Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 92)

Trigger Happy
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knowledge of Pong-style (or, in the real world,
squashstyle) angular reflections, as bubbles may be
bounced off the side walls to achieve tactically
desirable formations that are impossible by aiming
directly.
Even so, the physical systems that games can model
so accurately are never totally “realistic.” Just as with
the operation of lasers, videogames deliberately load
the dice one way or another. If you put a Formula One
racing driver in front of an accurately modeled racing
game, Topping says, he would still crash the car,
because of the gulf between controllability and visual
feedback. And an ordinary player would find the game
merely boring and frustrating. So, Topping explains,
“You’re gonna fake the physics. Increase friction, make
the car smaller— you choose what you model
properly.”
The lesson is that even with whiz-bang math
programming, a videogame in important ways remains
defiantly unreal. Videogames’ somewhat paradoxical
fate is the ever more accurate modeling of things that
don’t, and couldn’t, exist: a car that grips the road like
Superglue, which bounces uncrumpled off roadside
barriers; a massive spacecraft with the maneuverability
of a bumblebee; a human being who can survive, bones
intact, a three-hundred-foot fall into water. We