Trigger Happy
“stealth” suit, so that you can have enormous fun playing through the environments as an invisible, death-dealing hero. Beat-’em-ups such as Tekken 3 or Soul Calibur, meanwhile, cleverly spread rewards between their two-player modes (two humans fighting each other’s digital surrogates—the genre’s raison d’Être)—and their solo modes (player versus machine), in that success in the latter unlocks new characters that can be pitted against each other in the social context.
Videogames in this sense are meta-games: the manipulation and achievement of such visual, dynamic and cybernetic rewards is another, higher-level game in itself. A well-designed videogame, such as Zelda 64, can approach the condition of a work of art simply by virtue of the way such rich, protean transformations in the game’s very structure are linked together for the gameplayer’s pleasure. The ways in which you can see more stuff and do more stuff are a joy, a reward in themselves. Perhaps they mirror the process of the rich and speedy acquisition of skills and experiences that we all went through as small children.
This idea suggests another course of action as we plunge deeper into the videogame metropolis. Along the way, we have measured the city’s space, heard its stories and read its history. We have seen how we
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