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Trigger Happy
345
no one wants to come home, turn on a game and feel
like they’re still working at the office PC.
50
But the
particular aesthetic phenomenon of techno-nostalgia is
also working a very clever, stealthy trick. Just as
Hamlet’s deliberately archaic play-within-a-play
enhances the audience’s suspension of disbelief, in that
the surrounding onstage action looks by comparison far
more “real,” so the blatantly archaic technological
design in some parts of the videogame make the
cutting-edge visuals in the thick of the action seem
even more novel and exciting.
Drawing you in
Modern videogames, as we have seen, glory in their
graphic richness: spacecraft with scarred hulls, fighters
with stubble, trees with individually swaying branches.
But this does not necessarily reduce the player’s
involvement in the game. What spoils “identification”
is simply a lack of symbolic richness to suck you in. If
a game with a beautiful graphic iconic construction also
enjoys symbolic richness—as in Zelda 64—it is a
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50 This is also the reason that, videogame journalists and hardcore system
fetishists aside, PC-based videogames are far less popular than
consolebased ones—quite apart from the fact that the latter hardware is five
times cheaper.