Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual

Trigger Happy

virtual psychotherapist. The user had a rudimentary conversation with it by typing answers to its questions, and Eliza would then respond to those answers and ask for further elaboration. “Eliza was one of the really exciting events throughout the computer industry,” Darling recalls, “because you could type to it and it wrote back to you. It’s interesting, I think, that in the games world, AI hasn’t to me actually exceeded that excitement level.”

With current videogame hardware thousands of times faster and more sophisticated, great strides could have been made toward in-corporating more fluent language engines in games, and even steering them toward something approaching true conversation. But that evolutionary path was not taken. “Unfortunately,” Richard Darling says, “I think we’ve gone through a bit of a dark age as far as communication AI is concerned, but we’ll hopefully come out of that soon.”

Instead, the kind of static puzzles that used to be typical of adventure games persist in what some call “action adventures” (they belong in our genre of exploration games). How does this work? Well, a game such as Resident Evil, for example, is built on exactly the same kind of puzzles that were the meat and drink of text adventures in their heyday. A nasty

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