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Trigger Happy
156
incommensurable sort of pleasure to that of Goldeneye
the film. For the moment it is hard to see how
videogames and movies could ever converge without
losing the essential virtues of both. The cinema—
especially good action cinema, which, as we have seen,
has the closest links with videogames—is first and
foremost a ride, like a fairground rollercoaster, part of
whose pleasure is exactly that you are not steering, and
you cannot decide to slow down. A videogame, on the
other hand, is an activity. Watching someone else with
a videogame, to non-players, is terribly boring. And
even watching the most “cinematic” of videogames is
still like watching a really bad, low-resolution film. A
videogame is there to be played.
There is one exception to the rule that videogames
are boring to watch, and it is exemplified by the
inventive beauty of the Crash Bandicoot games. Here it
is apparent that, for all the talk of war between
videogames and movies, the former have already won a
stunning victory over one genre of film: the animated
cartoon. The golden age of Looney Tunes was always a
fertile ground from which videogames could reap
certain mechanical ideas: the comedy of Mario and