Trigger Happy
non, the lightgun. And as I wander the halls speaking to designers showing off their latest games, there is a marked tendency for them to make excuses. Yes, they say, this is a cutting-edge first-person shooter where you can put bullets through people’s heads and blast their limbs off individually in gushes of beautifully animated blood, but that’s not the point. You see, it’s basically a really good story.
Storytelling is the second oldest profession. Epic poetry, drama, the novel and the cinema have all become expert in their different ways at the craft of telling a story. Why should videogames, then, be any different? Modern videogames have plots; they use voice actors for different “characters”; there is usually a main protagonist who must accomplish specific tasks; the games boast self-contained, carefully scripted “movies” in them.
So far, so once-upon-a-time. But as we’ve seen, videogames have an important quality that militates against easy conjunctions with other media such as film. That quality is interactivity. Of course, in one sense books themselves have always been highly interactive, depending on the reader’s imagination to flesh out their worlds in color and detail, but, unlike a
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