Trigger Happy
automatically doing pretty complex parabolic calculus without any conscious thought. Appreciation of dynamic properties is hard-wired into the species—it’s essential for survival. This, then, is one of the most basic ways in which videogames speak to us as the real world does, directly to the visceral, animal brain— even as they tease the higher imagination by building a universe that could never exist.
Furthermore, just as timing a good shot in tennis is a pleasure in itself, there is a direct link between convincing videogame dynamics and gameplay pleasure. A game that is more physically realistic is thereby, Topping says, “more aesthetically pleasing,” because the properly modeled game enables us pleasurably to exercise our physical intuition. “All great games have physics in them—that’s what gives it the lovely feel,” Topping points out. And this is just as true for classic games such as Defender or Asteroids as it is for modern racers like Gran Turismo 2000. In Defender, you aim your ship to face left or right and then thrust, and the simple inertia means that you can flip around and fire at aliens while still traveling backward; the subsequent application of forward thrust takes time to kick in. Even a very simple puzzle game such as Bust-A-Move exercises the intuitive
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