Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual 369

Trigger Happy

such skewed spaces would initially be very confusing to the gameplayer, but by building in a sufficient degree of intuitive predictability in other aspects—the way, say, that inertia or gravity works—the game could still present an enjoyable challenge without becoming thoroughly alienating. It would anyway be impossible to construct a world that was thoroughly different in every way from the real one.55

Or why should a videogame not let us move through Escherian space, with its baffling perspectival contradictions? Escher’s prints depend for their power on a single point of view, deliberately chosen to maximize the illusion. With a moving point of view such as a videogame provides, designers would need to write very clever algorithms to adjust the illusion according to every movement of the player so that the house of cards did not fall.

This wouldn’t be easy. But designers ought to have the courage to play with the very fabric of their unreality, to create ever newer kinds of space rather than settling permanently on scientific perspective— itself, as we have seen, a tissue of illusionistic distortions.

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55 “It is obvious that an imagined world, however different it may be from the real one, must have something—a form—in common with it.” Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

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