Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual

Trigger Happy

martial arts combination of smacks and punches by floating six feet into the air and delivering a roundhouse kick to the head?

Counterintuitively, it seems for the moment that the perfect videogame “feel” requires the ever-increasing imaginative and physical involvement of the player to stop somewhere short of full bodily immersion. After all, a sense of pleasurable control implies some modicum of separation: you are apart from what you are controlling. You don’t actually want to be there, performing the dynamically exaggerated and physically perilous moves yourself; it would be exhausting and painful. Remember, you don’t want boring, invisible lasers; you don’t want a Formula One car that takes years of training to drive; and you don’t want to die after taking just one bullet. You don’t want it to be too real.

The purpose of a videogame, then, is never to simulate real life, but to offer the gift of play. In a videogame, we are citizens of an invisible city where there is no danger, only challenge. And our videogame metropolis, like any city, is teeming and multifaceted. We have already sketched out a rough map of its geography. Later in this book we shall look at its architecture, dig below its tarmac to the pipes and

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