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Trigger Happy
117
martial arts combination of smacks and punches by
floating six feet into the air and delivering a
roundhouse kick to the head?
Counterintuitively, it seems for the moment that the
perfect videogame “feel” requires the ever-increasing
imaginative and physical involvement of the player to
stop somewhere short of full bodily immersion. After
all, a sense of pleasurable control implies some
modicum of separation: you are apart from what you
are controlling. You don’t actually want to be there,
performing the dynamically exaggerated and physically
perilous moves yourself; it would be exhausting and
painful. Remember, you don’t want boring, invisible
lasers; you don’t want a Formula One car that takes
years of training to drive; and you don’t want to die
after taking just one bullet. You don’t want it to be too
real.
The purpose of a videogame, then, is never to
simulate real life, but to offer the gift of play. In a
videogame, we are citizens of an invisible city where
there is no danger, only challenge. And our videogame
metropolis, like any city, is teeming and multifaceted.
We have already sketched out a rough map of its
geography. Later in this book we shall look at its
architecture, dig below its tarmac to the pipes and