Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual

Trigger Happy

out in all the time they’ve had since Space Invaders, getting thoroughly vaporized time and time again.

Why, then, do videogames get it so wrong? The answer is they get it wrong deliberately, because with “real” laser behavior it wouldn’t be much of a game. It would be far too easy to blow things up. The challenge of accounting for an enemy craft’s direction and speed, of aiming appropriately off-target, and the concomitant satisfaction of scoring a fiery hit, are artifacts of this unrealism. Generally, the world-building philosophy of videogames is one in which certain aspects of reality can be modeled in a realistic fashion, while others are deliberately skewed, their effects caricatured or dampened according to the game’s requirements.

The most intriguing way in which videogames are apparently becoming more “realistic” is in the arcane world of physical modeling. Laser behavior may be a fantastical paradigm, but such games nevertheless enforce very strict systems of gravity and motion. Videogames increasingly codify such natural laws, such as those of Newtonian physics and beyond, in ever more accurate ways. This sounds abstruse and technical, but you have already experienced it if you’ve ever played or seen a game even as old as Pong (1972). Pong was modeled on simple physics: the way

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