Trigger Happy
Even games that do not try to build a recognizable, real-world place are still rather repetitively reliant on the same hoary old visual references. Littered around Core’s studios during the development of Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, for instance, are photographic and illustrative source books such as An Introduction to Egyptology, from which the artists are liberally stealing and fusing visual ideas both for the architecture of the tombs and for Lara’s assailants, such as a huge golden dog. The resulting environments are at once familiar and strange (see fig. 22). There is a great deal of visual and spatial invention in this game, but it consists of clever combination, not of imagining a world anew from the ground up.
Videogames should try more often to break free of such recognizable templates, the clichÉs of the torchlit stone tomb, the fairy dungeon, the biomechanoid spaceship interior, the sunny meadow, the Dunederived hi-tech desert metropolis. The abstract, voidal spaces of early videogames were in some senses far more interesting than the third-hand patchwork worlds of the majority of current exploration games. But there, modernist abstraction was a happy by-product, born of technological necessity. As a free choice, it’s obviously much harder to make. Some of the most
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