Trigger Happy
videogame environment as a whole is perfectly coherent.
If this cannot be accomplished at the moment for recreations of large “real” environments like Tokyo, owing to the data intensiveness problem, that in itself should be a good reason for videogames to develop their architectural imagination in much more creative ways. Even when it is possible to recreate a real environment, we still don’t want it to be too real. Sam Houser describes the design process of skateboarding game Thrasher: Skate and Destroy (1999) in this way: “All the levels in the game are based on real-world locations. The testers saw one level and said, ‘Wow, that’s China Banks!’—which is a big place in San Francisco which is now banned, but it’s one of the world-famous meccas that any skateboarder knows about.” But even so, the virtual China Banks was deliberately not made completely accurate, because then the gameplay would have been boring. “It’s quite hard to take a real-world location that in skateboarding may be good for one rail that everyone rides, but you’ve got to make the whole level fun,” Houser explains. So the digital China Banks features a host of invented extra curves and ramps. It’s even better than the real thing.
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