Trigger Happy
make sure you are not going to tread in some fatal ooze, break a trip wire or fall down a satirical pit.
While videogames are still played out on flat television screens or monitors, therefore, and while the interface remains so doggedly mechanical, a critical level of realism will never be achieved, and the experience of playing Quake and its siblings will always be more like remote-controlling a robot with tunnel vision rather than being there yourself. Of course, remote-controlling a robot (or a dune buggy, or an orange marsupial) can be fun and interesting in itself, but this is a large obstacle to greater immersion of the player in the virtual world. Only coin-op arcade games such as Sega’s fabulous Ferrari 335 Challenge (1999) have the resources to address this problem by using three large screens, with the two outside ones angled towards the player, thus giving an excellent illusion of wide-angle vision.
The third way
One creative and novel way, however, in which videogames have expanded the three-dimensional horizons and given the player a feeling of having more “room” to move around, is with the so-called “thirdperson” 3D style. Most famously exemplified by the
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