Trigger Happy
glorious detail and color, it cast the player as a cybernetic infiltrator in a Neuromancer-style matrix of coruscating firewalls, defense programs and virus detectors. Success by the player effected greater polyphonic sophistication in the real-time synthesized soundtrack, and at the same time caused the ghostly environment gradually to fill in its polygons and become a solid world. The player was in this sense encouraged to replay the aesthetic history of 3D videogames in real-time, in a riotous blaze of semiotic play.
With the advent of the next generation of hardware, videogame designers have, in principle at least, a broader canvas to work on. But they could easily continue to paint the same old compromised clichÉs in prettier colors — and, as in any cultural form, most of them probably will. The initial winter 2001 line-up of games for Microsoft’s Xbox and Nintendo’s GameCube, for example, was dominated by the same old kinds of game — snowboarding, martial-arts fighting, first-person shooters — just with prettier graphics. Even so, there were shards of hope among the predictable cash-ins, with the lovingly designed if shallow ghostbusting game Luigi’s Mansion, and
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