Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual

Trigger Happy

The virtue of Tomb Raider is that, although the variety of symbolic interaction that it offers to the player—manipulating keys, doors and switches—is quite rudimentary and uninteresting, the way the player is required to interact with such symbols in the three dimensions of space is what makes the game a pleasurable challenge. Lara is a very nicely designed videogame character, as we have seen, because of the rich range of physical animations—rolling, somersaulting, running, climbing—she is capable of, and these acrobatic moves must be strung together with exquisite tactical timing to move her around the environments in which she operates.

But a game such as Zelda 64, historically a contemporary of Tomb Raider III, is even more entertaining, because it combines requirements of spatial navigation and tactical timing with a far greater semiotic richness, which consists in the much wider variety of sign combinations and the cognitive challenges they pose to the player. In the Forest Temple of Zelda 64, for example, a good deal of complex fun is had with the nature of an icon itself.

The environment is a crumbling old country house, full of dark nooks and shadows. Gilt-edged paintings of ghosts hang on the walls. The paintings are icons

332