Trigger Happy

player to rear a hilariously bizarre fish with a man’s head (straight out of Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life) that swims around a digital aquarium. The player can speak into a microphone peripheral that plugs into the joypad, and Seaman answers back. For the moment, however, only half the job is done, for Seaman’s responses are still all pre-scripted. Dynamic voice synthesis and language creation in response to a player’s conversation is still, it seems, a long way off.

When it happens, it will certainly be a wonderfully rich form of interaction. But I don’t think it will achieve the dream of interactive narrative. What it will revolutionize instead is Olivier Masclef’s ambition of a “dramatically interesting virtual world”: it will bolster the illusion of actually being a character in an imaginary social context. Yet for the game to be able to surprise and move the player with its story line, it must necessarily still keep certain plot developments out of the player’s control. (“Could there be a truly interactive, democratic art form?” David Cronenberg wonders. “My films certainly aren’t democratic—their creation is more like a dictatorship.”)

Like Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the future gameplayer might be an actor

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Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual