Trigger Happy
The fun of Turok: Dinosaur Hunter was thus compromised by passages that required the player to make precise jumps, platform-style—yet in a game where you can’t see your own feet, such jumps are impossible to judge properly. Equally, however, there are problems in the other direction: third-person games present the rather chancy challenge of aiming weapons in three-dimensional space without giving the player true line-of-sight. Tomb Raider relies on an alienating auto-aiming system, where you just stand there hoping to hit the enemy, while Zelda 64 enables you perhaps too easily to “lock on” to a monster, and swings the camera right behind the player’s character. These examples confirm that gameplay requirements must always take account of the particular virtues and limitations of the chosen spatial style and representation.
The example of precision-jumping in Turok partakes of another formal phenomenon that needs to be seriously questioned: unfair challenge. By this I mean either a procedure that, as in Turok, is maddeningly hard to perform simply because the player is not given enough (visual and spatial) information, or more generally a difficulty that is not
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