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Trigger Happy
207
environment had no characteristics of its own: it was
not terrain, but simply a function of the relations
between objects (such as the perilous gravitational field
surrounding the sun in Spacewar) or a means by which
time could pass while one object traveled across the
screen (the ball in Pong), so that everything did not
happen simultaneously.
This was a mode of space purer than any that exists
in the real universe. Its laws produced no frictional
resistance, and it offered no decorative matter to
distract from the task in hand. It was a pure dream of
unhindered movement and harmonious action. More
modern games have diluted this primal passion in a
mania of hyper-representation. Certainly it is clear that
as soon as more advanced graphic systems become
available in the history of videogames, it is space that
gets filled up, terraformed, converted into a game
object itself. Perhaps in the end there was something
disturbing about the alien vacuum.
In the early flat-plane games, the boundaries of the
TV screen limited the play arena to a fixed, small size,
and thus limited the type of action available to game
designers. (Just as in real life, a game of football
requires more space than a game of tennis.) The screen
was a prison. But it didn’t take long before ways were