Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 176)

Trigger Happy
178
care why my city is cursed, I’m off to the hills with
Jocasta to live out my days in luxury,” you’re not going
to get much of a story out of the game.
Some kinds of irreversibility, indeed, are actually
anathema to good videogame design. A good
exploration game, for example, should never let the
player get irreversibly “stuck” in a space from which
there is no escape (because, for example, he or she
hasn’t collected the right key yet), forcing her to switch
off completely and reload. Although this is a feasible
real-life situation for behatted and whipped
adventurers, it is merely frustrating and boring in a
videogame. The Tomb Raider games are admirable
examples in this respect, as the level designers have
always been careful to provide a way back to the more
open environment: when the player gets stuck, she can
be confident that there must be some way out that
hasn’t been spotted yet.
The fact that the videogame form is predicated
strongly on such types of reversibility is one
explanation, then, why the action tells no very
compelling synchronic story. On the other hand, the
FMV cut-scenes that move the plot along in the more
ostensibly “cinematic” types of game are full of
irreversible factors that are out of the player’s