Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual

Trigger Happy

live performance by slacker-country rocker Beck, Ken Kutaragi, the engineering genius at Sony Japan who designed the PlayStation and its successor, gave an intriguing speech that concentrated on the advantages of “new worlds” and “characters.” He was cheered to the echo by the audience.

Kutaragi’s concentration on “character” rather than storytelling was informative. Developments in Los Angeles and elsewhere show a new pragmatism among videogame designers: concentrating on what they alone can provide, rather than chasing the fashionable dream of interactive narrative, or uncritically seeking convergence with the cinema. Instead, especially in their concentration on character, videogames are carefully strip-mining our conventional notions of narrative and storytelling for what can be usefully simulated in their own, utterly different, medium.

But how do videogames build the worlds that their characters inhabit?

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