Trigger Happy
383
in purgatory and in heaven;
56
heretics are burned at the
stake, yet a bonfire is a means of celebration. Many
ancient cultures, such as the Zoroastrians or Assyrians,
worshiped fire as a god. Fire is the perfect
representative of the Romantic sublime: at once
beautiful and terrifying.
Videogames so far have not moved far beyond the
twin poles of attraction and repulsion—these reptilian
emotions, age-old reflexes buried deep in the brain. But
this too might change. In the future, for example,
videogames should be cleverly designed so as to make
you live with the consequences of your actions. Take
Goldeneye. The game’s mission structure is rather
artificially limited: if you accidentally (or deliberately)
allow your Russian hacker-babe sidekick Natalya to be
fatally shot, you are forced to play that mission again
and again until she emerges unscathed to join you in the
next operation. It would surely be much more
interesting, however, if the game just continued anyway
no matter what you had done, so that you had cause to
bewail your failure to protect her ever more strongly as
you struggled to reprogram the satellite yourself (this
would then be a difficult, but not
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56 For example, Milton’s “Heav’nly fires” in
Paradise Lost
xii.256;
Shakespeare’s “the fires of heaven” in
Coriolanus
I.iv.39.
