Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual Say something else

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Trigger Happy

see the road in snapshots every twenty yards, you cannot drive very accurately.

However powerful a computer processor, its resources will always be finite, so there will always be a trade-off between temporal resolution and graphical resolution. You can have very richly defined pictures that move jerkily, or slightly less detailed ones that move smoothly. Quake III: Arena, for example, is a beautiful example of how very high temporal resolution really sucks the player in. So frame rate should never be sacrificed to visual detail.

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Modern videogames adore the icon. They draw ever more beautifully detailed worlds and characters. But they are not necessarily any less semiotically complex than Pac-Man, once you get behind the pictures. Nearly all signs are mixtures of the semiotic modes. In an iconic game such as Tomb Raider, it becomes clear that game objects such as doors and keys, while being good three-dimensional “pictures” of their referents, actually operate mostly as symbols. For they are not granted “realistic” physical attributes. As noted earlier in the book, a wooden door may not be blown up by a rocket- launcher, and a key may not be filed down to fit

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Page 328
Image 328
Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual Say something else