Trigger Happy
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make sure you are not going to tread in some fatal ooze,
break a trip wire or fall down a satirical pit.
While videogames are still played out on flat
television screens or monitors, therefore, and while the
interface remains so doggedly mechanical, a critical
level of realism will never be achieved, and the
experience of playing Quake and its siblings will
always be more like remote-controlling a robot with
tunnel vision rather than being there yourself. Of
course, remote-controlling a robot (or a dune buggy, or
an orange marsupial) can be fun and interesting in
itself, but this is a large obstacle to greater immersion
of the player in the virtual world. Only coin-op arcade
games such as Sega’s fabulous Ferrari 335 Challenge
(1999) have the resources to address this problem by
using three large screens, with the two outside ones
angled towards the player, thus giving an excellent
illusion of wide-angle vision.
The third way
One creative and novel way, however, in which
videogames have expanded the three-dimensional
horizons and given the player a feeling of having more
“room” to move around, is with the so-called
“thirdperson” 3D style. Most famously exemplified by the
