Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 341)

Trigger Happy
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that provide a map of the current environment. In Zelda
64, the player must find a map: it is an object in the
gameworld that functions as a power-up. Once
acquired, it can be viewed to help you find your way to
new areas: it is graphically designed so as to look like a
real parchment map (it’s an icon); it “points to” the
salient structural features of the environment (it’s an
index); and it is marked with symbols that are agreed to
stand for various crucial features: a treasure chest, the
monster’s lair. But here the player must switch between
the map “screen” and the gameworld. By contrast, the
dinosaur-hunting first-person shooter Turok 2
intelligently enables the level map to be overlaid on to
the iconically constructed environment, as if it were a
transparency; thus, the player is reading all possible
modes of sign at once.
Videogames have become so clever at displaying
information in imaginative yet instantly intuitive ways
that they have started to exhibit a kind of aesthetic
techno-nostalgia. They are so far ahead of the race,
compared to the dull and workmanlike interfaces of
“serious” software or most Internet pages, that they can
fool around and have a bit of visual fun. This is most
obvious in the panoply of support screens— option
screens to set the player’s preferences, to