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Trigger Happy
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Even games that do not try to build a recognizable,
real-world place are still rather repetitively reliant on
the same hoary old visual references. Littered around
Core’s studios during the development of Tomb Raider:
The Last Revelation, for instance, are photographic and
illustrative source books such as An Introduction to
Egyptology, from which the artists are liberally stealing
and fusing visual ideas both for the architecture of the
tombs and for Lara’s assailants, such as a huge golden
dog. The resulting environments are at once familiar
and strange (see fig. 22). There is a great deal of visual
and spatial invention in this game, but it consists of
clever combination, not of imagining a world anew
from the ground up.
Videogames should try more often to break free of
such recognizable templates, the clichÉs of the torchlit
stone tomb, the fairy dungeon, the biomechanoid
spaceship interior, the sunny meadow, the Dunederived
hi-tech desert metropolis. The abstract, voidal spaces of
early videogames were in some senses far more
interesting than the third-hand patchwork worlds of the
majority of current exploration games. But there,
modernist abstraction was a happy by-product, born of
technological necessity. As a free choice, it’s obviously
much harder to make. Some of the most