Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 97)

Trigger Happy
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away in one of several chests—and, risibly, an object
put in one chest may be retrieved from another chest
three floors higher up in the building.
By these standards, Tomb Raider III and Resident
Evil are arguably inferior to Space Invaders or Pong,
both of which exhibit total consistency in the laws of
the imaginary world. As Chris Crawford says in The
Art of Computer Game Design, special-case rules
(which roughly map on to our causal, functional and
spatial incoherences) are bad: “In the perfect game
design, each rule is applied universally.” This is easy to
verify if you consider the situation in other types of
game—chess, for instance: Garry Kasparov would be
profoundly, glaringly unimpressed if his opponent
sought to stave off defeat by pronouncing that, actually,
at this particular juncture, the black queen was not
allowed to move diagonally.
Tomb Raider III also illustrates perfectly another
potential danger of trying to increase “realism” in a
game—in this case by adding extra ranges of
movement to a human character. Because the hero of
Manic Miner lives in such a resolutely bizarre world,
where flying electrified lavatories are the least of his
worries, we do not worry that our character is able only
to walk and to jump. But in the far more