Trigger Happy
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glorious detail and color, it cast the player as a
cybernetic infiltrator in a
Neuromancer
-style matrix of
coruscating firewalls, defense programs and virus
detectors. Success by the player effected greater
polyphonic sophistication in the real-time synthesized
soundtrack, and at the same time caused the ghostly
environment gradually to fill in its polygons and
become a solid world. The player was in this sense
encouraged to replay the aesthetic history of 3D
videogames in real-time, in a riotous blaze of semiotic
play.
With the advent of the next generation of hardware,
videogame designers have, in principle at least, a
broader canvas to work on. But they could easily
continue to paint the same old compromised clichÉs in
prettier colors — and, as in any cultural form, most of
them probably will. The initial winter 2001 line-up of
games for Microsoft’s Xbox and Nintendo’s
GameCube, for example, was dominated by the same
old kinds of game — snowboarding, martial-arts
fighting, first-person shooters — just with prettier
graphics. Even so, there were shards of hope among the
predictable cash-ins, with the lovingly designed if
shallow ghostbusting game Luigi’s Mansion, and
