Trigger Happy
that provide a map of the current environment. In Zelda 64, the player must find a map: it is an object in the gameworld that functions as a power-up. Once acquired, it can be viewed to help you find your way to new areas: it is graphically designed so as to look like a real parchment map (it’s an icon); it “points to” the salient structural features of the environment (it’s an index); and it is marked with symbols that are agreed to stand for various crucial features: a treasure chest, the monster’s lair. But here the player must switch between the map “screen” and the gameworld. By contrast, the dinosaur-hunting first-person shooter Turok 2 intelligently enables the level map to be overlaid on to the iconically constructed environment, as if it were a transparency; thus, the player is reading all possible modes of sign at once.
Videogames have become so clever at displaying information in imaginative yet instantly intuitive ways that they have started to exhibit a kind of aesthetic techno-nostalgia. They are so far ahead of the race, compared to the dull and workmanlike interfaces of “serious” software or most Internet pages, that they can fool around and have a bit of visual fun. This is most obvious in the panoply of support screens— option screens to set the player’s preferences, to
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