Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy User Manual
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Trigger Happy
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gonna really work.” Well, at that point, it really didn’t make
any difference. It was only when they really started to
develop Lara—she was animated and her hair was moving—
it was like, “Wow, you could actually quite relate to this!”
One apotheosis of this sort of emotional manipulation is
in the classic puzzle game Lemmings, in which you
must guide hundreds of stupid, suicidal little furry
creatures home, reacting quickly to stop them falling
off high ledges or being sliced in two by imaginatively
sadistic machines. The lemmings are only about fifteen
pixels high, but the way their hair is bouncily animated
and their naive faith in a safe world mean you’ve got to
save them.
This protectiveness functions the same way whether
the character is abstract and cartoony or humanlike and
filmic. And of course we must still insist that the latter
type of videogame character is not supposed to be
“realistic” any more than a deformed anime character
is. Part of the very attraction is a certain glossy
blankness—what Smith enthuses over as “that
computer look.” As videogame graphics become ever
more sophisticated, the designers of the next generation
of Tomb Raider games on PlayStation2 will