Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 190)

Trigger Happy
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seen, it tries to be like a film, making use of certain
horror-movie camera angles and so on. And its most
evocative language is the incoherent moaning of
zombies.
The play’s the thing
So what might the future hold? It is clear, for one thing,
that mainstream videogames will never go back to the
keyboard. (Games played on personal computers rather
than on keyboard-free consoles such as the PlayStation
account for only about 10 percent of the total sold
worldwide.) The text adventure, therefore, is dead as a
dodo. But future games will probably start to
incorporate accurate voice recognition and eventually,
no doubt, sophisticated language parsing, so that you
can actually “talk” to other characters in the videogame
world. Richard Darling agrees. “And then with AI
systems as we are now, that could be a huge leap in
excitement levels, where you could actually
communicate with AI people in a way that you believed
to be pretty close to realistic.”
Sega’s beautiful and fascinating oddity Seaman
(2000), for the Dreamcast system, is an admirable first
step to reclaiming this higher path for videogames.
Described as a “voice recognition pet,” it requires the