate, challenge and feed.
Trigger Happy 10 THE PROMETHEUS ENGINE God’s gift In the beginning, heaven and earth were married. Gaia (earth) and Uranus (the heavens) then gave birth to the Titans, the twelve gods of earliest times. They had dominion over all the cosmos. The youngest Titan, Kronos, married his sister Rhea, but he knew that he was fated to be supplanted by one of his children. In order to protect himself, he hit upon the strategy of eating them all, one by one, as they were born.
Trigger Happy all his other eaten children. The Titanomachy ensued: a ten-year war between Zeus and his siblings on one side and the rest of the Titans on the other that shook the universe to its foundations. There was one Titan battling on Zeus’s side: Prometheus. His name means “he who thinks ahead.” His insistence on using guile rather than brute force was laughed off by his fellow Titans, and so Prometheus abandoned them to their fate and made his ingenuity available to Zeus’s faction.
Trigger Happy continued to improve the brutish lives of his creations by teaching them writing, astronomy, agriculture, sailing, medicine, mining and the interpretation of dreams. He also fooled Zeus into accepting the worst portion of meat from sacrificed animals: gristly bone was the gods’ due, while men kept the edible flesh. For these and other indiscretions, however, Prometheus was punished.
Trigger Happy the champion now of human imagination and sexuality, defeats the tyrannical god and casts him forever into the abyss. For the moment, man’s inheritance is safe. For what had Prometheus done in the first place? He had given humans a power-up. Burn this The gift of fire. Like most children, I used to find battery-powered flashlights fascinating toys. I’d smuggle a flashlight into bed and turn it on after lights out, beaming whirling patterns onto the ceiling for what seemed like hours.
Trigger Happy the Babylonian techno palace on Ibiza. Lately, electricity has become the preferred fire—eminently biddable and plastic—of the moderns. Electric light freed us from the tyranny of the dark, hastening the march of technology. The movies came along and “broke our prisons asunder”: reality was recorded and recreated anywhere, through light. Then there was television: a tumultuous inferno of electrons, arcanely marshaled and beaming more reality into each lucky home.
Trigger Happy watching, you’re doing. And when videogames are at their best, what you’re doing is something vastly more creatively challenging than watching a docusoap or a quiz show. Your reasoning, reflexes and imagination are tested to exhilarating limits. That hunk of molded plastic, that PlayStation or Dreamcast, is a magic box that allows you to play with fire. A Prometheus engine. Bad company Fire is not necessarily an unqualified good. It can burn. Back in 1982, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. C.
Trigger Happy into the possible negative effects of videogames is so far inconclusive. Patricia Greenfield’s 1984 study, Media and the Mind of the Child, concluded that there was no such evidence, but then videogames were not nearly so graphically detailed as they are now.
Trigger Happy Mortal Kombat. Grand Theft Auto (1997), a game in which the player steals cars, runs over lines of Hare Krishnas and shoots cops, was described by the British Police Federation as “sick, deluded and beneath contempt,” and in the summer of 1999 a member of Parliament wrote to the prime minister asking if anything could be done to limit sales of the horrorthemed game Silent Hill, whose story centers on the disappearance and torture of a young girl.
Trigger Happy gun in a fashion making him an...effective killer without teaching him any of the constraints or responsibilities needed to inhibit such a killing capacity.” The suit was summarily dismissed in May 2000 by a federal court judge, but the scapegoating of videogames continues. Now it is true that videogames have had a worryingly close relationship with the technologies of killing.
Trigger Happy a T-34C Turbo Mentor, the aircraft used for primary flight training. But what does it mean to say that a videogame can train you to kill? I think it means rather less than critics want it to. When I was in school, my favorite sport was fencing. I was trained to wield my preferred weapon, a saber, with great speed and precision. The swords we used were blunted, and we all wore protective clothing and face-masks.
Trigger Happy motivated to kill by their experience of playing that game; they are ordered to do so by their superiors. Fencing, of course, is a sport whose kinetic form is derived from a long, bloodthirsty history of actual sword fighting, combat and duels. But we class it as a morally neutral sport because its content is nonviolent: the risk of injury is very low (far lower than with boxing), and the intent of the fencer is not to kill or maim but simply to win. The same is true of videogames.
Trigger Happy videogames might be said to have an influence on reallife violence in the same way that films or any other media do—by having a particular style that may be imitated. The Columbine murderers are thought to have dressed in black trench coats in emulation of Keanu Reeves in The Matrix. It is possible that Michael Carneal killed his schoolmates deliberately in the manner of a Doom deathmatch.
Trigger Happy kill, you can find stylistic inspiration anywhere: in a detective novel, a film, a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, a heavy-metal album or a videogame. They won’t, however, implant the murderous desire in the first place. A videogame can even be seen as positively valuable if it enables the formal imitation of dangerous or criminal activities in a safe and consequence-free environment.
Trigger Happy Genesis In a dance of fire are new worlds born. At British videogame developers Core Design, they have a special, home-grown software tool designed exactly for the purpose of building new worlds: it’s called, not inappropriately, Worldbuild II. After the artists have drawn hundreds of pencil sketches of imaginary landscapes, the topographical features of each area are fed directly into the computer. Acetate plans go up on the walls.
Trigger Happy valleys and rivulets. Block by block, the ground is raised and lowered; edges are smoothed off. Only then, when the landscape is shaped in three dimensions, do the artists start to color it in, choosing from a palette of colors and textures (endless pages of sun-bleached grass, clover patches, subtly different shades of rock) that are simply painted on to the wireframe model. Meanwhile, other artists have been fashioning animals out of their digital version of the Promethean clay.
Trigger Happy meadows and open spaces to get the player comfortable with the character.” The terrain is designed expressly to optimize gameplay. One theory of how the universe came to exist is a provocative idea called the Strong Anthropic Principle, which suggests that the universe is designed exactly the way it is, with the forces of nature and relative charges of fundamental particles balanced exactly this way, for the sole purpose of allowing intelligent life forms such as ourselves to observe it.
Trigger Happy The final frontier This is a particular kind of utopianist terraforming, where a person’s capabilities are never insufficient. But what about the purely visual imagination of videogame worlds? Whereas the Battlezone universe was in its day shockingly new, today’s environments are much more instantly recognizable. They draw on only a few basic templates.
Trigger Happy they aim for an effect of vertiginous scale such as that created so masterfully by Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s etchings of nightmare dungeons in his Carceri d’invenzione (see fig. 21), which had an enormous influence on the aesthetics of Romanticism and, later, Surrealism. In this way, such videogames are part of a long tradition of imaginary architecture.
Trigger Happy such skewed spaces would initially be very confusing to the gameplayer, but by building in a sufficient degree of intuitive predictability in other aspects—the way, say, that inertia or gravity works—the game could still present an enjoyable challenge without becoming thoroughly alienating. It would anyway be impossible to construct a world that was thoroughly different in every way from the real one.
Trigger Happy Fig. 21.
Trigger Happy In an ideal world But a good illusion must be cogent. The fabulous, unreal world that we are given to play with must seem to be perfectly real on its own terms. A strange new world is a thing of awe, but of course there is also a certain pleasure to be had from playing in recognizable environments.
Trigger Happy Such videogames at the moment, however, fall squarely into the high-velocity driving genre, and for a good reason. Because games as yet have only made a few faltering steps toward a necessary goal of the future: the fully interactive environment. If you were walking a character around that virtual Shibuya, it would soon become apparent that all the complex parts of a building—shop doors, drainpipes, windows—are not real objects modeled by the program.
Trigger Happy that looks like a door, I should be able to open unless it’s locked, or break it down if it’s made of rotting wood; if its hinges are visible I should be able to blow them off with a shotgun. Anything that looks like a window, I should be able to smash, with my bare fists if necessary. Conversely, give me a spade, and I should be able to dig ditches or plant flowers if I’m feeling particularly green-thumbed. Let’s see no more spatial incoherence either.
Trigger Happy videogame environment as a whole is perfectly coherent. If this cannot be accomplished at the moment for recreations of large “real” environments like Tokyo, owing to the data intensiveness problem, that in itself should be a good reason for videogames to develop their architectural imagination in much more creative ways. Even when it is possible to recreate a real environment, we still don’t want it to be too real.
Trigger Happy Even games that do not try to build a recognizable, real-world place are still rather repetitively reliant on the same hoary old visual references.
Trigger Happy original environments so far in modern gaming have been seen, ironically, in some of the worst products, those triumphs of virtual tourism over symbolic richness Myst and Riven, whose pleasurably organic topography extrapolates inventively from the real, natural world. Another straightforward conclusion: videogames need to play to their strengths.
Trigger Happy Fig. 22.
Trigger Happy Virtual justice Terry Pratchett, the videogame-loving author of the Discworld novels (whose universe, like that of a good videogame, is bizarre but consistent), explained to me just why he enjoys games in these terms: “For me, it’s the fun of exploration, and new challenges. I like the big-screen feel of the Tomb Raider series and, for example, Half-Life . . . I like hidden areas, secret rooms, non-player characters who can help you. This gives you a real sense of involvement.
Trigger Happy player’s ability to switch control between several soldiers with different mission duties enhances the demands of strategic timing and also, since the environment may be seen from several different viewpoints in rapid succession, increases the sense of that environment’s solid existence.
Trigger Happy The fun of Turok: Dinosaur Hunter was thus compromised by passages that required the player to make precise jumps, platform-style—yet in a game where you can’t see your own feet, such jumps are impossible to judge properly. Equally, however, there are problems in the other direction: third-person games present the rather chancy challenge of aiming weapons in three-dimensional space without giving the player true line-of-sight.
Trigger Happy organically related to and coherent with the rest of the virtual world. One good example of this, again, is in the Resident Evil games: the quite arbitrary restriction on inventory that we saw in Chapter 3. How much stuff you can carry is illogically determined—a herb takes up as much space as a shotgun—and you can only drop items in special chests. This rule results in incredibly tedious item-swapping and back-tracking between item boxes—a task of absolutely no symbolic interest.
Trigger Happy this all in one go; the current position in the game may be saved to disk, or to a “memory card.” But often, the process of saving is made into another thoroughly arbitrary hurdle. Tomb Raider III, for example, only allows the player to save when he or she has collected the appropriate power-up, a blue save-crystal, and they are frustratingly few and far between. Again, it’s an easy (for the designers) but incoherent way to make the game more challenging.
Trigger Happy in purgatory and in heaven;56 heretics are burned at the stake, yet a bonfire is a means of celebration. Many ancient cultures, such as the Zoroastrians or Assyrians, worshiped fire as a god. Fire is the perfect representative of the Romantic sublime: at once beautiful and terrifying. Videogames so far have not moved far beyond the twin poles of attraction and repulsion—these reptilian emotions, age-old reflexes buried deep in the brain. But this too might change.
Trigger Happy impossible, task). The old-style scrolling shooter Metal Slug already has a rudimentary version of such a “consequences” system: if your plane is shot down, the game doesn’t instantly stop; instead, you get captured and have to fight your way out of prison. This idea could eventually induce a gnawing sense of personal guilt that is not evoked by novels or films, where we pity or regret the fates of characters who remain distinctly “other people.
Trigger Happy flawed Soul Reaver (1999). The player’s character is a vampire called Raziel. When he dies, you do not start again from the last safe point; instead, you shift into the “spectral realm,” the same environments with a twisted, Boschian air, where you continue playing and find previously nonexistent pathways to new areas.
Trigger Happy In videogames, regret is an easily vanquishable phantom; it operates merely as a fleeting wound that may be quickly salved. If I had timed that jump correctly, Lara wouldn’t have been impaled on the spikes. So I will do it again, properly this time. In 1983, in Mind at Play, Geoffrey and Elizabeth Loftus wrote the following about classic arcade games: “Computer games provide the ultimate chance to eliminate regret; all alternative worlds are available.
Trigger Happy machine guns, guided missiles) that one so enjoys playing with. Metal Gear Solid, then, toys with the player’s emotions in largely non-interactive ways, as a film does.
Trigger Happy to beat your opponent or beat the computer at flicking this ball back.” Modern games, vastly more visually thrilling though they are, must still answer the same need. “We play videogames because they’re fun to play. You’re not playing it to further your education, you’re playing it as a means of leisure,” Smith emphasizes.
Trigger Happy can never compete. If architecture is frozen music, then a videogame is liquid architecture. Indeed, the United Nations has funded the development of a “virtual tour” of Notre Dame cathedral, which uses the engine (the computer code which draws 3D environments) from the first-person shooter videogame Unreal.
Trigger Happy fire. Now, it is true that the great cathedrals of Europe, at Rome, Chartres or Cologne, purposively evoke wonder not as a purely aesthetic end in itself, but as a means to lead the spectator to humble contemplation of his or her impotence in the face of the grandeur of God. Videogames, on the other hand, represent the latest stage in the secularization of wonder that has been abroad since the fine arts were divorced from religion and aesthetics was invented.
Trigger Happy why the wonder induced by videogames should not enjoy a similar motivational power. Early videogame designers were inspired by imagery from comics, films and paintings.
Trigger Happy Earlier, I described the way in which a videogame such as Time Crisis enables you to simulate the form of killing while being happily dissociated from the morality of the acts represented, because there is no actual killing going on. This in itself is an innocent phenomenon with respectable sporting forebears. But in the specific military context, it becomes a real danger. For modern hi-tech wars are increasingly fought and seen through videogame-type graphic systems.
Trigger Happy were incinerated from afar; hospitals were bombed. Relying on pixels rather than eyes is perilous, because computers can malfunction, and pixels can lie. Moreover, if the modern pilot has been trained on souped-up videogame systems, we should not be surprised if, when he is performing exactly the same actions in exactly the same computerized context but in a real war zone, he fails utterly to realize that his actions now have a very real moral content.
Trigger Happy Metal Gear Solid is an anti-war wargame that features a plot about treacherous goings-on in DARPA itself— the very defense agency that commissioned a version of Battlezone for its tank gunners all those years ago. Metal Gear Solid is also remarkable for its imaginative emphasis on stealth, and at the game’s end the player is actually awarded a higher grading the fewer guards he or she has had to kill.
Trigger Happy Crisis 2. The player in such games is always cast, not as a violent gun-toting maniac, but as a law-enforcing agent of national security. The fictional calculus of letting innocent hostages die versus killing terrorists thus in some small way palliates the violent form. Meanwhile, the arcade racing game Thrill Drive displays a message to the player warning that in “real life” he or she should drive carefully and respect other road users.
Trigger Happy processing chip in Sony’s PlayStation2 console is called an “Emotion Engine.” This is more than just a good marketing coinage; it also implies a more thoughtful approach—not toward something like an interactive novel, of course, but certainly toward videogame software that will take more chances to make the player stop and think.
Trigger Happy videogames continue to plough clichÉd visual and formal ruts, they will furnish the anomic mental landscape of an impoverished and unimaginative future generation, not only of artists but of people in general. Which is why it is so important for videogames to continue aiming at creative revolution, in any number of wonderful and strange directions. The story of the inner life of videogames is not just a disinterested analysis; it’s a challenge, a gauntlet.
Trigger Happy AFTERWORD Sony’s long-awaited PlayStation2 console, which launched in the U.S. and Europe in late 2000, did not represent the instant big bang that some were expecting, and only served to demonstrate the point that an increase in processing power does not instantly entail better gameplay. It took until the summer 2001 launch of state-of-the-art driving game Gran Turismo 3 for PlayStation2 really to take off in sales terms.
Trigger Happy extraordinary worldwide success. Over six days in August 2000, the PokÉmon Yellow game sold a million copies across Europe. A survey of British teenagers found that they were more likely to recognize Pikachu, the cute yellow mascot of the PokÉmon franchise, than Tony Blair, the cute pink mascot of the British government. Worldwide, PokÉmon grossed $15 billion over the year, and Nintendo continued to manufacture 2,000 GameBoys every hour.
Trigger Happy or sulk all by themselves as the player watches. Your job is to change their environment to their advantage and help them succeed in the careers you choose for them; but you can also set up deliberately fraught love triangles and chuckle over fights in the chintzy living room.
Trigger Happy buying new things for the Sims’ house in order to increase its inhabitants’ happiness (such as a large mirror, which will boost their charisma, or a new oven, which will help them cook meals for their housemates and so become more popular), and in helping them climb the slippery pole of a career as a politician or scientist. More money makes a Sim happier; social dissidents are not allowed.
Trigger Happy desirable. But you must choose your simplifications carefully. Though true artificial intelligence, as discussed in Chapter 5, is still very much in its computational infancy, it remains one of the key buzzwords of the videogame industry. Every bog-standard driving game or first-person shooter that comes along claims to have revolutionary AI in its computer-controlled opponents.
Trigger Happy videogame concepts, Black and White nevertheless still comes up against the inherent problem of reversible systems identified in Chapter 10. Although your moral decisions have global effects in the gameworld—let your worshippers drown, or destroy them with fireballs, and the remaining population worships you ever more fervently out of fear, while the environment changes to reflect your evildoing—they are, in the end, reversible.
Trigger Happy to providing a more dramatically interesting, and even emotionally involving, virtual world. Another innovative aspect of Black and White is in its cybernetics: every aspect of play is controlled with the mouse, using a highly intuitive “gestural system.” With this, you can stroke your creature, teach him how to play with balls, or smack him if he takes an unhealthy interest in his own excrement.
Trigger Happy While such cybernetic innovations hold out tantalizing possibilities for the future, one aspect of videogaming that drew ever greater interest during 2001 was massively multiplayer action, either over wired networks or online. Full-time gamers, such as Britain’s Sujoy Roy, can now earn $300,000 a year by traveling the world playing Quake III in organized tournaments.
Trigger Happy might eventually come to represent a revolutionary democratization of the nature of sport. Laurels are no longer determined simply by the tyranny of genes. Women and men, able-bodied and otherwise, can compete on a level playing field, a digital city of play where all are equal before the games begin.
Trigger Happy interestingly warped chessboard spaces—but its combination of a first-person viewpoint with precise platform-jumping gameplay was staggeringly inept. Like so many games, it was great to look at but a pig to play. The eagerly awaited follow-up to Goldeneye, Perfect Dark (2000), a sci-fi first-person shooter, was compromised as a single-player game by numerous faults identified throughout this book.
Trigger Happy seems possible: you can specialize in computers and hacking and infiltrate the enemy installations that way, or you can become an expert lockpicker, or a lethal sniper, or just rock in, all guns blazing. No strategy is privileged over another. The terms of the semiotic conversation in Deus Ex are unusually and laudably broad. Among other aesthetic gems was the extraordinary style of Jet Grind Radio (2000), Sega’s in-line skating, graffiti-spraying game.
Trigger Happy glorious detail and color, it cast the player as a cybernetic infiltrator in a Neuromancer-style matrix of coruscating firewalls, defense programs and virus detectors. Success by the player effected greater polyphonic sophistication in the real-time synthesized soundtrack, and at the same time caused the ghostly environment gradually to fill in its polygons and become a solid world.
Trigger Happy Shigeru Miyamoto’s wonderfully curious herding game Pikmin (both on Nintendo’s GameCube), plus the longawaited release of Hideo Kojima’s extraordinary Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, which enhanced all the anti-realistic tricks of its precursor while pushing the visual design into a breathtakingly stylized, quasicinematic style, and expanding the player’s tactical freedom even further.
Afterword (2004) Extra final chapter from the 2004 US edition of Trigger Happy Over the last four years, as the new generation of videogame hardware — Sony’s PlayStation2, Microsoft’s Xbox, and Nintendo’s GameCube — came to maturity, there were a handful of standout videogames. One of the most heavily anticipated was Japanese master Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid 2 (2001), and it represented an ultrarefined concept of the much-hyped though problematic “convergence” with cinema.
world of blocky wireframe 3D skyscrapers gradually morphs, over the game’s five levels, into a lushly solid representation of a green Earth, in a parable of human and machine evolution.
Theodor Adorno, whom we met in Chapter 1, once observed that the products of mass entertainment secretly had much in common with work in industrial society. “Amusement in advanced capitalism is the extension of work,” he wrote. “It is sought after by those who wish to escape the mechanised work process, in order to be able to face it again.
Economic and political ideology was even more to the fore in The Sims (2001), for example, a God game in which you look after little people in a house, with some of the voyeuristic kick of a reality TV show. Rapidly becoming an extraordinarily successful multi-tentacled franchise, it is the soap-opera version of Pokémon, and an advert for the “American way”. Buy a Sim a large mirror and she will be happier, by virtue of being able to gaze at her reflection.
participating in a certain totalising idea of foreign policy without ever examining its own assumptions. Other developers are already seeing the problem and avoiding it: the squadbased combat sequel Conflict: Desert Storm 2 (2003), for example, was set like its predecessor during the first Gulf War, so as not to be embroiled in controversy about the 2003 war on Iraq.
Trigger Happy BIBLIOGRAPHY In addition to the works cited below, I have found useful several non-bylined articles and reviews in the excellent monthly videogame magazine Edge. Arcade and MCV magazines have also been useful sources of industry reporting. Adorno, Theodor, and Walter Benjamin. The Complete Correspondence, 1928–1940. Edited by Henri Lonitz. Translated by Nicholas Walker. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. Amis, Martin. Invasion of the Space Invaders. London: Hutchinson, 1982.
Trigger Happy Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935). In Film Theory and Criticism, edited by Mast, Cohen & Braudy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Cassell, Justine, and Henry Jenkins, eds. From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998. Crawford, Chris. The Art of Computer Game Design. At http://vancouver.wsu.edu/fac/peabody/gamebook/ Coverpage.html. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.
Trigger Happy Gombrich, E.ɢH. Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961. ———. The Story of Art. London: Phaidon Press, 1995. Greenfield, Patricia. Media and the Mind of the Child: From Print to Television, Video Games and Computers. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984. Griffiths, Mark. “Video Games and Children’s Behaviour.” T. Charlton and K. David (eds.) Elusive Links: Television, Video Games and Children’s Behavior.
Trigger Happy Herman, Leonard. Phoenix: The Fall and Rise of Videogames. 2d. ed. Union, N. J.: Rolenta Press, 1997. Herz, J.ɢC. Joystick Nation. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1996. Huizinga, Johann. Homo Ludens: A Study of the PlayElement in Culture. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986. Hume, Nancy G. Japanese Aesthetics and Culture. New York: State University of New York Press, 1995. Kinder, Marsha. Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games from Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Trigger Happy Statistical Verification of a Possible Causal Link.” MS thesis, Edinburgh University, 1998. Loftus, Geoffrey R., and Elizabeth F. Loftus. Mind at Play: The Psychology of Video Games. New York: Basic Books, 1983. Martinez, D. P., ed. The Worlds of Japanese Popular Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Parlett, David. The Oxford History of Board Games. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Peirce, C. S. The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume 1 (1867–1893).
Trigger Happy ———. Laws. Edited and translated by Thomas L. Pangle. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folktale. Austin: University of Texas, 1968. Sale, Kirkpatrick. Rebels against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution: Lessons for the Computer Age. New York: Perseus Press, 1996. SatÔ, Ikuya. Kamikaze Biker: Parody and Anomy in Affluent Japan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Schwarz, Frederic D. “The Patriarch of Pong.
Trigger Happy Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus. London: Routledge, Kegan & Paul, 1995. Zielinski, Siegfried. Audiovisions: Cinema and Television as Entr’actes in History. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999.
Trigger Happy INDEX Please note: text in eBooks is reflowed according to the reader you are using. Hence, pagination and indexing change from one environment to another. If you are looking for a word or a name, you can select it in the list below and use the "Search" or "Find" feature of your eBook reader. You can also use this feature for any word, even if it is not listed below.
Trigger Happy first appearance of, 22“motion-capture” technique of physics-based polygonal Ape Escape arcades cybernetic resources of first coin-op videogame in good reason for spending money in nineteenth-century examples of architecture pleasure of investigating videogames as new form of Aristotle artificial intelligence Asteroids Atari atmosphere borrowed from horror movies creation through fog of creation through sound of creation through tempo of Battlezone beat-’em-ups Beatmania Benjamin, Walter Black
Trigger Happy Bushnell, Nolan Bust-A-Move cameras depth of field in disembodied types of use in sports games Carmageddon cartoons games as competitors of iconic influence of Japanese cartoons Castle Wolfenstein 3D chance ancient games of in evolution in role-playing games characters criteria for the attractiveness of digitizing of ethnic choice of inflatable models of non-playable (NPCs) physical abilities of chess cigarettes deleterious health effects of indispensable for spies no use to astronauts sublimi
Trigger Happy industry links with games of influence of on murderers Civilization Columbine massacre Colony Wars Command and Conquer Computer Space Core Design cosmogony, theories of cows happily roaming digital pastures as offensive weapons Crash Bandicoot series Crawford, Chris Croft, Lara Cronenberg, David Csikszentmihalyi, Mihalyi cybernetics Daley Thompson’s Decathlon Dance Dance Revolution Dark, Joanna Darling, Richard data intensiveness problem Date, Kyoko Defender Descartes, RenÉ Deus Ex Donkey Kong
Trigger Happy DÜrer, Albrecht Elite Elixer Studios Eliza emotion, potential for in videogames exploration games beauty of definition iconicism of rules for reversibility of fairground games Fawlty, Basil fencing fetish, two-dimensional Fighting Fantasy gamebooks Final Fantasy series fishing freedom desirable gift of limits of player’s Game Boy GameCube Gibson, William, God player’s role as programmer as of videogames Goldeneye Gombrich, Erns G-Police 422
Trigger Happy Gran Turismo Grand Theft Auto Greenfield, Patricia Griffiths, Mark Grim Fandango Half-Life Hamlet Hammurabi Heidegger, Martin Herz, J. C. Higinbotham, William A.
Trigger Happy language parsing Le Diberder, Alain & FrÉdÉric Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (aka Zelda 64) Lemmings Little Lovers: She So Game Luigi’s Mansion Lunar Lander Manic Miner Mario, birth of Mario 64 Marxism, cryptic message of in Pac-Man Masclef, Olivier Mathengine The Matrix Metal Gear Solid Metropolis Street Racer Microsoft military, links with videogames Minogue, Kylie, useful with fists Missile Command Miyamoto, Shigeru Molyneux, Peter morals games as possible influence on programmable syste
Trigger Happy Nabokov, Vladimir Nietzsche, Friedrich, pummeling the joysticks Nintendo The Nomad Soul Oedipus Rex Omega Boost online gaming. See Internet Outcast Pachinko Pac-Man Pajitnov, Alexei, inventor of Tetris parallax effect Peirce, C. S.
Trigger Happy PlayStation2 plinth ideology PokÉmon Pole Position police, attitude to videogames of polygons Pong Populous Power Stone power-ups in Classical mythology as “gadgets,” ontology of semiotics of various functions of Pratchett, Terry Prince of Persia prostheticization of play psychology puzzle games Quake series racing games radar Rainbow Six RC Stunt Copter Ready 2 Rumble Boxing realism limit of in character design problems of in sound effects real-time strategy games 426
Trigger Happy replays Republic Resident Evil series Rez Reznor, Trent Ridge Racer series Robotron role-playing games (RPGs) Romero, Jon Roy, Sujoy R-Type scrolling Seaman: The Forbidden Pet Sega semiotics Sentinel Sheff, David Shelley, P. B.
Trigger Happy Soul Blade (aka Soul Edge) Soul Calibur, iv Soul Reaver sound design, See also music Space Invaders Spacewar special relativity Spector, Warren sports games Star Wars stories Strong Anthropic Principle Super Mario Bros.
Trigger Happy unfair challenge Unreal Uridium Vanguard vector graphics violence, nature in videogames of Virtua Fighter V-Rally WipEout series wireframe graphics Wittgenstein, Ludwig, gnomic utterances of Wolfenstein 3D Wright, Will Xbox Zaxxon Zen, and the art of videogame playing 429
Trigger Happy ABOUT THE AUTHOR Steven Poole Steven Poole is a journalist and writer who has contributed articles to the Guardian, the Independent, and the Times Literary Supplement, and has worked as a composer for television and short films.
