Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual Life in plastic

Trigger Happy

on the one hand—for instance, the laser behavior considered earlier, or Manic Miner’s winged cisterns— and inconsistencies in the fantastical system—such as Lara’s rocket-launcher or Resident Evil’s item boxes— on the other.

Life in plastic

Of Sweeney’s16 three certainties of life, videogames have so far largely eschewed birth and copulation. But, as if in sardonic compensation, they are triply teeming with death. And their particular reinvention of death is but one of a whole lexicon of happily irrealist principles that videogames have amassed over their history. Death in a videogame is multimodal: it means one thing for your enemies, another thing for certain other types of enemies, yet another for you. Shoot a space invader and he is gone for ever. Kill a dungeon skeleton in Zelda 64 and it is dust—but if you leave and then reenter the room, it has horribly regenerated, there to be fought all over again. But what does death mean for you, the player? If the aliens’ rain of bombs becomes overwhelming and one hits your ship, blowing it to pixelated smithereens, it is certainly bad news. But wait—suddenly a gleaming new ship

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16 Protagonist of T. S. Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes, that is.

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