Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 114)

Trigger Happy
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and right up to a maximum speed, and when you jumped, the
amount of time you held the button down for determined how
high you jumped. Therefore there was an awful lot of skill in
running along over a hole, jumping up on to a platform and
landing on it without falling off the other side. It was actually
an extremely skillful thing to do.
What about total immersion? Virtual reality systems
have been around for many years and no doubt will
soon be affordable and efficient. Some combination of
headset (such as Sony’s Glasstron monitors),
motionsensitive data gloves and so on will enable the
player to become totally immersed in a game, just as
the science fiction movies have been telling us for
decades. Will this, then, become the dominant means
of videogame control? Perhaps; but if so, the spirit of
Heidegger will rise again to warn that such cybernetic
hegemony will necessarily narrow the field of
possibilities. Immersive VR will be fine for
exploration games, driving games, 3D space shoot-
’em-ups and so on. But what happens to the
pleasurable unreality of human-body physics? How
will such a system enable the player to somersault like
Lara Croft, to climb sheer walls, to swim a hundred
feet down in icy Arctic rivers or to finish off a brutal