Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual

Trigger Happy

care why my city is cursed, I’m off to the hills with Jocasta to live out my days in luxury,” you’re not going to get much of a story out of the game.

Some kinds of irreversibility, indeed, are actually anathema to good videogame design. A good exploration game, for example, should never let the player get irreversibly “stuck” in a space from which there is no escape (because, for example, he or she hasn’t collected the right key yet), forcing her to switch off completely and reload. Although this is a feasible real-life situation for behatted and whipped adventurers, it is merely frustrating and boring in a videogame. The Tomb Raider games are admirable examples in this respect, as the level designers have always been careful to provide a way back to the more open environment: when the player gets stuck, she can be confident that there must be some way out that hasn’t been spotted yet.

The fact that the videogame form is predicated strongly on such types of reversibility is one explanation, then, why the action tells no very compelling synchronic story. On the other hand, the FMV cut-scenes that move the plot along in the more ostensibly “cinematic” types of game are full of irreversible factors that are out of the player’s

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