Trigger Happy

and right up to a maximum speed, and when you jumped, the amount of time you held the button down for determined how high you jumped. Therefore there was an awful lot of skill in running along over a hole, jumping up on to a platform and landing on it without falling off the other side. It was actually an extremely skillful thing to do.

What about total immersion? Virtual reality systems have been around for many years and no doubt will soon be affordable and efficient. Some combination of headset (such as Sony’s Glasstron monitors), motionsensitive data gloves and so on will enable the player to become totally immersed in a game, just as the science fiction movies have been telling us for decades. Will this, then, become the dominant means of videogame control? Perhaps; but if so, the spirit of Heidegger will rise again to warn that such cybernetic hegemony will necessarily narrow the field of possibilities. Immersive VR will be fine for exploration games, driving games, 3D space shoot- ’em-ups and so on. But what happens to the pleasurable unreality of human-body physics? How will such a system enable the player to somersault like Lara Croft, to climb sheer walls, to swim a hundred feet down in icy Arctic rivers or to finish off a brutal

116

Page 114
Image 114
Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual