Trigger Happy
organically related to and coherent with the rest of the virtual world.
One good example of this, again, is in the Resident Evil games: the quite arbitrary restriction on inventory that we saw in Chapter 3. How much stuff you can carry is illogically determined—a herb takes up as much space as a shotgun—and you can only drop items in special chests. This rule results in incredibly tedious item-swapping and back-tracking between item boxes—a task of absolutely no symbolic interest. It’s like filing, or stacking supermarket shelves. Such unfair challenges are purely the result of laziness and lack of imagination: it’s a very easy way to make the game harder. Similarly, many levels in Tomb Raider II were made arbitrarily more difficult simply by dropping in more guys with machine guns to take a pop at Lara. Making the game harder by thinking up new and interesting gameplay challenges is clearly a more demanding job, but it’s going to be far more rewarding to the player.
A more widespread example is the knotty issue of saving games. Most modern videogames that are not predicated upon pure adrenaline-fueled action require a total of between twenty and sixty hours’ play to be completed. Sensibly, the player is not expected to do
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