Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 196)

Trigger Happy
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live performance by slacker-country rocker Beck, Ken
Kutaragi, the engineering genius at Sony Japan who
designed the PlayStation and its successor, gave an
intriguing speech that concentrated on the advantages
of “new worlds” and “characters.” He was cheered to
the echo by the audience.
Kutaragi’s concentration on “character” rather than
storytelling was informative. Developments in Los
Angeles and elsewhere show a new pragmatism among
videogame designers: concentrating on what they alone
can provide, rather than chasing the fashionable dream
of interactive narrative, or uncritically seeking
convergence with the cinema. Instead, especially in
their concentration on character, videogames are
carefully strip-mining our conventional notions of
narrative and storytelling for what can be usefully
simulated in their own, utterly different, medium.
But how do videogames build the worlds that their
characters inhabit?