Trigger Happy
Videogames had, with such forms as Defender’s, somehow acquired a new dimension of action. It is certainly not the same space as in the old, static, onescreen games. Yet nor is it three-dimensional, for the player cannot fly “into” or “out of” the screen. The game demands, moreover, that the player watch two representations of the same space: one on the main playing area, and one on Defender’s innovatively complex radar, a small subscreen that shows a wider section of the game universe at any one time so that attacks can be planned and threatened humans rescued. The arrangement of space on the primary screen is rather as if we found ourselves in the center of a large circular strip, onto which is projected the battle action; when we scroll sideways, we are metaphorically turning our heads to investigate another area of the scene.
This spatial arrangement is indeed the perfect, unforeseeable fusion of two pre-cinema visual technologies: the Cyclorama of the 1840s, in which the viewer stands inside a circular drum painted with a continuous image; and the Kinematoscope, patented by Coleman Sellers in 1861, in which a series of photographs arranged around the inside of a revolving drum presents the illusion of movement to an observer
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