Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 387)

Trigger Happy
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can never compete. If architecture is frozen music, then
a videogame is liquid architecture. Indeed, the United
Nations has funded the development of a “virtual tour”
of Notre Dame cathedral, which uses the engine (the
computer code which draws 3D environments) from the
first-person shooter videogame Unreal. And new
technology pushes this virtue further: the PlayStation2
game Dark Cloud (2000) actually allows the player to
build his or her own world, and then to explore it by
walking among the constructions. This revolutionary
type of videogame certainly provokes and feeds the
imagination.
Meanwhile, of course, we may still wonder at the
spaces designed by others. Personally, I have found
some of the breathtaking environments in Tomb
Raider’s worlds—particularly in the second game,
featuring the huge rusted ship sunk into a vaulted
cavern at the bottom of the sea—to be moving in the
aesthetic as well as dynamic sense. (Notice, by the way,
that this sort of pleasure also depends on the game
enjoying a properly designed tempo—you can only
look around and smell the flowers, as it were, when
there is no immediate threat in the game.)
Such videogames at their best build awe-inspiring
spaces from immaterial light. They are cathedrals of