Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 99)

Trigger Happy
101
on the one hand—for instance, the laser behavior
considered earlier, or Manic Miner’s winged cisterns—
and inconsistencies in the fantastical system—such as
Lara’s rocket-launcher or Resident Evil’s item boxes—
on the other.
Life in plastic
Of Sweeney’s
16
three certainties of life,
videogames have so far largely eschewed birth and
copulation. But, as if in sardonic compensation,
they are triply teeming with death. And their
particular reinvention of death is but one of a
whole lexicon of happily irrealist principles that
videogames have amassed over their history.
Death in a videogame is multimodal: it means one
thing for your enemies, another thing for certain
other types of enemies, yet another for you. Shoot
a space invader and he is gone for ever. Kill a
dungeon skeleton in Zelda 64 and it is dust—but if
you leave and then reenter the room, it has
horribly regenerated, there to be fought all over
again. But what does death mean for you, the
player? If the aliens’ rain of bombs becomes
overwhelming and one hits your ship, blowing it
to pixelated smithereens, it is certainly bad news.
But wait—suddenly a gleaming new ship
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16 Protagonist of T. S. Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes, that is.