Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 379)

Trigger Happy
381
organically related to and coherent with the rest of the
virtual world.
One good example of this, again, is in the Resident
Evil games: the quite arbitrary restriction on inventory
that we saw in Chapter 3. How much stuff you can
carry is illogically determined—a herb takes up as
much space as a shotgun—and you can only drop items
in special chests. This rule results in incredibly tedious
item-swapping and back-tracking between item
boxes—a task of absolutely no symbolic interest. It’s
like filing, or stacking supermarket shelves. Such unfair
challenges are purely the result of laziness and lack of
imagination: it’s a very easy way to make the game
harder. Similarly, many levels in Tomb Raider II were
made arbitrarily more difficult simply by dropping in
more guys with machine guns to take a pop at Lara.
Making the game harder by thinking up new and
interesting gameplay challenges is clearly a more
demanding job, but it’s going to be far more rewarding
to the player.
A more widespread example is the knotty issue of
saving games. Most modern videogames that are not
predicated upon pure adrenaline-fueled action require a
total of between twenty and sixty hours’ play to be
completed. Sensibly, the player is not expected to do