Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 222)

Trigger Happy
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geometric figurings for such common subjects as stags
and birds, and argued that the fact that all animals are
reducible to simple Euclidean forms is attributable to
divine Providence. The geometrical method revealed to
the artists a deep, Timaean truth about the nature of the
universe: as Ernst Gombrich describes it, “The regular
schema which we call an abstraction was therefore
‘found’ by the artist in nature. It belongs to the laws of
its being.”
On the one hand, then, polygonal videogames are
using a very old tradition of illusionistic construction;
on the other hand, they have revolutionized it. Because
these polygons move. Every videogame, you see,
constructs not only a space but a space-time. All 3D
games are in this sense four-dimensional. And now the
polygons become animated—literally, given a soul. A
machine soul. Virtua Fighter 2 looks as though the
figures in SchÖn’s etching have suddenly come to life,
participating in an epic ballet of crunching tibia. The
pious geometrical idealism of the ancients has been lost
along the way, replaced by the banally unphilosophical
late twentieth-century idealism of the perfect body:
fighting men with horrifically overdeveloped trapezoid
muscles; fighting women with long legs, wasp waists
and unfeasibly pert breasts.