Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual

Trigger Happy

some pretense of monetary exchange—you might shoot enough ducks and win a cuddly toy—Time Crisis finishes the job begun by Pachinko, and offers nothing but purely sensual and psychological rewards for your cash. Another lightgun game, Point Blank, explicitly acknowledges this heritage by including a number of fairground-style shooting ranges to play at.

Fairground games in general, which are tests of skill packaged in a fizzingly son et lumiÈre environment, are obviously another set of precursors to modern videogames. So, too, are fairground rides, in a different way, for they offer a very convincing illusion of danger: on a rollercoaster, you feel you must be plummeting to your death, but you know it is safe. Shigeru Miyamoto has said he is constantly playing on his audience’s “desire to realize something exhilarating but impossible in real life.”

A good example of this is Gran Turismo, which we touched on at the end of the last chapter. Now, not only will we rarely have the chance to race a Dodge Viper around Tokyo at two hundred miles an hour, but it would be extremely dangerous to do so. Doing the same thing in a videogame, however (practicing the same form) ensures that if we crash, we do not die or get burned to death, but only lose the race and live to

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