Trigger Happy

gonna really work.” Well, at that point, it really didn’t make any difference. It was only when they really started to develop Lara—she was animated and her hair was moving— it was like, “Wow, you could actually quite relate to this!”

One apotheosis of this sort of emotional manipulation is in the classic puzzle game Lemmings, in which you must guide hundreds of stupid, suicidal little furry creatures home, reacting quickly to stop them falling off high ledges or being sliced in two by imaginatively sadistic machines. The lemmings are only about fifteen pixels high, but the way their hair is bouncily animated and their naive faith in a safe world mean you’ve got to save them.

This protectiveness functions the same way whether the character is abstract and cartoony or humanlike and filmic. And of course we must still insist that the latter type of videogame character is not supposed to be “realistic” any more than a deformed anime character is. Part of the very attraction is a certain glossy blankness—what Smith enthuses over as “that computer look.” As videogame graphics become ever more sophisticated, the designers of the next generation of Tomb Raider games on PlayStation2 will

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Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual