Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 236)

Trigger Happy
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dimensions that we are currently assured constitute
reality.
There is no question that such a game could be
built; it is a question of whether there exists the vision
to build it—and, of course, whether anyone would
want to play it. Such a mixture of styles in our
hypothetical game, of course, would—and this is the
second thing we have learned—necessitate a mixture
of different sorts of gameplay. The Egyptian level
might be a sophisticated melding of role-playing with
platform genres, whereas the cubist level would imply
more of an abstract puzzle game. And this is one of the
main ways in which videogame representation differs
from that in painting. No artist would now deliberately
draw in the inaccurate perspective of the thirteenth
century, a mode of representation that has really been
superseded and replaced by a correct mode of
endeavor. But as we have seen, videogames may still
use isometric perspective, or wireframe 3D, or flat
scrolling, depending on the type of gameplay
experience they wish to offer. In this way, videogames
are fortunate in that their entire artistic history in terms
of spatial representation is, as yet, still available in the
present. Two-dimensional videogames live on, for