Trigger Happy
dimensions that we are currently assured constitute reality.
There is no question that such a game could be built; it is a question of whether there exists the vision to build it—and, of course, whether anyone would want to play it. Such a mixture of styles in our hypothetical game, of course, would—and this is the second thing we have learned—necessitate a mixture of different sorts of gameplay. The Egyptian level might be a sophisticated melding of role-playing with platform genres, whereas the cubist level would imply more of an abstract puzzle game. And this is one of the main ways in which videogame representation differs from that in painting. No artist would now deliberately draw in the inaccurate perspective of the thirteenth century, a mode of representation that has really been superseded and replaced by a correct mode of endeavor. But as we have seen, videogames may still use isometric perspective, or wireframe 3D, or flat scrolling, depending on the type of gameplay experience they wish to offer. In this way, videogames are fortunate in that their entire artistic history in terms of spatial representation is, as yet, still available in the present. Two-dimensional videogames live on, for
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