Trigger Happy
relatively hermetic fields. The first stage in development of a videogame at British designers Core, for example, consists of the writing of several hundred pages of a “Game Design Document,” which is rather like a (nonlinear) script for a film: the game’s characters are introduced through drawings and verbal sketches; the gameplay concept is elaborated; and example situations are described. A top game will now take around two years to develop, with a budget of anything up to tens of millions of
Meanwhile, Japanese videogame giant Square moved the other way, making an entirely digital feature film based on its
Perhaps this perceived competition is one reason why, when videogames themselves feature in films, they are so often shorthand for moral or cognitive vacancy, or actual destructive tendencies. Russ Meyer shows a woman playing Pong at the beginning of Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens precisely to indicate her anomie and lack of sexual interest in her partner. Meanwhile, the superb slice of 1980s teen
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