Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual

Trigger Happy

original environments so far in modern gaming have been seen, ironically, in some of the worst products, those triumphs of virtual tourism over symbolic richness Myst and Riven, whose pleasurably organic topography extrapolates inventively from the real, natural world.

Another straightforward conclusion: videogames need to play to their strengths. Shigeru Miyamoto said exactly the same thing in September 1999: “The beauty of interactive media is it is different from other types of media, so we need to concentrate on those differences.” In this instance, that means recognizing that whereas film—at least naturalistic, “live-action” film—is tied down to real spaces, the special virtue of videogames is precisely their limitless plasticity. And only when that virtue is exploited more fully will videogames become a truly unprecedented art—when their level of world- building competence is matched with a comparable level of pure invention. We want to be shocked by novelty. We want to lose ourselves in a space that is utterly different. We want environments that have never been seen, never been imagined before.

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