Trigger Happy
away in one of several chests—and, risibly, an object put in one chest may be retrieved from another chest three floors higher up in the building.
By these standards, Tomb Raider III and Resident Evil are arguably inferior to Space Invaders or Pong, both of which exhibit total consistency in the laws of the imaginary world. As Chris Crawford says in The Art of Computer Game Design, special-case rules (which roughly map on to our causal, functional and spatial incoherences) are bad: “In the perfect game design, each rule is applied universally.” This is easy to verify if you consider the situation in other types of game—chess, for instance: Garry Kasparov would be profoundly, glaringly unimpressed if his opponent sought to stave off defeat by pronouncing that, actually, at this particular juncture, the black queen was not allowed to move diagonally.
Tomb Raider III also illustrates perfectly another potential danger of trying to increase “realism” in a game—in this case by adding extra ranges of movement to a human character. Because the hero of Manic Miner lives in such a resolutely bizarre world, where flying electrified lavatories are the least of his worries, we do not worry that our character is able only to walk and to jump. But in the far more
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