Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 328)

Trigger Happy
330
see the road in snapshots every twenty yards, you
cannot drive very accurately.
However powerful a computer processor, its
resources will always be finite, so there will always be
a trade-off between temporal resolution and graphical
resolution. You can have very richly defined pictures
that move jerkily, or slightly less detailed ones that
move smoothly. Quake III: Arena, for example, is a
beautiful example of how very high temporal resolution
really sucks the player in. So frame rate should never
be sacrificed to visual detail.
Say something else
Modern videogames adore the icon. They draw ever
more beautifully detailed worlds and characters. But
they are not necessarily any less semiotically complex
than Pac-Man, once you get behind the pictures. Nearly
all signs are mixtures of the semiotic modes. In an
iconic game such as Tomb Raider, it becomes clear that
game objects such as doors and keys, while being good
three-dimensional “pictures” of their referents, actually
operate mostly as symbols. For they are not granted
“realistic” physical attributes. As noted earlier in the
book, a wooden door may not be blown up by a rocket-
launcher, and a key may not be filed down to fit