Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual

Trigger Happy

they aim for an effect of vertiginous scale such as that created so masterfully by Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s etchings of nightmare dungeons in his Carceri d’invenzione (see fig. 21), which had an enormous influence on the aesthetics of Romanticism and, later, Surrealism.

In this way, such videogames are part of a long tradition of imaginary architecture. But they are still some way behind in inventiveness, because part of Piranesi’s visualized nightmare is that the fabric of space itself is warped: the perspective is deliberately ambiguous, worryingly off-key. As Ernst Gombrich asks in Art and Illusion: “The rope hanging from the pulley—where does it lead? How is the drawbridge tied up? What is the angle of the bannister near the lower edge?” The artist used his illusionistic craft to create a gnawing sense of unease in the viewer. In videogames so far, on the other hand, everything is fanatically, obsessively “true” in three dimensions. There is no room for interesting fuzziness or spatial ambiguity.

The spatial aesthetics of videogames are still stuck in the conservative line of the eighteenth century, because geometrically, it seems, truth is easier than interesting fiction. Yet why should a game not let the player wander around Piranesi’s own dungeons? Of course,

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