Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual User illusion

Trigger Happy

polygons’ very ubiquity will lead to their immolation. Sony’s PlayStation2 draws about seventy million polygons per second, which is roughly equivalent to the total number of pixels on the screen.32 Hardware is thus getting very close to being able to provide so many polygons that to all intents and purposes they will soon vanish, collapsing back into the original cosmic building blocks. They will become, in effect, the modest, invis-ible atoms of videogame reality.

The user illusion

But even with modern videogames’ zillions of polygons—and their weird mathematical progeny: voxels, non-uniform rational B-splines and other computational flora33—they still need to make use of tricks and misdirections borrowed from painting in order to achieve the dream of fooling the player into believing in an imaginary world.

These are tricks that persuade us we are looking into the screen or canvas, rather than just looking at it.

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32 The number of polygons drawn per second is a theoretical maximum, of course, ignoring shading and lighting effects, and we are assuming a screen resolution of a million pixels at a frame rate of 60 fps.

33 Voxels is short for “volumetric pixels”—tiny graphic building blocks that are already three-dimensional; B-splines are curved surfaces described not by polygonal approximations, but by clumps of polynomial equations.

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