Trigger Happy
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bodystockinged martial arts cyborg called Psycho
Mantis, comments sarcastically on the other
videogames you play (by reading the memory card in
your console, which contains data saved from other
games). And a helpful character will tell you at one
point to pull your controller out of the PlayStation and
put it in the other socket, so that Psycho will no longer
be able to predict your movements and kill you quickly.
Such clever devices ensure that the player is a happy
slave: though he has no freedom to change the story, he
has a lot of freedom in the gameplay itself, where many
different creative solutions can be found to the game’s
problems. The unique pleasure of a videogame, after
all, the one that no other medium can offer, is always
going to be what happens
between
the episodes of the
story.
The videogame industry knows just how successful
this approach can be—and, increasingly, professional
scriptwriters are being hired to work on high-budget
productions for exactly these reasons. In the future,
videogames will no doubt have much better stories, but
it seems unlikely that we will be given much more
freedom to change them than we already have in games
like Perfect Dark, Zelda 64 or Metal Gear Solid. And
above all, there will still need to be interesting
