Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual Let’s stick together

Trigger Happy

don’t want absolutely real situations in videogames. We can get that at home.

Let’s stick together

Naturally, the player doesn’t mind this fakery, this playing fast and loose with the laws of nature in the name of fun. But a critical requirement is that the game’s system remains consistent, that it is internally coherent. Crucially, it is lack of coherence rather than unrealism that ruins a gameplaying experience. This is largely but not exclusively a phenomenon of more modern videogames, whose increasing complexity in terms of space, action and tasks clearly places a greater strain on the designer’s duty to create a rock-solid underlying structure.

Videogame incoherence has three types: it can apply to causality, function or space. Incoherence of causality, firstly, appears, for ex-ample, in a driving game such as V-Rally (1997), where driving at full speed into another car causes a slight slowing down, but hitting a boulder at the road’s edge leads to a spectacular vehicular somersault. Another example crops up in Tomb Raider III, where a rocket-launcher blows up one’s enemies into pleasingly gory, fleshy chunks, but does no damage to a simple wooden door,

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