Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual Pushing the boundaries

Trigger Happy

But along the way, videogames have rehearsed other histories of pictorial representation, and come up with imaginative and original visual strategies themselves. Moreover, as has been made abundantly clear in the mid- to late 1990s by the industry’s numerous abortive attempts to convert old twodimensional game paradigms into 3D space, videogame possibilities often depend totally on the form of representation chosen. It is hard to imagine a workable true-3D Asteroids or Defender. The critical problem is this: you can’t see behind you. Of course, you can’t in real life either, but then in real life you don’t often find yourself piloting an arrow-shaped spaceship and blasting big rocks. The latest reiteration of Asteroids (1998), in fact, finally recognizes this problem. The ships and rocks are reimagined as “solid,” multifaceted objects, but the playing area is a good old two-dimensional plane.

So what is the story of videogames’ visual refinement? What shapes of world have sprouted from the silicon, and what might the future still hold?

Pushing the boundaries

The very earliest videogames, such as Spacewar and Pong, represented objects on a flat plane, the boundaries of which were those of the screen. The

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