Trigger Happy
machine guns, guided missiles) that one so enjoys playing with.
Metal Gear Solid, then, toys with the player’s emotions in largely non-interactive ways, as a film does. The future challenge is this: if videogames choose to try to expand their nuances of emotional impact interactively, they will need to become irreversible; yet that means having a game system that is able to create an interesting and evocative story even out of really dumb decisions by the player, a huge and perhaps insurmountable challenge.
To begin to guess how videogames might become more sophisticated in the future, remember what they are already really good at. Games will never be as good as films at telling stories visually. They’ll never be as good as books at weaving cerebral tapestries of ideas and human lives. But videogames are already extremely good at providing an exhilarating blast of the animal emotions. Fear and triumph—that is why you play a videogame at the moment. Jeremy Smith of Core Design points out that these fundamental pleasures can be traced right back to the beginning of the form. “Why did we all play that stupid tennis game that used to burn lines on our screens?” he asks, chuckling. “Because it was actually just good fun to try
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