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Trigger Happy
367
The final frontier
This is a particular kind of utopianist terraforming,
where a person’s capabilities are never insufficient. But
what about the purely visual imagination of videogame
worlds? Whereas the Battlezone universe was in its day
shockingly new, today’s environments are much more
instantly recognizable. They draw on only a few basic
templates. There is the blasted, neonlit Blade Runner
cityscape; the dank metal corridors with exposed
piping, steam vents and unpredictable lighting are
straight from Alien; steel catwalks and pools of orange
molten metal ring that Terminator bell. Cute,
unthreatening worlds in primary colors come straight
from animated cartoons—hardly surprising, then, that
there is an exodus of talent from traditional animation
into the videogame industry.
There is a certain amount of interbreeding among
these types, of course. Just as we saw earlier that many
games opt for interfaces of a deliberately
technonostalgic design, so the very environments in
games like Quake III, Turok: Rage Wars, Tomb Raider
III or Unreal mix hi-tech steel and electric light with
architecture of a deliberately archaic grandeur: vaulted
stone archways and sweeping staircases. In this way