Trigger Happy
controlled car. When you are first given this gadget, you just play with it, as you would with a real one. The form is identical. Herein lies one secret of the videogame’s enormous potential: it is the universal toy. (Indeed, 1999’s RC Stunt Copter is a videogame simulation of playing with a real radio-controlled helicopter, while No ClichÉ’s Toy Commander lets you play with something like fifty different types—toy planes, tanks, race cars and so on—spread over an imaginary house.)
But wait a minute: Ape Escape’s radio-controlled car, after all, doesn’t really exist. It is racing round a virtual world, and an anime-styled orange-haired punkboy is holding the car’s controller box on screen. That’s alienation without the pain. In fact, the tangible connection between the controls in your physical hands and the action of the little toy on screen is a clever semiotic trick that fools you into ever-increasing absorption into the cartoon world. A similar trick is worked by the videogame paradigm of the sniper rifle, introduced by MDK (1997), perfected by Goldeneye (1997) and then cropping up everywhere—for example in Metal Gear Solid (1999) and Perfect Dark (2000). This gadget zooms in on an area and lets you view it in close-up, usually for the purpose of delivering
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