Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 334)

Trigger Happy
336
controlled car. When you are first given this gadget,
you just play with it, as you would with a real one. The
form is identical. Herein lies one secret of the
videogame’s enormous potential: it is the universal toy.
(Indeed, 1999’s RC Stunt Copter is a videogame
simulation of playing with a real radio-controlled
helicopter, while No ClichÉ’s Toy Commander lets you
play with something like fifty different types—toy
planes, tanks, race cars and so on—spread over an
imaginary house.)
But wait a minute: Ape Escape’s radio-controlled
car, after all, doesn’t really exist. It is racing round a
virtual world, and an anime-styled orange-haired
punkboy is holding the car’s controller box on screen.
That’s alienation without the pain. In fact, the tangible
connection between the controls in your physical hands
and the action of the little toy on screen is a clever
semiotic trick that fools you into ever-increasing
absorption into the cartoon world. A similar trick is
worked by the videogame paradigm of the sniper rifle,
introduced by MDK (1997), perfected by Goldeneye
(1997) and then cropping up everywhere—for example
in Metal Gear Solid (1999) and Perfect Dark (2000).
This gadget zooms in on an area and lets you view it in
close-up, usually for the purpose of delivering