Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual Cracked actors

Trigger Happy

you don’t have high levels of dramatic changes, everything starts to seem the same. So above the nonlinear play you have a totally linear story line.” This, he thinks, is one way to address our theoretical concerns about nonlinearity (that is, reversible, interactive stories). Nonlinearity, Masclef agrees, leads to non-urgency: the player has no particular reason to do one thing rather than another. “You’ve got to hook the player again. So when, say, ten percent of the game is completed, we throw in a preplanned event that changes things in a certain way. Generally [the story] is scripted and possibilities are locked in time.” This, then, is the traditional solution thus far in videogame history: the drama is provided by the prescripted story, the virtual exploration is interactive, and never the twain shall meet.

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But what makes Masclef’s game more sophisticated than most is its approach to character. Now, of course, stories involve people (or at least intelligent, sentient life forms), and so any videogame with narrative pretensions must be populated with people other than the main character (the one under the player’s control). These are known generally as NPCs, or non-playable

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