Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 162)

Trigger Happy
164
non, the lightgun. And as I wander the halls speaking to
designers showing off their latest games, there is a
marked tendency for them to make excuses. Yes, they
say, this is a cutting-edge first-person shooter where
you can put bullets through people’s heads and blast
their limbs off individually in gushes of beautifully
animated blood, but that’s not the point. You see, it’s
basically a really good story.
Storytelling is the second oldest profession. Epic
poetry, drama, the novel and the cinema have all
become expert in their different ways at the craft of
telling a story. Why should videogames, then, be any
different? Modern videogames have plots; they use
voice actors for different “characters”; there is usually a
main protagonist who must accomplish specific tasks;
the games boast self-contained, carefully scripted
“movies” in them.
So far, so once-upon-a-time. But as we’ve seen,
videogames have an important quality that militates
against easy conjunctions with other media such as
film. That quality is interactivity. Of course, in one
sense books themselves have always been highly
interactive, depending on the reader’s imagination to
flesh out their worlds in color and detail, but, unlike a