Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 330)

Trigger Happy
332
The virtue of Tomb Raider is that, although the
variety of symbolic interaction that it offers to the
player—manipulating keys, doors and switches—is
quite rudimentary and uninteresting, the way the player
is required to interact with such symbols in the three
dimensions of space is what makes the game a
pleasurable challenge. Lara is a very nicely designed
videogame character, as we have seen, because of the
rich range of physical animations—rolling,
somersaulting, running, climbing—she is capable of,
and these acrobatic moves must be strung together with
exquisite tactical timing to move her around the
environments in which she operates.
But a game such as Zelda 64, historically a
contemporary of Tomb Raider III, is even more
entertaining, because it combines requirements of
spatial navigation and tactical timing with a far greater
semiotic richness, which consists in the much wider
variety of sign combinations and the cognitive
challenges they pose to the player. In the Forest Temple
of Zelda 64, for example, a good deal of complex fun is
had with the nature of an icon itself.
The environment is a crumbling old country house,
full of dark nooks and shadows. Gilt-edged paintings of
ghosts hang on the walls. The paintings are icons