Trigger Happy
3 is an idealized amalgam of body-building action grunts such as Schwarzenegger and martial arts movie heroes.
A good videogame character is one that the player, because of a fulfilled combination of dynamic and iconic criteria, likes—just as we like cartoon characters such as Sylvester the Cat or Cartman. But since the character is under our control, if we like him (or her) we must also feel somehow protective, and anxious lest we cause the character harm through our own manual inadequacy. And so a good character, as well as being aesthetically pleasing, constitutes one very strong motivation for playing the videogame well: you want Mario to overcome his surreal obstacles; you want Lara to escape from those pesky dogs; you want Sophitia to hack Rock to bits. Jeremy Smith of Core Design remembers how Tomb Raider nearly featured a man:
The original script and graphics that were done, it just was Indiana Jones, and I said, “Christ, you can’t do that— we’ll be sued from here to Timbuktu!” And they said, “Yeah, I suppose you’re right. We’ll work on it.” And then literally two weeks later we had another project meeting and there was this babe there. I said, “It’s a woman—what are you doing?” and they said “No, it’s
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