Trigger Happy
wasn’t written in as a possibility, so you can’t do it. Remember, in a videogame you can only perform such actions as the programmers have allowed for. This recalls Heidegger’s notion of “enframing”—that technology, far from being liberating, actually circumscribes the possibilities of action. But a good videogame will allow predetermined actions to be combined in creative ways that certainly weren’t deliberately predicted at the design stage. In chess, after all, you don’t invent the forms of individual moves, you choose creatively among them and string them together in a strategy. This is the basic difference, if operating at a far less complex level, that we touched on in the last chapter, between beat-’emups, which provide many hundreds of individual actions but little freedom of combination, and something like Robotron, with two basic actions— move and fire—and strategy aplenty. Indeed, as Eugene Jarvis, programmer of Robotron and Defender, told J. C. Herz about someone he watched playing the latter game: “He was doing things I never envisioned, never thought of, tactics I never dreamed of.”
Meanwhile, back to smoking. Metal Gear Solid stresses that it’s bad for you, but if Snake hasn’t found some infrared goggles, he needs to smoke a cigarette in
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