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Trigger Happy
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The fun of Turok: Dinosaur Hunter was thus
compromised by passages that required the player to
make precise jumps, platform-style—yet in a game
where you can’t see your own feet, such jumps are
impossible to judge properly. Equally, however, there
are problems in the other direction: third-person games
present the rather chancy challenge of aiming weapons
in three-dimensional space without giving the player
true line-of-sight. Tomb Raider relies on an alienating
auto-aiming system, where you just stand there hoping
to hit the enemy, while Zelda 64 enables you perhaps
too easily to “lock on” to a monster, and swings the
camera right behind the player’s character. These
examples confirm that gameplay requirements must
always take account of the particular virtues and
limitations of the chosen spatial style and
representation.
The example of precision-jumping in Turok
partakes of another formal phenomenon that needs to
be seriously questioned: unfair challenge. By this I
mean either a procedure that, as in Turok, is
maddeningly hard to perform simply because the
player is not given enough (visual and spatial)
information, or more generally a difficulty that is not