Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 153)

Trigger Happy
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round a corner unless the plot and the director take you
that way. But in Goldeneye you can explore areas from
every conceivable angle. Indeed, one aficionado of the
game, on seeing the film again, commented: “I thought,
‘I know this place—I know it better than the characters
do.’” In the movie theater, the world is projected at
you; in a videogame, you are projected into the world.
This virtue of videogames is so seductive that on
occasion it can override all other formal deficiencies.
Games like Myst and Riven were rightly derided by the
videogame cognoscenti for having tediously simplistic
gameplay properties, yet they sold in their millions
precisely because they are rather beautifully pure
exploration games. The player wanders around
gorgeously designed virtual environments with
fabulously detailed landscapes, water lapping against
jetties and mysterious dark buildings. J. C. Herz is
exactly right in labeling the appeal of these games as
that of “virtual tourism”: “Myst put you into a world
you might actually want to visit, if you only had the
money and time. . . . It was an escape destination.”
The fundamental point in comparing this aspect of
videogames with the movies is that, for instance,
Goldeneye the videogame offers a different and