Trigger Happy
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wasn’t written in as a possibility, so you can’t do it.
Remember, in a videogame you can only perform such
actions as the programmers have allowed for. This
recalls Heidegger’s notion of “enframing”—that
technology, far from being liberating, actually
circumscribes the possibilities of action. But a good
videogame will allow predetermined actions to be
combined in creative ways that certainly weren’t
deliberately predicted at the design stage. In chess, after
all, you don’t invent the forms of individual moves, you
choose creatively among them and string them together
in a strategy. This is the basic difference, if operating at
a far less complex level, that we touched on in the last
chapter, between beat-’emups, which provide many
hundreds of individual actions but little freedom of
combination, and something like Robotron, with two
basic actions— move and fire—and strategy aplenty.
Indeed, as Eugene Jarvis, programmer of Robotron and
Defender, told J. C. Herz about someone he watched
playing the latter game: “He was doing things I never
envisioned, never thought of, tactics I never dreamed
of.”
Meanwhile, back to smoking. Metal Gear Solid
stresses that it’s bad for you, but if Snake hasn’t found
some infrared goggles, he needs to smoke a cigarette in
