Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual

Trigger Happy

Such videogames at the moment, however, fall squarely into the high-velocity driving genre, and for a good reason. Because games as yet have only made a few faltering steps toward a necessary goal of the future: the fully interactive environment. If you were walking a character around that virtual Shibuya, it would soon become apparent that all the complex parts of a building—shop doors, drainpipes, windows—are not real objects modeled by the program. They have no symbolic function: they are simply pictures thrown on to a flat surface. You could not go into a shop or shin up the drainpipe.

Providing a fully functional rendering of such a hugely complex environment as a real city is still beyond current videogame abilities. Even at its blisteringly high speed, Metropolis Street Racer cannot give the player total freedom to drive around: there is a set circuit, with many streets cordoned off by invisible barriers. But it will happen eventually, even in complex exploration games. The problem as things stand is that certain arbitrary simplifications have to be made. All right, say in the London levels of Tomb Raider III, you can open that door but this other door’s just a dummy, just painted on for atmosphere. But that’s our old

enemy, functional incoherence. Anything

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