Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual Drawing you

Trigger Happy

no one wants to come home, turn on a game and feel like they’re still working at the office PC.50 But the particular aesthetic phenomenon of techno-nostalgia is also working a very clever, stealthy trick. Just as Hamlet’s deliberately archaic play-within-a-play enhances the audience’s suspension of disbelief, in that the surrounding onstage action looks by comparison far more “real,” so the blatantly archaic technological design in some parts of the videogame make the cutting-edge visuals in the thick of the action seem even more novel and exciting.

Drawing you in

Modern videogames, as we have seen, glory in their graphic richness: spacecraft with scarred hulls, fighters with stubble, trees with individually swaying branches. But this does not necessarily reduce the player’s involvement in the game. What spoils “identification” is simply a lack of symbolic richness to suck you in. If a game with a beautiful graphic iconic construction also enjoys symbolic richness—as in Zelda 64—it is a

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50 This is also the reason that, videogame journalists and hardcore system fetishists aside, PC-based videogames are far less popular than consolebased ones—quite apart from the fact that the latter hardware is five times cheaper.

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