Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual

Trigger Happy

buying new things for the Sims’ house in order to increase its inhabitants’ happiness (such as a large mirror, which will boost their charisma, or a new oven, which will help them cook meals for their housemates and so become more popular), and in helping them climb the slippery pole of a career as a politician or scientist. More money makes a Sim happier; social dissidents are not allowed. Once more, we reach a stratum in videogame design where certain gameplay possibilities have been ruled out by the assumptions buried deep in its structure.

This will, for the forseeable future, continue to be the case. Even in the splendidly ambitious Republic, a forthcoming game that promises to simulate revolutionary politics in a life-sized eastern European city, there is a fundamental assumption, according to one of the designers at London’s Elixir Studios, that everyone is cynically self-interested and powerhungry. That still represents a certain angle, a necessarily partial explanation of how the world works, although it seems a more potentially fruitful and provocative starting point than the Sims philosophy. Simplification in videogame design, as this book has insisted, is not only inevitable but

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