Trigger Happy
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that development, for by the eighteenth century in
painting the classical ideal of beauty based on some
cosmic mathematical order was already being
challenged, and the shortcomings of perspective were
already being identified. Videogame scenery, being an
artifact of computers, is clearly still in thrall to the god
of mathematics. Of the myriad post-perspectival ways
of seeing such as impressionism or cubism, there is as
yet no sign in the apprentice draughtsmanship of
videogames.
One can imagine, for instance, a far more
ambitious game along the lines of Tomb Raider, in
which adventures in different times and places would
be rendered in the appropriate style. Tomb raiding
among the freshly built pyramids would draw the
world in the statuesquely side-on, information-stuffed
mode of ancient Egyptian art; Lara’s exploits in early
twentieth-century Paris would present objects as
fabulous collages of their shapes apprehended under
different viewing angles; Machiavellian derring-do at
the court of the Medicis would most likely occur in
doomy chiaroscuro, with something disturbingly
offkey about the relationship between foreground and
background; and if Lara were shrunk to subatomic
size, she could journey among the full eleven
