Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 367)

Trigger Happy
369
such skewed spaces would initially be very confusing
to the gameplayer, but by building in a sufficient degree
of intuitive predictability in other aspects—the way,
say, that inertia or gravity works—the game could still
present an enjoyable challenge without becoming
thoroughly alienating. It would anyway be impossible
to construct a world that was thoroughly different in
every way from the real one.
55
Or why should a videogame not let us move
through Escherian space, with its baffling perspectival
contradictions? Escher’s prints depend for their power
on a single point of view, deliberately chosen to
maximize the illusion. With a moving point of view
such as a videogame provides, designers would need to
write very clever algorithms to adjust the illusion
according to every movement of the player so that the
house of cards did not fall.
This wouldn’t be easy. But designers ought to have
the courage to play with the very fabric of their
unreality, to create ever newer kinds of space rather
than settling permanently on scientific perspective—
itself, as we have seen, a tissue of illusionistic
distortions.
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55 “It is obvious that an imagined world, however different it may be from
the real one, must have something—a form—in common with it.”
Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.