Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 303)

Trigger Happy
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“stealth” suit, so that you can have enormous fun
playing through the environments as an invisible,
death-dealing hero. Beat-’em-ups such as Tekken 3 or
Soul Calibur, meanwhile, cleverly spread rewards
between their two-player modes (two humans fighting
each other’s digital surrogates—the genre’s raison
d’Être)—and their solo modes (player versus machine),
in that success in the latter unlocks new characters that
can be pitted against each other in the social context.
Videogames in this sense are meta-games: the
manipulation and achievement of such visual, dynamic
and cybernetic rewards is another, higher-level game in
itself. A well-designed videogame, such as Zelda 64,
can approach the condition of a work of art simply by
virtue of the way such rich, protean transformations in
the game’s very structure are linked together for the
gameplayer’s pleasure. The ways in which you can see
more stuff and do more stuff are a joy, a reward in
themselves. Perhaps they mirror the process of the rich
and speedy acquisition of skills and experiences that we
all went through as small children.
This idea suggests another course of action as we
plunge deeper into the videogame metropolis. Along
the way, we have measured the city’s space, heard its
stories and read its history. We have seen how we