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Trigger Happy
210
Videogames had, with such forms as Defender’s,
somehow acquired a new dimension of action. It is
certainly not the same space as in the old, static,
onescreen games. Yet nor is it three-dimensional, for
the player cannot fly “into” or “out of” the screen. The
game demands, moreover, that the player watch two
representations of the same space: one on the main
playing area, and one on Defender’s innovatively
complex radar, a small subscreen that shows a wider
section of the game universe at any one time so that
attacks can be planned and threatened humans rescued.
The arrangement of space on the primary screen is
rather as if we found ourselves in the center of a large
circular strip, onto which is projected the battle action;
when we scroll sideways, we are metaphorically
turning our heads to investigate another area of the
scene.
This spatial arrangement is indeed the perfect,
unforeseeable fusion of two pre-cinema visual
technologies: the Cyclorama of the 1840s, in which the
viewer stands inside a circular drum painted with a
continuous image; and the Kinematoscope, patented by
Coleman Sellers in 1861, in which a series of
photographs arranged around the inside of a revolving
drum presents the illusion of movement to an observer