It was the ZX Spectrum, the brainchild of famed British inventor Sir Clive Sinclair (this was before he created the wildly unsuccessful electric tricycle called the C5). She was on the cover of The Face and the subject of countless articles in Sunday supplements. It has sold more than sixteen million copies of the first three games in the series worldwide.
So the inner life of video games - how they work - is connected to the inner life of the player. Those cars look pretty real; the trees beside the racetrack, waving gently in the wind, look satisfyingly (arbo)real. Where do video games fit into the development of leisure technologies, of perspective representation, of the narrative arts.
THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES
But the world at large remained ignorant of the myriad charms of these proto-video games. Finally, at the turn of the decade, Intel got its act together and invented. You control a laser tower that can move from side to side at the bottom of the screen.
But the purism and simplicity of the gameplay show that the games are brothers under the skin. If the destructive orgy of the shoot-'em-up captures the essence of human-versus-machine competition, the racing game is the purest expression of machine-mediated human-versus-human competition. It qualifies as an "exploration game" in part because of the player's simple desire to see what surreal beauties the designers have hidden around the next corner.
The other potential pleasure of a god game is a function of the artificiality of the soi-disante itself. Colored bubbles hang from the top of the screen; new ones are added slowly.
UNREAL CITIES
The most exciting way in which video games are apparently becoming more "realistic" is in the mysterious world of physical modeling. Now processor speeds are such that more and more small variables can be calculated "on the fly" - almost instantaneously, as and when needed - to give the player a sense of interacting with objects that behave exactly as they would in the real world. Naturally, the player doesn't mind this fakeness, this playing fast and loose with the laws of nature in the name of fun.
Tomb Raider's rocket launcher also fails in this area because its use in the game is artificially limited. If the game designer decides to give the player a special item or weapon, it should work consistently and reliably in all relevant circumstances in the game, or the likely unreal illusion is shattered. But at a certain stage of the game, Lara finds herself at the end of a low tunnel that leads to a corridor.
By these standards, Tomb Raider III and Resident Evil are probably inferior to Space Invaders or Pong, both of which show total consistency in the laws of the imaginary world. In the game, the player controls a soldier, Solid Snake, who can be made to smoke a cigarette. If you smoke long enough, health reaches a minimal splinter on the bar, but it is impossible in the game to commit suicide by a cigarette.
Medikits and other health-restoring devices are further examples of a class of items in the game world that usually obey none of the normal physical rules of the game world: power-ups. Power-ups generally improve the player character's abilities in the game: in addition to restoring health or granting an extra life, they can also increase speed, envelop the player's ship in a temporary shield (which mysteriously prevents bullets from entering but allows the player to shoot out) or provide the player with an arsenal of extra-destructive weapons with which to face the next enemy attack. The first, and so far only, application of the idea occurs in the beautiful, gadget-adorned exploration game Ape Escape (1999), in which the player must row an inflatable dinghy downstream by turning both sticks, each of which controls a separate oar .
We can expect future controllers to offer finer gradations of vibration, as well as physically resist player movement and even, as hypothesized in Kurt Andersen's 1999 novel Turn of the Century, change temperature according to action on the screen.
ELECTRIC SHEEP
At first it looks a lot like the practice of the film industry, but it soon becomes clear that the deployment of the audio arts cannot always follow similar lines in the two media. Purely abstract sonic invention like Defender's was necessitated in part by the comparative crudeness, in those days, of the video game machine's sound chip. But oddly enough, back in the distant days of the Commodore 64 and Amiga, video game music was much more distinct as a stylistic genre than it is now.
The rather beautiful title music of the Tomb Raider games features undulating orchestral strings with a sweet oboe tune. Most of the cartridges were eventually buried in a landfill in New Mexico, where it is hoped they will eventually provide some entertainment for archaeologists in the distant future. The game didn't replicate the movie, but stole the parts of the movie (the action scenes) that could have been.
And the allure of the Star Wars franchise is such that every console and PC gaming platform since then has been home to a game based on the film. One of the most important modern influences, not only on video games, but on all forms of science fiction, is the film Blade Runner. They work like the proverbial carrot and stick: the player must successfully complete one part of the game before the next "movie" sequence.
But function always takes precedence over such elegant touches: when the hero walks away again, the camera returns to its normal view, allowing the player to see more of the environment. You are asked to complete several missions that are loosely based on the plot of the film: infiltrate an underground complex and blow things up; reprogramming. Such plot sections usually occur at the end of a mission and they occur to the player.
Such plot twists, then, in the context of video games mean little more than excuses to move the action of the next mission elsewhere. There is one exception to the rule that video games are boring to watch, and it is exemplified by the inventive beauty of the Crash Bandicoot games. Then came the motion picture, and with dynamite in a tenth of a second shattered this prison world, so that now, amid its distant ruins and ruins, we set out calmly and adventurously.
NEVER-ENDING STORIES
Therefore, the Dreamcast version of the zombie game House of the Dead 2 is presented without the game's cybernetic sine qua non. Think of the cinematic concept of the “back story”. The backstory took place in the "past" and sets the conditions and establishes the concerns of the present. For example, the back story of Blade Runner is the invention, programming and rebellion of the replicants; the "present" story is Deckard's attempts to find and kill them.
In such a situation, the player/reader's own memory exploits the book's amnesia to the detriment of the storytelling experience. On the other hand, FMV cut-scenes that advance the plot in the more ostensibly "cinematic" game types are full of irreversible factors that are out of the player's control. So when e.g. ten percent of the game is complete, we throw in a pre-planned event that changes things in a certain way.
We've developed very smart AI for character behavior and life cycles, but sometimes the player doesn't see it,” says Masclef. Speech is one of the things that isn't generated on the fly [in this game]. Outcast requires the player to actually “talk” to other characters in the game; their responses vary from helpful to belligerent.
Nostalgia aside, the comparison is instructive because of the ways each game executes aspects of a story. However, in order for the game to be able to surprise and move the player with its storyline, it must still keep certain plot developments out of the player's control. Forster noted of the novel's primary appeal, you just want to know what happens next.
And a helpful character will at one point tell you to pull your controller out of the PlayStation and put it in the other socket, so that Psycho will no longer be able to predict your movements and kill you quickly.
SOLID GEOMETRY
But the most immediately noticeable thing about the game now is that its tanks and mountains are drawn only in light outline. 3D.”26 Where two planes of an object meet, a line is drawn, but the planes themselves have no surface, no solidity. Wireframe 3D caught on after Battlezone, and several arcade classics borrowed this technology as they made the leap from pervasive green to full color, most notably Star Wars and, in excelsis, Tempest, whose abstract fireworks are among the best shoot-'em- floated up. games ever invented.
The particular ascetic appeal of wireframe graphics (whose apotheosis coincided with the last days of vector displays, but continued after they were gone, as raster monitors now had enough pixel resolution to draw reasonably straight diagonals) enabled the player to focus purely on action in a challenging alien, unreal and as yet featureless arena. For many who grew up in these machines, the shiny geometries of these worlds became a new metaphor for the terrain of the imagination—it. 26 The first 3D frame-by-frame computer animation was created almost two decades ago by Edward Zajac, an engineer working at Bell Labs, as part of an experiment to see if an orbiting satellite could be stabilized so that one of its surfaces his to always face the Earth. .
