Trigger Happy
368
they aim for an effect of vertiginous scale such as that
created so masterfully by Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s
etchings of nightmare dungeons in his
Carceri
d’invenzione
(see fig. 21), which had an enormous
influence on the aesthetics of Romanticism and, later,
Surrealism.
In this way, such videogames are part of a long
tradition of imaginary architecture. But they are still
some way behind in inventiveness, because part of
Piranesi’s visualized nightmare is that the fabric of
space itself is warped: the perspective is deliberately
ambiguous, worryingly off-key. As Ernst Gombrich
asks in
Art and Illusion
: “The rope hanging from the
pulley—where does it lead? How is the drawbridge tied
up? What is the angle of the bannister near the lower
edge?” The artist used his illusionistic craft to create a
gnawing sense of unease in the viewer. In videogames
so far, on the other hand, everything is fanatically,
obsessively “true” in three dimensions. There is no
room for interesting fuzziness or spatial ambiguity.
The spatial aesthetics of videogames are still stuck in
the conservative line of the eighteenth century, because
geometrically, it seems, truth is easier than interesting
fiction. Yet why should a game not let the player wander
around Piranesi’s own dungeons? Of course,
