Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual Moral maze

Trigger Happy

this all in one go; the current position in the game may be saved to disk, or to a “memory card.” But often, the process of saving is made into another thoroughly arbitrary hurdle. Tomb Raider III, for example, only allows the player to save when he or she has collected the appropriate power-up, a blue save-crystal, and they are frustratingly few and far between.

Again, it’s an easy (for the designers) but incoherent way to make the game more challenging. Saving a videogame should be just like pausing a videotape. The save-crystal (or, in Resident Evil, the typewriter ribbon) is also an unwarranted extra rip in the fabric of the game universe. For this power-up doesn’t mean anything in the fictional gameworld. The fact that I have to stop playing now because I’m going out has nothing whatsoever to do with Lara’s universe. After all, Lara doesn’t know who I am—she doesn’t even acknowledge my existence. That is precisely why, for some, she is inexhaustibly desirable.

The moral maze

Desire and fear: our twin primal responses to fire, from the moment Prometheus first unveiled his spark to humans’ dumbstruck eyes. Fires burn in hell, yet also

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