Trigger Happy
round a corner unless the plot and the director take you that way. But in Goldeneye you can explore areas from every conceivable angle. Indeed, one aficionado of the game, on seeing the film again, commented: “I thought, ‘I know this
This virtue of videogames is so seductive that on occasion it can override all other formal deficiencies. Games like Myst and Riven were rightly derided by the videogame cognoscenti for having tediously simplistic gameplay properties, yet they sold in their millions precisely because they are rather beautifully pure exploration games. The player wanders around gorgeously designed virtual environments with fabulously detailed landscapes, water lapping against jetties and mysterious dark buildings. J. C. Herz is exactly right in labeling the appeal of these games as that of “virtual tourism”: “Myst put you into a world you might actually want to visit, if you only had the money and time. . . . It was an escape destination.”
The fundamental point in comparing this aspect of videogames with the movies is that, for instance, Goldeneye the videogame offers a different and
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