Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 93)

Trigger Happy
95
don’t want absolutely real situations in videogames. We
can get that at home.
Let’s stick together
Naturally, the player doesn’t mind this fakery, this
playing fast and loose with the laws of nature in the
name of fun. But a critical requirement is that the
game’s system remains consistent, that it is internally
coherent. Crucially, it is lack of coherence rather than
unrealism that ruins a gameplaying experience. This is
largely but not exclusively a phenomenon of more
modern videogames, whose increasing complexity in
terms of space, action and tasks clearly places a greater
strain on the designer’s duty to create a rock-solid
underlying structure.
Videogame incoherence has three types: it can
apply to causality, function or space. Incoherence of
causality, firstly, appears, for ex-ample, in a driving
game such as V-Rally (1997), where driving at full
speed into another car causes a slight slowing down,
but hitting a boulder at the road’s edge leads to a
spectacular vehicular somersault. Another example
crops up in Tomb Raider III, where a rocket-launcher
blows up one’s enemies into pleasingly gory, fleshy
chunks, but does no damage to a simple wooden door,