Trigger Happy
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replayability—in that you can always try again—
means to narrative. One problem is that great stories
depend for their effect on irreversibility
24
—and this is
because life, too, is irreversible. The pity and terror that
Aristotle says we feel as spectators to a tragedy are
clearly dependent on our apprehension of
circumstances that cannot be undone. If Oedipus, on
learning of his unintended parricide and philomatria,
were able to go back and undo his deeds in another
“play” of the story, there would be no tragedy, for he
would live happily ever after. If Raskolnikov were able
to undo his murders there would be nothing for
Dostoyevsky to write about. The argument is, of
course, equally true of farce. If Basil Fawlty had
surreptitiously banked his horse-racing winnings so that
Sibyl couldn’t commandeer them, he wouldn’t have
been driven to such hilariously doomed attempts to
keep the cash, and we wouldn’t laugh at him. But in a
videogame we can go back and change our actions if
they turn out to have undesirable consequences.
Secondly, some choices just make better stories
than others. If you are the hero in a videogame version
of
Oedipus Rex
and you think, “To hell with it, I don’t
_________________
24 This argument is suggested by Alain and FrÉdÉric Le Diberder in
L’Univers des jeux vidÉo.
