Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 202)

Trigger Happy
204
Modern videogames themselves understand the loss
and even grieve it, in witty ways: Metal Gear Solid, for
instance, provides the player with a delicious “VR
Training Mode,” in which strategies for the game
proper are practiced in a wireframe world, and moving
among these glowing green rectilinear constructions
feels, in a funny way, like a sort of homecoming.
The art of the new
From Space Invaders to the creation of space itself.
For many years the Holy Grail of videogame graphics
engineers was a system of true three-dimensional
action, a “virtual” space that the player could inhabit.
The problem of representing three dimensions on a
flat plane (in this case, the television screen) had
already been worried about by painters for thousands of
years. The earliest attempts at perspective that we know
of are found in scenery painting for the Dionysian
theater at Athens in the fifth century
B
.
C
. (the Greeks
called it skenographia), and foreshortening and shading
developed with increasing sophistication up to and
through the medieval period. But an exact theory of
perspective in painting was not codified until circa
1420, when Filippo Brunelleschi systematized a