Trigger Happy
in purgatory and in heaven;56 heretics are burned at the stake, yet a bonfire is a means of celebration. Many ancient cultures, such as the Zoroastrians or Assyrians, worshiped fire as a god. Fire is the perfect representative of the Romantic sublime: at once beautiful and terrifying.
Videogames so far have not moved far beyond the twin poles of attraction and repulsion—these reptilian emotions, age-old reflexes buried deep in the brain. But this too might change. In the future, for example, videogames should be cleverly designed so as to make you live with the consequences of your actions. Take Goldeneye. The game’s mission structure is rather artificially limited: if you accidentally (or deliberately) allow your Russian hacker-babe sidekick Natalya to be fatally shot, you are forced to play that mission again and again until she emerges unscathed to join you in the next operation. It would surely be much more interesting, however, if the game just continued anyway no matter what you had done, so that you had cause to bewail your failure to protect her ever more strongly as you struggled to reprogram the satellite yourself (this would then be a difficult, but not
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56 For example, Milton’s “Heav’nly fires” in Paradise Lost xii.256; Shakespeare’s “the fires of heaven” in Coriolanus I.iv.39.
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