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. Plot and character are things videogames find very difficult to deal with.
The fact is that Silent Hill and Resident Evil resemble each other far more than they resemble any film you care to name. But will this necessarily always be the case, or could the
The gift of sound and vision
Videogames are superficially like films in one major respect, which is that they communicate to the player through eyes and ears. Just as film crews include specialized audio technicians for the
122