Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual

Trigger Happy

knowledge of Pong-style (or, in the real world, squashstyle) angular reflections, as bubbles may be bounced off the side walls to achieve tactically desirable formations that are impossible by aiming directly.

Even so, the physical systems that games can model so accurately are never totally “realistic.” Just as with the operation of lasers, videogames deliberately load the dice one way or another. If you put a Formula One racing driver in front of an accurately modeled racing game, Topping says, he would still crash the car, because of the gulf between controllability and visual feedback. And an ordinary player would find the game merely boring and frustrating. So, Topping explains, “You’re gonna fake the physics. Increase friction, make the car smaller— you choose what you model properly.”

The lesson is that even with whiz-bang math programming, a videogame in important ways remains defiantly unreal. Videogames’ somewhat paradoxical fate is the ever more accurate modeling of things that don’t, and couldn’t, exist: a car that grips the road like Superglue, which bounces uncrumpled off roadside barriers; a massive spacecraft with the maneuverability of a bumblebee; a human being who can survive, bones intact, a three-hundred-foot fall into water. We

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