Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual

Trigger Happy

that development, for by the eighteenth century in painting the classical ideal of beauty based on some cosmic mathematical order was already being challenged, and the shortcomings of perspective were already being identified. Videogame scenery, being an artifact of computers, is clearly still in thrall to the god of mathematics. Of the myriad post-perspectival ways of seeing such as impressionism or cubism, there is as yet no sign in the apprentice draughtsmanship of videogames.

One can imagine, for instance, a far more ambitious game along the lines of Tomb Raider, in which adventures in different times and places would be rendered in the appropriate style. Tomb raiding among the freshly built pyramids would draw the world in the statuesquely side-on, information-stuffed mode of ancient Egyptian art; Lara’s exploits in early twentieth-century Paris would present objects as fabulous collages of their shapes apprehended under different viewing angles; Machiavellian derring-do at the court of the Medicis would most likely occur in doomy chiaroscuro, with something disturbingly offkey about the relationship between foreground and background; and if Lara were shrunk to subatomic size, she could journey among the full eleven

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