Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 278)

Trigger Happy
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some pretense of monetary exchange—you might shoot
enough ducks and win a cuddly toy—Time Crisis
finishes the job begun by Pachinko, and offers nothing
but purely sensual and psychological rewards for your
cash. Another lightgun game, Point Blank, explicitly
acknowledges this heritage by including a number of
fairground-style shooting ranges to play at.
Fairground games in general, which are tests of
skill packaged in a fizzingly son et lumiÈre
environment, are obviously another set of precursors to
modern videogames. So, too, are fairground rides, in a
different way, for they offer a very convincing illusion
of danger: on a rollercoaster, you feel you must be
plummeting to your death, but you know it is safe.
Shigeru Miyamoto has said he is constantly playing on
his audience’s “desire to realize something exhilarating
but impossible in real life.”
A good example of this is Gran Turismo, which we
touched on at the end of the last chapter. Now, not only
will we rarely have the chance to race a Dodge Viper
around Tokyo at two hundred miles an hour, but it
would be extremely dangerous to do so. Doing the
same thing in a videogame, however (practicing the
same form) ensures that if we crash, we do not die or
get burned to death, but only lose the race and live to