Trigger Happy
which a fatal mistake need not be your last; branches of a system can be multiply explored until all the lives are used up. But when that happens, the downside is grim indeed. The result in this final situation is not a simple death, but a violent ejaculation from the safety of the entire game universe. The petit mort of Homo ludens: Game Over.
Subsequent to this distribution of multiple “lives,” videogames began to introduce another highly unrealistic paradigm, again disguised in deceptively ordinary language: that of “health.” Whereas in Space Invaders or Asteroids the player’s ship is destroyed by contact with one bomb, bullet or rock, later games further subdivide a life with a colored bar representing “health,” which is degraded (to use an ugly latetwentieth- century military euphemism) by damage to the player’s character. When the bar is completely emptied, the life is gone. Applied to spacecraft or other vehicles, this concept is understandable, as it could be thought to measure the integrity of the craft’s hull or other analog,
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