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Trigger Happy

VIDEOGAMES AND THE

ENTERTAINMENT REVOLUTION

by

Steven Poole

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS............................................ 8

1 RESISTANCE IS FUTILE ......................................10

Our virtual history....................................................10

Pixel generation .......................................................13

Meme machines .......................................................18

The shock of the new ...............................................28

2 THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES ....................................35

Beginnings ...............................................................35

Art types...................................................................45

Happiness is a warm gun .........................................46

In my mind and in my car ........................................51

Might as well jump ..................................................56

Sometimes you kick.................................................61

Heaven in here .........................................................66

Two tribes ................................................................69

Running up that hill .................................................72

It’s a kind of magic ..................................................75

We can work it out...................................................79

Family fortunes ........................................................82

3 UNREAL CITIES ....................................................85

Let’s get physical .....................................................85

Let’s stick together...................................................95

Life in plastic .........................................................101

Out of control.........................................................109

4 ELECTRIC SHEEP ...............................................119

The gift of sound and vision ..................................122

CinÉ qua non? ........................................................130

Camera obscura......................................................142

You’ve been framed...............................................153

5 NEVER-ENDING STORIES.................................161

A tale of two cities .................................................161

Back to the future...................................................166

How many roads must a man walk down . . . ........172

Erase and rewind....................................................176

Cracked actors........................................................181

Talking it over........................................................187

The play’s the thing ...............................................192

Tie me up, tie me down..........................................195

6 SOLID GEOMETRY.............................................199

Vector class............................................................199

The art of the new ..................................................204

Pushing the boundaries ..........................................206

Points of view ........................................................213

Being there.............................................................217

The user illusion.....................................................226

The third way .........................................................233

Brave new worlds ..................................................236

7 FALSE IDOLS.......................................................240

Dress code..............................................................240

Virtual megalocephaly ...........................................244

Gender genres ........................................................250

Character building..................................................258

Some say life’s the thing . . ...................................267

8 THE PLAYER OF GAMES ..................................271

Tiny silver balls......................................................271

Power tools ............................................................276

Veni, vidi, lusi........................................................282

Get into the groove.................................................291

You win again........................................................298

9 SIGNS OF LIFE.....................................................307

I am what I eat........................................................308

Deep in conversation..............................................317

Time, gentlemen, please.........................................322

Say something else.................................................330

Information overlord..............................................339

Drawing you in ......................................................345

10 THE PROMETHEUS ENGINE...........................351

God’s gift ...............................................................351

Burn this.................................................................354

Bad company .........................................................356

Genesis...................................................................364

The final frontier ....................................................367

In an ideal world ....................................................371

Virtual justice.........................................................378

The moral maze......................................................382

Ashes to ashes........................................................388

AFTERWORD..........................................................398

BIBLIOGRAPHY .....................................................411

INDEX ......................................................................418

ABOUT THE AUTHOR...........................................430

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Eat pixels, sucker: this book grew out of an orphaned
article to which Stuart Jeffries kindly gave a home. I
am grateful to everyone who agreed to be interviewed:
Paul Topping, Richard Darling, Jeremy Smith, Olivier
Masclef, Nolan Bushnell, Terry Pratchett and Sam
Houser.

David Palfrey saved crucial passages of the
manuscript from themselves. Jason Thompson
phlegmatically suffered innumerable defeats at Tekken
3 and Gran Turismo, but turned the tables in Bushido
Blade. He and Kate Barker also made constructive
comments on the text.

Dr. Mark Griffiths and Maugan Lloyd generously
provided psychology material, Gavin Rees was a most
hospitable guide to Tokyo, and I enjoyed useful
conversations with Caspar Field, Mike Goldsmith,
AndrÉ Tabrizifar and Teresa Grant. My agent, Zoe
Waldie, has been an oasis of profound calm and
encouragement. Thanks also to Rev. Stuart Campbell
and Chris Arrowsmith for expertly homing in on

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factual errors, and to Cal Barksdale and Danielle A.
Durkin for their work on the U.S. edition.

Trigger Happy owes much to the incisive attentions
of its editor, Andy Miller: il miglior fabbro.

Any infelicities or errors that remain I acknowledge
mine. Readers are invited to email comments for future
editions to:

[e-mail].

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1

RESISTANCE IS FUTILE

Our virtual history

In the beginning, the planet was dead.

Suddenly, millions of years ago, arcane
spontaneous chemical reactions in the primeval ooze
resulted, by a freak cosmic chance, in the first
appearance of what we now call “the code of life.”
Formed in knotty binary strings, each node
representing information by its state of “on” or “off”
and its place in the series, the code grew adept at
replicating in ever more complex structures.
Eventually, the organizations of code became so dense
that an overarching property emerged that could not be
explained by reference to any of the constituent parts.
This was “life” itself.

The first videogame formed in the sludge. It was a
simple organism, but a father to us all. Soon enough

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(in geological terms) videogames crawled out on to the
shore, developed rudimentary eyes and legs, and
gradually began to conquer Earth.

Biologically speaking, early videogames were, as
they are today, radically exogamous—that is to say,
they did not replicate by breeding with each other, but
with “humans,” a preexisting carbon-based life form
whose purpose was, and still is, unknown but seemingly
providential. If the videogame managed to impart
particularly intense pleasure to a parasitic human
during the reproductive act, the chances of its offspring
surviving were enhanced. Obviously, videogames were
programmed by Nature to be as promiscuous as
possible: the more humans impregnated with code, the
more likely that some of the next generation would
survive to breed in their turn. The work of such genetic
programming persists in the primeval substratum even
of modern, sophisticated videogame civilization.

Over this vast meander of time, the pressures
of adapting to varied conditions prompted the
formation of different genera and species of
organism with different habitats, social structures
and breeding strategies. The fittest survived.

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But nothing could be certain in the great
evolutionary game. Some seemingly successful species
found it impossible to adapt swiftly enough to
catastrophic changes in the environment, and died out.
They were the dinosaurs. (By copying their “code” and
letting it gestate under laboratory conditions, however,
we can actually bring these fossils to life again, and let
them roam happy, if confused, in virtual amusement
parks.)

Nor was this evolution a gradual and inexorable
expansion of possibilities and types. There seems to be
no final goal to the random machinations of Nature.
Some species of game, for example, turned at certain
points down evolutionary blind alleys and failed to
develop, concentrating instead, like the peacock, on
attracting partners with ever more lurid visual displays.
Other species merged, pooling resources and erasing
previous distinctions to become the great games that we
know and love.

The narrative of these manifold splittings and
fusings, this world-historical struggle of the will
encoded in our deepest selves, is not a mere just-so
story for the young. For through the noble history of
videogame species, with due homage made to the great
examples that have paved the way for us, the heroic

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story unfolds of how we came to be the planet’s
masters. Remember, humans, it’s not how you play the
game that counts, it’s whether you win or lose.

>Player 1 Ready

0101111111010101001111101010111111110101010011
0011111100101010001000000101010100000011111100101110
1010010000101000111101001010100100101010010110111

Pixel generation

Like millions of people, I love videogames. I also love
books, music and chess. That’s not unusual. For most
of my generation, videogames are just part of the
cultural furniture. In particular, videogames, among
people all over the world, are a social pleasure. The
after-hours PlayStation session is one of the joys of
modern life.

Videogames are in one sense just another
entertainment choice—but compared to many, a much
more interesting one. And yet there seems to be a fear
that videogames are somehow nudging out other art
forms, and that we’re encouraging a generation of
screen-glazed androids with no social skills, poetical
sensitivity or entrepreneurial ambition. But new forms

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don’t replace the old. Film did not replace theater. The
Internet did not replace the book. Videogames have
been around for thirty years, and they’re not going
away.

When I was ten years old, my parents bought me a
home computer. It was a ZX Spectrum, brainchild of
the celebrated British inventor Sir Clive Sinclair (this
was before he went on to create the savagely
unsuccessful electric tricycle called the C5). The entire
computer, which was a contemporary of the American
Commodore Vic-20, was about half the size of a
modern PC keyboard, and it plugged into a normal
television. It was black, with little gray squidgy keys
and a rainbow stripe over one corner. Tiny blocky
characters would move around blocky landscapes
lavishly painted in eight colors, while the black box
beeped and burped. It was pure witchcraft. But the
magic wasn’t simply done to me; it was a spell I could
dive into. I could swim happily in this world, at once
mysterious and utterly logical, of insubstantial light.

Doubtless my parents imagined the Spectrum
would be educational. In a way it was, for very soon I
was an expert at setting exactly the right recording
levels on hi-fi equipment to ensure a perfect copy of a
hot new game. (In those days, videogames came on

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cassette, and I would swap copies and hints with my
schoolfriends.) For many years, the myriad delights that
videogames offered were a reliable evening escape,
their names now a peculiarly evocative roll call of
sepia-tinged pleasures: Jet Pac, Ant Attack, Manic
Miner, Knight Lore, Way of the Exploding Fist, Dark
Star . . . Then I decided, at the age of sixteen, to put
away childish things. So I bought a guitar and formed a
skate-punk heavy-metal band.

While I was away practicing my ax heroics, home
computers—the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64, as
well as a later, more powerful generation comprising
the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga—were gradually
being supplanted by home videogame consoles. These
little plastic boxes could not be programmed by the
user, and the games came on cartridge rather than on
cassette tape. The big players in the late 1980s and
early 1990s were two Japanese giants: Nintendo, with
its Nintendo Entertainment System (or Famicom) and
the more powerful Super NES; and Sega, with its
Megadrive. Each company was represented by its own
digital mascot: Nintendo had Mario, the world-famous
mustachioed plumber, and Sega had Sonic, a cheeky
blue hedgehog.

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Already by this stage a great number of teenagers
were more interested in videogames than in pop music.
And Nintendo and Sega inspired fanatical loyalty. They
were the Beatles and Stones of the late 1980s and early
1990s. Nintendo was the Beatles: wholesome fun for all
the family, with superior artistry but a slightly “safe”
image; Sega, on the other hand, were the snarling,
street-smart gang, roughing it up for the hardcore
videogame fans.

As videogaming culture grew and the games
became ever more complex and adventurous (with ever
larger profits to be made), the hardware companies
realized that technology had to keep pace with the
designers’ ambitions. The seemingly unassailable
Nintendo, having seen enormous success with the 1989
launch of the handheld Game Boy, decided to soup up
the SNES by adding a CD-ROM drive. CD-ROMs hold
a lot more information than cartridges, so the games
could be even bigger in scope. But Nintendo had no
expertise in that area of hardware, so they hooked up
with the Japanese audio giant Sony, manufacturer of hi­fi and inventors of the Walkman. It seemed like a
marriage made in heaven.

But after various behind-the-scenes shenanigans,
Nintendo pulled out of the deal. It was to lose them

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their market preeminence, because Sony wasn’t happy
about being messed around with by the arrogant Mario
machine, and decided to go it alone and muscle in on
the videogames business themselves. Thus the Sony
PlayStation was born. On its launch in 1995 it blew
Sega’s new machine, the Saturn, out of the water.
Nintendo, meanwhile, didn’t have a competitive
console out until two years later: the Nintendo 64,
which had a handful of brilliant games but was
woefully under-supported by most software developers.
The landscape of power had irrevocably shifted while
my back was turned.

Apart from the odd blast in an arcade, I hadn’t
thought about videogames again. Then, one summer, I
was staying in a friend’s Edinburgh flat while watching
more or less disastrous pieces of fringe theater at the
rate of three or four a day. The odorous broom closet I
was sleeping in had only one particularly interesting
piece of furniture: a PlayStation. My friend introduced
me to something called WipEout 2097, a fast, futuristic
hover-racing game. My jaw dropped.

Over the previous decade, it seemed, videogames had
really grown up. This was an amazing, sensebattering,
physically thrilling trip. Artistically, it felt

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superior to anything I had seen on the Fringe. And so,
after sacrificing most of my sleep during that
Edinburgh stay to improving my lap times, I decided I
needed to buy a PlayStation of my own. Perhaps one
day, I thought, I might even write something about
videogames.

So I bought the console. And then I had to buy a
few games. Soul Blade (fighting), WipEout 2097
(racing), Tomb Raider (Lara Croft)—that would do for
starters. On second thought, better add V-Rally (more
racing) and Crash Bandicoot (marsupial wrangling).
My research had to be dutifully wide-ranging, didn’t it?
Soon, I also bought the Nintendo 64, which slotted
neatly on to my shelves with Super Mario 64 and 1080°
Snowboarding. Now they’re joined by a Sega
Dreamcast, Sony’s PlayStation2, a Nintendo
GameCube, and Microsofts’s Xbox.

It hasn’t been cheap. But my experience is one
that’s shared by millions of people all over the planet.
Indeed, this acceleration in videogame evolution would
not have been possible otherwise.

Meme machines

Videogames today are monstrously big business.
Their present status has largely to do with the shift in
demographics, of which I was a part. In the 1980s,

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videogames were indeed mainly a children’s
pursuit, but now games cost between twenty and
fifty dollars and are targeted at the disposable
income of adults. The average age of videogame
players is now estimated to be twenty-eight in the
United States; one 2000 survey reported that 61
percent of all U.S. videogamers are eighteen and
over, with a full 42 percent of computer
gameplayers and 21 percent of console
gameplayers thirty-six years of age or older.

1

More and more grownups choose to play
videogames rather than watch TV or go to the
movies. According to the European Leisure
Software Publishers’ Association, the British
videogame market already grosses 60 percent
more than total movie box-office receipts, and 80
percent more than video rentals. On the other side
of the Atlantic, Americans named videogames as
their favorite form of home entertainment for the
third year in a row in 1999. Twice as many people
nominated videogames as chose watching TV,
three times as many preferred videogames to
going out to the movies or reading books, and six
times as many preferred videogames to

_________________

1 According to figures published in the Interactive Digital Software
Association’s fifth annual Video and PC Game Industry Trends Survey,

2000.

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renting movies. Total videogame software and
hardware sales in the United States reached $8.9
billion, versus $7.3 billion for movie box-office
receipts;

2

$6.6 billion of the videogame receipts were

from software sales, retail and online. How did this
strange invasion happen? How did this stealthy virus
insinuate itself into so many homes?

Well, one company has done more than any other
over the last six years to stake out videogames’ huge
place in adult popular culture: Sony, manufacturers of
the PlayStation, the unassuming gray box that
reinvigorated my own interest and that of so many
others. The last time they counted, Sony had sold five
million PlayStations in the UK alone. “The focus for
the brand,” explains Guy Pearce, Sony’s UK PR
manager, “is eighteen to twenty-five. That’s the age
group we aim at, and always have done.” One in every
four U.S. households owns a PlayStation.

Sony’s initial stroke of marketing brilliance was to
release an early game, 1995’s WipEout, with a
thumping techno soundtrack featuring well-known
electronic acts of the caliber of Orbital, Leftfield and
the Chemical Brothers. The success of this product had
_________________

2 Wall Street Journal, April 28, 2000.

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the Prodigy and Underworld clamoring to provide
tracks for the sequel. Sony had a PlayStation room built
in London superclub the Ministry of Sound, and got its
logo onto club flyers all over the country. Soon
PlayStation was happily associated with dance culture,
with enthusiastic support from early adopters such as
the band Massive Attack, who had bought theirs while
on tour in Japan. Control of the soundtrack to the third
game in the series, 1999’s Wip3out, was handed over to
superstar DJ Sasha, thus ensuring another soundtrack
cleverly poised between cutting-edge and mass-appeal
dance music.

Sony targeted the youth market with intelligent
aggression. During the 1995 Glastonbury Festival, they
distributed thousands of perforated cards adorned with
PlayStation logos, which could be torn up to make
convenient roaches for marijuana joints—or, as Sony
claimed, to dispose of chewing gum.

And then God created woman. Enter Lara
Croft, the pistol-toting, ponytailed, hotpants­and-shadeswearing digital star of a
revolutionary 1996 game, Tomb Raider. Much
has been written about her. She has been on the
cover of The Face and the subject of countless
Sunday-supplement articles. The publisher of
Tomb Raider, Eidos, was named Britain’s most

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successful company in any industry in 1999. It has sold
more than sixteen million copies worldwide of the first
three games in the series. Add a conservative estimate
for sales of the fourth installment, Tomb Raider: The
Last Revelation, and Lara’s getting close to becoming a
billion-dollar babe.

Lara is such a recognizable icon that she now
advertises other products, appearing, for example, in
computer-generated television commercials for
Lucozade and Nike. Generation X author Douglas
Coupland contributed to the devotional tome Lara’s
Book; the Germans have a monthly magazine dedicated
to her. In the summer of 1999, Lara could be seen
hanging from the back of buses all over London, and
six months later a bus and billboard campaign giving
Lara the movie-star treatment was undertaken in
several cities in the United States. Jeremy Smith,
managing director of Lara’s birthplace, Core Design,
points out what a gift her exploding profile was to the
company: “Who knows how many millions and
millions of pounds’ worth of free marketing we got
from the press, by them putting it in front of people
who’d then think, ‘Well, wow, that looks like a great
game.’ We could never have spent that sort of money
on the marketing that we got from the media.” And of

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course, Lara’s contribution to the PlayStation brand
itself cannot be overestimated. An exclusivity deal with
Sony ensured that the next three games appeared only
on PlayStation, and a next-generation Tomb Raider
game will appear on PlayStation2 in 2002.

These days, videogames generate a large spin-off
industry of playing cards, posters, strategy guides,
clothes and plastic figurines. In the summer of 1999,
sales of Bandai’s Duke Nukem action figures soared,
with the majority of purchasers being women. (Duke is
the testosterone-dripping digital hero of humorous
shoot-the-aliens games. He sports a blond crop and
mirrored shades and uses arch catchphrases such as,
“It’s time to chew gum and kick ass!”) Bandai claimed
to have received an “anxious” call from a woman after
her local store ran out of Nukem figures. According to
their press release, she claimed that 1990s women were
turning away from Victoria’s Secret and Tupperware
parties in favor of Duke Nukem evenings. Even if this
is just a tease, it is illuminating that Bandai feels the
potential female audience is large enough for them to
make such a claim.

Game companies have also cultivated strong
commercial links with the UK’s biggest game, soccer.
Videogame companies pay stars like Michael Owen

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and Alan Shearer to endorse their soccer games. In the
United States, Sega has hired spokesmen of the likes of
Boston Red Sox pitcher Pedro Martinez and
Philadelphia 76er Allen Iverson, and has sponsored the
San Francisco Giants in baseball and the Tennessee
Titans and Oakland Raiders in football. Meanwhile,
Sony sponsors the Vans Triple Crown series of sports
such as snowboarding and freestyle motocross.

And videogames have gradually become a
marketing medium in their own right. My first
experience of the PlayStation, WipEout 2097, featured
neon advertisements for Diesel jeans and Red Bull
caffeine drinks that flashed by as you sped around its
virtual racecourses. Stockholm company Addgames
released Mall Maniacs in 1999, a bizarre “virtual
supermarket” game whose entire development costs
were covered by retail companies paying to have
reconstructed presences in the digital world. Meanwhile
Sega’s Dreamcast game, Crazy Taxi, in which the
player drives passengers around an imaginary
American town center, sports a suspicious number of
people asking to go to the Pizza Hut or Kentucky Fried
Chicken, restaurant franchises given their own near­photorealistic presences in the shopping area.

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The music industry, too, is slowly waking up to the
commercial possibilities of placing an artist’s song in a
videogame. British rock band Ash is rumored to have
earned nearly $1,000,000 in royalties by licensing just
one song to the hit driving game Gran Turismo.
Gremlin’s Actua Ice Hockey 2 has a soundtrack
entirely by cult post-rockers Mogwai, whose faces have
also been digitized and slapped onto the team members’
heads. Trent Reznor, the man behind industrial-techno
outfit Nine Inch Nails, composed the soundtrack for
Quake. CDs of specially written videogame music now
regularly enter the pop charts in Japan, and videogame
scores are now eligible for three categories of
soundtrack music in the annual Grammy Awards.

Videogames now have such a potent influence on
other forms of entertainment that they raise a clutch of
questions about what they really have in common with
the older forms. For example, David Bowie, well
known as a man with an eye for the next big thing,
wrote and performed (with guitarist Reeves Gabrels) an
entire concept album for the soundtrack to the 1999
videogame Omikron: The Nomad Soul. At the Los
Angeles press conference to announce this
collaboration, Bowie said he approached the project as

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he would a film, “to provide an emotional heart to the
game.” And it doesn’t stop there: the rock star’s
involvement extends to being a digitized character in
the game itself.

Videogames also extend their silvery tentacles into
the worlds of film and books. Star Wars director
George Lucas has had his own videogames division,
the widely respected LucasArts, for many years; Sega
put up a chunk of the budget for David Cronenberg’s
movie eXistenZ; and in summer 2001, Japanese
software giant Square released Final Fantasy: The
Spirits Within, an $80 million computer-generated
feature film based on its enormously successful Final
Fantasy games, with voices provided by Hollywood
stars Steve Buscemi, James Woods and Donald
Sutherland. Amazingly, videogames now compete
directly with movies in terms of financial returns. Over
the six-week Christmas 1998 period in the United
States, one videogame, Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda:
Ocarina of Time, grossed $160 million, well outpacing
the most popular film, Disney’s A Bug’s Life.

Meanwhile, thriller novelist Tom Clancy now
writes scenarios for videogames produced by his own
company, Red Storm, so that eventually his paperbased
products may be demoted to the status of

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videogame tie-ins. Michael Crichton is also setting up
his own videogame development studio. And in 1998
Douglas Adams—who had a hand in the first
videogame based on his sci-fi comedy The Hitchhiker’s
Guide to the Galaxy, a text adventure game published
by Infocom in 1985—scripted the adventure videogame
Starship Titanic before the appearance of the tie-in
novel, which he didn’t even write himself. These guys
aren’t stupid; they know which way the wind is
blowing.

The major videogame console manufacturers,
meanwhile, have epic ambitions for their little lumps of
extruded plastic. Consoles aim to be not just gaming
machines but the one-stop entertainment center in the
homes of millions. One Sony insider has been
overheard saying that the company’s aim with
PlayStation2 is to “own the living room.”

In the late 1990s, you could already play audio CDs
on a PlayStation, but that’s small beer. Sony’s
PlayStation2 plays DVE movies through your TV, and
various interface ports allow the connection of digital
video cameras for editing home movies, printers,
scanners, storage devices and much else. Playstation2
sold 980,000 units on its first launch weekend in Japan
in March 2000, and by mid-2001 Sony had shipped 15

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million of the consoles worldwide. In 2002, Sony will
expand PlayStation2’s capabilities further to include
broadband internet access so that users will be able to
browse the Web, use email, play games online against
each other, and even download music and featurelength
movies straight onto the machine’s hard drive. While
the hard drive and modem of PlayStation2 are an
optional accessory, Microsoft has cunningly built these
features into its own first videogame console, the Xbox,
which is also a domestic DVD player. Consoles today
can offer more different types of entertainment than
ever before.

Can anything stop this fun-juggernaut? Research
from U.S. analysts Datamonitor suggests that sales of
games consoles and software in Europe and the United
States will generate over $17 billion worth of business
a year by 2003. The conventional media—Hollywood,
music, even books—are scared. Who can blame them?

The shock of the new

Videogames are not going to go away. You can’t
hide under the stairs. Resistance is futile. Any industry
with such a vast amount of money sloshing around in it
is by that token alone worthy of investigation.

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Videogames are powerful, but they are nothing
without humans to play them. So the inner life of
videogames—how they work—is bound up with the
inner life of the player. And the player’s response to a
well-designed videogame is in part the same sort of
response he or she has to a film, or to a painting: it is an
aesthetic one.

Alain and FrÉdÉric Le Diberder, authors of an
excellent French book on videogames called L’Univers
des jeux vidÉo, welcome this idea with open arms. They
already declare that the videogame is the “tenth art.”

3

Most people are not yet so progressive. But videogames
clearly have the potential to become an art form, even if
they are not there yet.

Here’s why. A videogame is put together by highly
talented artists and graphic designers, as well as
programmers, virtual architects and sonic engineers.
Increasingly, first-class graduates in computer science
from such universities as Cambridge and MIT are
moving into videogames rather than academic research;
there is also a large flow of animation talent
_________________

3 Tradition (since the Athenian Greeks and Confucian Chinese) has held
that there are six distinct arts: music, poetry, architecture, painting, dance
and sculpture. The Le Diberders add TV, movies and bandes dessinÉes
(graphic novels) to the list, and then declare the videogame the tenth.

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from traditional cartoons into videogame development.
Musicians who might once have become television or
film composers are now writing videogame
soundtracks, and there is even such a beast as the
professional videogame scriptwriter. There’s a huge
amount of thought and creativity encoded on to that
little silver disc. And aesthetics, by which I mean in the
most general terms the systematic study of why we like
one painting or one film more than another, cannot
ignore this bizarre digital hybrid.

The original Greek meaning of “aesthetics” refers to
things that are perceived by the senses. Modern
videogames—dynamic and interactive fusions of colorful
graphic representation, sound effects, music, speed and
movement—are unquestionably a fabulously sensual form;
furthermore, the simple fact is that some videogames are
better than others, yet so far no serious attempt has been
made to understand why. Videogames are an increasingly
pervasive part of the modern cultural landscape, but we
have no way of speaking critically about them. The noisy
lightshows competing for attention in living rooms around
the globe appear as some kind of weird, hermetic monolith:
mysteriously exciting to the initiated, baffling to the non­player. But both kinds of people are

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affected by videogames in one way or another. Even if
you’ve never played Tomb Raider, you can’t escape the
clutches of Lara Croft.

People are always loath to admit that something
new can approach the status of art. Take this rather
aggressive ejaculation: “A pastime of illiterate,
wretched creatures who are stupefied by their daily
jobs, a machine of mindlessness and dissolution.” Such
high moral bile is typical of the attacks on videogames
today.

But this sentence wasn’t written about videogames;
it was written seventy years ago by French novelist
Georges Duhamel, about the movies. Yet today, few
people would argue that filmmaking is not an art form.
An art form that is dependent on new technology
always makes some people uneasy. The German
philosopher and musicologist Theodor Adorno
expressed his wariness of jazz (dependent on a recently
invented instrument, the saxophone, as well as
emerging recording technologies) in similar terms
during his correspondence with philosopher and critic
Walter Benjamin.

Videogames today find themselves in the position
that the movies and jazz occupied before World War II:
popular but despised, thought to be beneath serious

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evaluation. Yet today there is a huge critical literature
that has expanded our understanding and appreciation
of films and jazz music. In half a century, I don’t doubt
that this will also be true for videogames.

I’m not trying to argue that there’s going to be a
revolution. Like it or not, the revolution has already
happened. Videogames are an enormous entertainment
business. The numbers, as we’ve seen, are huge. When
people talk about videogames, they tend to compare
them with forms they already know and love: film,
painting, literature and so on. But there’s one critical
difference that we need to bear in mind, and it throws a
huge spanner in the works of any easy equation
between videogames and traditional art forms. It’s this.
What do you do with a videogame? You play it.

In his Laws, Plato defined “play” like this: “That
which has neither utility nor truth nor likeness, nor yet,
in its effects, is harmful, can best be judged by the
criterion of the charm that is in it, and by the pleasure it
affords. Such pleasure, entailing as it does no
appreciable good or ill, is play.” It looks as if today’s
graphically astonishing videogames do have something
like “truth” or “likeness.” A casual observer would
certainly note the vast improvements in graphic style

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and detail every year and conclude that videogames are
increasingly realistic. Those cars look pretty real; those
trees at the side of the racetrack, waving gently in the
wind, look satisfyingly (arbo)real.

This turns out to be the subject of a fundamental
tension in videogames, which will appear in many
guises throughout this book. It’s a version of a very old
question about art, concerning what Plato called
mimesis (“representation”). Is it real or not? How can
videogames claim to be “realistic” at all? But the
peculiar nature of videogames gives the old question
several intriguing and novel digital spins. The problem
of mimesis in this context—the virtual representation of
“realities”—informs the inner life of nearly every
videogame.

Plato allows something to be a game as long as it is
not “harmful” and has no “utility.” There is an
increasingly vocal charge from some sections of society
that videogames are in fact morally harmful. But do
they have positive effects—do they have “utility?”
Squabbles between psychologists as to whether
videogames enhance spatio-visual and motor skills are
largely unresolved. The only thing that everyone agrees
on is that playing videogames makes you better at
playing videogames. Their effects on our

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inner lives can only be investigated once we have a
more rounded view of what videogames actually are.

What does this novel sensual fusion really have in
common with films, with storytelling, or with painting?
Where do videogames fit in the development of leisure
technologies, of perspectival representation, of the
narrative arts? Where do videogames fit in the history
of play?

Playing videogames may or may not be “useful.”
That’s beside the point. This book is about their charm:
the life in them, and their life in us. Videogames are
fun, but just what kind of fun is it?

What does it mean to be Trigger Happy?

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2

THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES

Beginnings

It all started at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, one night in 1962. The first Soviet Sputnik
spacecraft had been launched five years previously, and
John F. Kennedy had just promised that America would
get to the moon within the decade. Six months earlier,
Digital Equipment Corporation had delivered a hulking
new mainframe computer, a model PDP-1, to MIT’s
electrical engineering lab—an innovative, massively
expensive tool for serious scientific research. And by
happy chance, there was a revolutionary achievement
with that machine: the invention of the world’s first
videogame.

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Well, that’s how the story usually goes.

4

But

beginnings are slippery things. Actually, the world’s
first videogame was created four years earlier, at a U.S.
government nuclear research facility, the Brookhaven
National Laboratory. William A. Higinbotham, an
engineer who had designed timing devices for the
Manhattan Project’s atomic bomb and helped in the
first developments of radar, worked at Brookhaven in
charge of instrumentation design. He was trying to
dream up an entertaining exhibit for visiting members
of the public, and he hacked together a rudimentary
two-player tennis game. An analogue computer showed
the trajectories of bouncing balls drawn as ghostly blips
on an oscilloscope, controlled by a button and a knob. It
was a smash hit with the visitors for two years.

But owing to this lone pioneer’s modesty—he
didn’t think he had created anything earth-shatteringly
novel—the game never left the confines of the facility.
“I considered the whole idea so obvious that it never
occurred to me to think about a patent,” Higinbotham
said wryly, years later. Luckily for the future of games,
_________________

4 Both J. C. Herz (in Joystick Nation) and Alain and FrÉdÉric Le Diberder
(L’Univers des jeux vidÉo) give this erroneous starting point. A thorough
history is provided by Leonard Herman’s excellent Phoenix: The Fall and
Rise of Videogames, to which I am indebted in this section.

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in fact, because the owner of any patent on oscilloscope
tennis would have been the United States government.
And so—as if, eons ago in the primordial soup, one
helix of a DNA molecule had winked into existence
without the other, and therefore didn’t catch on—the
videogame spark fizzled and went out. If that
oscilloscope could have spoken, it might have said:
“There is one who comes after me.”

And so there was. Three years later a big package
arrived at MIT. Until this point, computers had mostly
been tedious, mute hulks that usually had to be
programmed with ticker-tape or punchcards, and were
strictly for esoteric mathematical applications. But the
new-fangled circular, dedicated VDU screen and
keyboard of the PDP-1 tempted programmer Steve
Russell and his friends

5

to indulge in a little creative

slacking. They began to fiddle around with the
interface, writing little bits of code that caused the
display to respond in real time to physical input. A
virtual typewriter and calculator. A model of the night
sky. And then . . . Spacewar.
_________________

5 I refer only to Russell by name for reasons of ease and fluency. These are
the full credits. Conception: Martin Graetz, Stephen Russell and Wayne
Wiitanen. Programming: Stephen Russell, Peter Samson, Dan Edwards and
Martin Graetz, together with Alan Kotok, Steve Piner and Robert A.
Saunders.

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The name’s melodrama, of course, grew out of the
geopolitical tensions of the time. But despite the lurid
sci-fi connotations, the game itself, which you can still
play on the Internet,

6

was serene, austere, a thing of

alien beauty. Two dueling spaceships in a pas de deux
against an electronic starfield, firing lazy torpedoes at
each other in the silence of space, avoiding all the while
the lethal gravitational pull of a central sun.

A leap of faith had been made. What these
coffeeguzzling student pioneers realized was that new
technology made possible a new sort of experience.
The photons fizzing from the screen were conceived
as manipulable packets of pleasure in themselves,
rather than simply a fancy way for the computer to
tell its user the result of a calculation via a dull string
of numbers. Russell and his friends designed—or
redesigned independently, to give Willy Higinbotham
his due—the first symbolic visual interface. That,
along with the work done by Xerox Parc in the 1970s,
is why you use word processors and other software
based around “windows” and “icons” rather than text.
(Playing videogames, though, is generally
acknowledged to be more fun than using Microsoft
_________________

6 Java-capable browsers can just point themselves at

http://lcs.www.media.mit.edu/groups/el/projects/spacewar

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products, at least until its X-Box console arrives in

2001.)

Spacewar sprang so fully formed into the
microcosmos that it took a very long time for other
games to catch up. Its structure offered many of the
virtues that are still essential features of videogames:
simple rules with innumerable combinational
possibilities; the competitive urge to destroy your
opponent’s spaceship; the pleasure of mastery over a
well-defined, consistent system; the challenge of
reacting instantly to craft governed by inertial physics;
and the sensual buzz of playing with animated patterns
of light. The game is remarkably similar to Asteroids,
an arcade machine that appeared some seventeen years
later.

Having briefly considered trying to sell this curio,
Russell and his team decided that no one would want to
buy it, so they gave away the source code to anyone
who was interested. Within a few years it was
everywhere, a benign virus, an unstoppable meme,
eating up time all over the world on government,
military and scientific mainframes. And if you can’t
beat them, join them: in the end, Digital Equipment
Corporation used the game as a centerpiece for
commercial demonstrations of their computer. In the

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same pivotal decade that saw the global war of the
space race and the tectonic cultural shifts of pop music,
videogames had launched a successful initial blitzkrieg
on the digital plains.

The lessons of the PDP-1’s unwitting involvement
in game history are twofold. First: give a man a tool,
and he will play with it. Second: pretty soon, everyone
will want one. Spacewar, however, never became a
mainstream entertainment, because so few people had
access to computers at the time.

7

The videogame

concept was there, but it had to wait ten years for cheap
computer-chip technology to make possible its wider
distribution.

Meanwhile, throughout the 1960s, the small
community of mainframe programmers produced other
highly influential game templates in tiny programs.
Lunar Lander was a turn-based game with a text
interface that required the player to administer
rocketthruster firing without running out of fuel before
meeting the surface. Hammurabi was the first God
game, requiring the user to manage a feudal kingdom
_________________

7 DEC sold about fifty PDP-1s in total. Even by 1971, there was only a total
of about 50,000 computers in the world (The Economist, September 28,

1996). By the end of 1993, there were more than 173 million computers in
use, not counting videogame consoles.

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by planting grain and assessing tax rates each year—a
direct ancestor of Civilization. And later, the advent of
ADVENT (1972): short for Adventure, this was the
first of a lost genre of game that was hugely popular on
personal computers right up until the late 1980s. It was
the first computerized version of “interactive
narrative”: the computer described a location and the
user typed in commands—“north,” “look,” “kill snake,”
“use torch”—to move around the virtual world, use
objects and solve fiendish puzzles. But the world at
large remained ignorant of the myriad charms of these
proto-videogames. It was a closed community, a
priesthood without a parish.

Most people assume that coin-operated arcade
games preceded home videogame technology. In fact,
in terms of conception rather than commercial
distribution, the reverse is the case, for by 1967 Ralph
Baer, the consumer-products manager of a military
electronics company, Sanders Associates, had invented
a TV-based home-tennis game and more complex
“hockey” simulations. Unfortunately it took him
several years to persuade other manufacturers of the
commercial possibilities. At last, at the turn of the
decade, Intel got their act together and invented the

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microprocessor. Videogames could now be just as
clever with much smaller, cheaper brains.

Back in 1965, an engineering student at the
University of Utah called Nolan Bushnell had
Spacewar on his computer, and like the other techies
Bushnell played it obsessively. He began to wonder
whether people might actually pay to play videogames
in an amusement park, but given the size and expense
of computers, it was a mere pipe dream at the time. By
1970, however, thanks to the microchip, the project had
become commercially feasible, and Bushnell joined
pinball company Nutting Associates to develop a mass­market version of Spacewar. In 1971, 1,500 units of
Computer Space, the first arcade game, were produced.
The project bombed.

So much for the future of entertainment. Computer
Space was just too complicated for the videogame
virgins of the general public. What the hell was it for?
Pinball, fine—it’s immediately obvious what to do:
there’s two flipper buttons, you light a cigarette and get
on with it. But this intimidating machine, with its reams
of instructions and its bizarre, bulbous casing, like
something out of Barbarella—it was just weird.
Bushnell learned his lesson. He would have to make a
videogame that anyone could just walk up to and play,

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without having to learn it first. He left Nutting,
determined to go it alone.

And so Pong was born. “Avoid missing ball for
high score” ran the only line of instructions on Pong’s
cabinet. It was a very simple version of tennis. A square
dot of light represented the ball, and two vertical lines
at each side of the screen were the bats. Players only
had to use one hand to rotate the paddle control, thus
facilitating simultaneous beer consumption. The first
Pong machine, hand-built in Bushnell’s apartment, was
set up in Andy Capp’s Tavern, a California pool bar. It
was soon collecting $300 a week in quarters—six times
as much as the neighboring pinball machine.

Amazed at the game’s success, Bushnell founded
his own company, the now-legendary Atari (named
after a term used in the Japanese chesslike game “Go”),
which was staffed by young, Led Zeppelin– loving,
herb-smoking hippies. Atari released the first
commercial Pong in November 1972. It was a huge
success, and altogether ten thousand of the machines
were manufactured. Four years later, Nolan Bushnell
sold Atari to Warner for $28 million, staying on as
chairman himself. Silicon entrepreneurialism, it
seemed, was the new rock’n’roll.

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But it was not all plain sailing. When Pong first
came out, Atari was immediately sued. Ralph Baer’s
home-tennis game had finally been taken up by
Magnavox. The first home console, the Magnavox
Odyssey, had been released six months before Atari’s
debut. And it was to all intents and purposes a home
Pong avant la lettre. It lacked the hypnotic sonar-blip
soundtrack of the arcade game, but there was no doubt
that it had got there first, and Atari was forced to pay
Magnavox a license fee on every game sold.

Of course, all these Pong-style games were direct
descendants of the lost oscilloscope program by Willy
Higinbotham, who never made a penny. Rip-offs of
home tennis and multi-player arcade versions of
“tennis” or “hockey,” as well as the first simplistic
shooting and driving games, flourished over the next
few years. But, as if punished by the Fates for not
honoring its ancestor, the booming videogame industry
was soon brought to its knees—and the reason was the
very multiplicity of Pongs. By 1977, there were so
many rival home machines that stores began dumping
them at knockdown prices, and many manufacturers
went bust. It looked as if videogames had been a mere
fad, a fad which had now burnt itself out. The industry
was on the verge of total meltdown.

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And then a little-known Japanese Pachinko
manufacturer called Taito rode in to the rescue. Their
extraordinary new arcade game was the seed of the
modern era. Within a few months of its 1978 release in
Japan, the game had caused a nationwide shortage of
the coin required to play it. Twenty thousand cabinets
were sold the next year in America, and over its
lifetime the game grossed $500 million. It was called
Space Invaders.

Art types

Videogames today are a broad church. I’m using
the term “videogames” to encompass arcade games,
homeconsole games, and computer games. The
bewildering array of different forms and styles could
lead a casual observer to think that the only thing all
these games have in common is a microprocessor. In
fact, all such games share crucial low-level qualities.

As with any form, videogame genres mutate and
shift over history. If they never exactly die, they can
sleep for a long time, while other, newer types spring
up to take their place. Furthermore, few modern
videogames slot neatly into very discrete categories.
But I’ll start mapping out this confusing terrain by
identifying certain families of videogame.

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Happiness is a warm gun

Perhaps the purest, most elemental videogame pleasure
is the heathen joy of destruction. You’ve got your
finger hovering over the trigger, you line up an enemy
and you fire. Such is the task presented by that
venerable videogame genre, the shoot-’em-up. Space
Invaders (see fig. 1) was not the first shoot-’em-up
(Atari’s Tank preceded it in 1974, and of course
Spacewar itself involved torpedo firing), but it was
revolutionary all the same. You control a laser turret
that can move from side to side at the bottom of the
screen. Farther up, a phalanx of fifty-five evil aliens
tramps across the screen in a smug dance of death.
When they reach one side of the screen, they all
descend one space and go back the other way. Your
task is simple: fire at will, and wipe them out.

Not so simple, though, because they are raining
bombs on you. You must dodge the bombs, or let your
four shields soak up the firepower. The shields,
however, crumble with every blast and are soon shot
through with holes, offering as much protection from
the merciless army above as a white handkerchief. As
you shoot off the invaders, their colleagues do not
panic, they do not break formation; in their infinite,
ego-less confidence they just move a little faster, and
faster still. They must not reach the bottom of the

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screen. You might manage to blast the entire division
away, but then another reappears in its place, lower
down and more bomb-happy. The eerie bass thumping
of the invaders’ progress increases in tempo, along with
your heartbeat. Just how long will you last, soldier?

Fig. 1 Space Invaders: time to get trigger happy (© 1978 Taito
Corp.)

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Space Invaders was the first game to feature
animated characters. The serried ranks of aliens
waggled their brutish tentacles across the screen; the
movement, for the time, was so realistically ugly that it
was all the more pleasurable to blast the critters away.
Space Invaders was also the first game to feature a
“high score” facility. The current highest score was
constantly displayed on your game screen, sneering at
your puny efforts, or encouraging you to develop your
own strategies to ever greater heights. As Martin Amis
put it in an early and engagingly enthusiastic book on
videogames, Invasion of the Space Invaders: “To
appear on the Great Score sheet is a powerful incentive
in space-game praxis—a yearning perhaps connected
with schooldays and the honor or notoriety of having
your name chalked up on the board, white on black.”

It was also the first “endless” game. Previously,
videogames had stopped when a certain score was
reached, or restarted; Taito’s classic, on the other hand,
just kept getting harder and harder, the aliens becoming
a terrifying blur as they whipped across the screen
raining bombs and hurtled ever closer to ground zero.
Therein lies the game’s special tension: it is
unwinnable. The player’s task is to fight a heroically
doomed rearguard action, to stave off defeat for as

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long as possible, but the war can never be won. Earth
will be invaded. And, of course, it was—by the
explosion of videogames that followed in Taito’s
trailblazing footsteps.

The late 1970s and early 1980s were the golden age
of classic shoot-’em-ups, with Asteroids, Robotron,
Defender, Galaxian, Scramble, Tempest et al. pushing
the tension envelope of this most fiery, physically
draining of videogame genres. Indeed, the extreme
simplicity of the basic concept—destroying things with
guns—is the reason why, for a few years, the shoot­’em-up expanded the possibilities of videogame action
more than any other type of game. Throughout the
1980s, shoot-’em-ups boasted ever more dazzling
lightshows and huge varieties of offensive weapons,
while gradually replacing the static Space Invaders
arena with larger, roamable spaces. Examples such as
the Commodore 64 and Spectrum classic Uridium
(easily as compelling as any arcade shooter of the time)
required not just shooting accuracy but high-speed
inertial negotiation of solid obstacles in two-and-a-half
degrees of freedom (the extra fraction granted by virtue
of the player’s ability to flip his craft onto its side and
zip through narrow spaces).

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As processing power increased in the 1990s, the
genre definitively broke the bounds of flat-plane
representations with the emergence of the “first-person
shooter,” exemplified by Doom and its multifarious
clones. Doom casts the player as a marine on Mars,
tramping around an invaded base from the hero’s point
of view and, with the aid of a comically powerful
arsenal, blasting demons back into the bloody hell from
which they have erupted. This, a sub-genre that traces
its roots back to Atari’s 3D tank game Battlezone
(1980), ousted its two-dimensional counterparts as king
of the hill, at the same time adding rudimentary quest
and object-manipulation requirements which—
especially as environments and programmed enemy
cunning became more complex, as in the extraordinary
Half-Life (1998)—edged it into the gray zone between
shoot-’em-up, exploration and puzzle games.

The pure shooter, however, persists in the form of
lightgun games: Virtua Cop, House of the Dead or the
viscerally thrilling Time Crisis. This game has one of
the simplest, most intuitive human-computer interfaces
ever conceived: the player uses a molded plastic
handgun (with properly aligned sights and a
forcefeedback mechanism to simulate recoil) to shoot

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directly at the enemies on screen, and works a footpedal
to reload the gun (after every six bullets) and duck
behind objects to avoid enemy fire. Each section must
be completed before the clock runs out. Though the
games could hardly look more dissimilar, it is Time
Crisis that is the true modern descendant of Space
Invaders. Where the old enemies were alien spacecraft
in two-dimensional formations, the enemies in Time
Crisis are human terrorists scurrying about in virtual
arenas; where you used to be Earth’s last hope, you are
now a member of a U.S. government SWAT team
protecting the interests of national security. But the
purism and simplicity of the gameplay shows that the
games are brothers under the skin. Time Crisis even
manages to increase the sweating tension, because at
your back you always hear Time’s winged chariot. But
relax into your task and revel in the challenge, for the
blissfully simple rules are still the same. Kill them all.

In my mind and in my car

Gamers of a certain age often argue that the oldies
were the best, in much the same way as the pop records
of one’s own youth seem so much better than the
rubbish the kids listen to today. But we can’t

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rewind; we’ve gone too far.

8

True, I have a certain

fondness for Vanguard, a game I could happily clock as
a nine-year-old on a family vacation in Wales (you
could shoot in four directions and the beepy tunes were
evil mind-limpets). Clearly, however, Goldeneye, a
first-person shooter for the Nintendo 64 console which
lets you play the role of James Bond, is a much better
game.

One genre that certainly refutes this nostalgiatinged
argument is the racing game. In most sorts of
videogame, “feel” is at base more important than fancy
graphics or speed for its own sake. But in the racing
game, graphics and speed are part of the “feel.” Every
increase in technological power enhances the genre’s
unique pleasure: the feeling of hurling a vehicle around
a realistic environment at suicidal velocities.
Conversely, because of this intimate relationship
between hardware base and software superstructure, a
racing game has very often been used as a seductive
showcase for new technology: the Sony PlayStation
was the mouth-watering machine of the future on its
release, just because of the unprecedented speed and
solidity of one of its first releases, Ridge Racer. That
_________________

8 “Video Killed the Radio Star” (1979) by Buggles, a deathless masterpiece
of popular song, the KindertÖtenlied that on the one hand revels in
modernist sonic synthesis but on the other mourns the passing of the 1970s
and of youth itself.

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series of games continued to evolve until 1999’s Ridge
Racer Type 4, which ran on the same hardware but
looked many times slicker (see fig. 2).

Fig. 2. Ridge Racer Type 4: prettier, faster, better (© 1999
Namco Ltd; all rights reserved)

Early two-dimensional racing games, with a flat
road scrolling up the screen, were little more than
simple dodge games or, with gun-equipped cars,
variations on the shoot-’em-up (Spy Hunter). The first,
crude attempt at driver’s-eye-view perspective was
Atari’s Night Driver, but the genre truly blossomed

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with Namco’s arcade Pole Position (1982), whose
steering wheel and pedals controlled a bright, colorful
approximation of track driving. Ever since, racing
games have become better and better at true
perspective, while added textures on the tarmac and
solid passing landmarks enhance the feeling of speed.
One of the best examples at the time of writing is Gran
Turismo, with tracks modeled on Japanese suburbs,
superbly atmospheric lighting effects and (crucially)
wonderfully throaty engine roars. As in most racing
games, players must learn to throw their cars into
powerslides with abandon and not to worry too much
about hitting other competitors; these vehicles might
look like racing cars but they act like dodgems.

This is not true, however, of a more serious kind of
racer, usually modeled on Formula One cars and real
Grand Prix circuits, and in spirit more of a simulation
than a pure videogame. Cars suffer real damage and
braking technique is vital. Simulation, distinct from the
role-playing game, is arguably not a genre in itself;
rather, it promotes in certain genres (driving, flight
games) the primacy of supposed “realism” over instant
fun. A true videogame deliberately simplifies any given
situation (imaginary or real) down to its essential,
kinetic parts; a simulation is loath to simplify

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and only does so when available CPU power is already
maxed out. The problem is, as we shall see, that
videogame “realism” is always a fix anyway.
Furthermore, simulations stomp roughshod all over one
raison d’Être of certain types of videogame, which is to
let the player perform amusingly dangerous and
unlikely maneuvers in perfect safety. If playing an
arcade-style racing game is like being a car stuntman in
The French Connection or Ronin, playing a simulation
is a much more earnest business. Martin Amis again:
“It sounds rather like driving, doesn’t it?”

Unlike Space Invaders et al., racing games offer the
perfect opportunity for competitive two-person action,
either with two arcade cabinets linked together or with
one home console splitting the television screen into
two separate viewpoints for each player. And you need
not be satisfied with racing mere cars against a friend.
The racing-game genre splits into driving games (what
we have seen so far) and the rest, which encompass
cartoon go-cart competitions (the superb Super Mario
Kart), snowboard piste challenges (1080°
Snowboarding), tiny cars speeding over a kitchen table
(Micro Machines) or futuristic hoverplanes thundering
around a sci-fi rollercoaster of a course (WipEout).

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Racing games not based on traditional cars are
usually distinguished by the appearance of power-ups:
weapons scattered along the course that can be picked
up by a player and used to blow his opponents off the
track. But in all categories of racer, the aim is the same:
get to the finish line first. If the destructive orgy of the
shoot-’em-up captures the essence of humanversus­machine competition, the racing game is the purest
expression of machine-mediated human-versushuman
competition. There can be no arguments about who
won and who lost. You were just too slow.

Might as well jump

Around 1981, a young Nintendo apprentice
designer, Shigeru Miyamoto, was asked to write
something to replace the innards of Radarscope, a
tedious shooter Nintendo’s American arm had
unwisely stocked up on to the tune of two thousand
unsellable cabinets. Miyamoto quickly, if somewhat
unpredictably, designed a game featuring a fat
mustachioed carpenter and a giant monkey. The
carpenter, under the player’s direction, had to begin
at the bottom of the screen and, jumping to avoid
barrels thrown by the infuriated simian, climb
ladders and move across platforms to reach the top,
where he could defeat the monkey and rescue a
princess. It was a far cry from the alien-

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themed shoot-’em-ups that were popular at the time.
But Miyamoto’s first game, called Donkey Kong (see
fig. 3), became an enormous hit, and invented a new
genre: the platform game.

9

The carpenter, known cratylically as Jumpman (for
it was his nature, uniquely at the time, to jump) in the
first game, was transformed by its sequel into a
plumber called Mario, who soon became the most
recognized videogame “character” of all, and most of
the innovations in the platform-game genre have been
made in games starring Mario, and written by
Miyamoto himself. Mario Bros. (1983) introduced the
plumber’s brother, Luigi, along with another paradigm
of platform gaming that stuck for years: enemies are
destroyed, not by means of projectile weapons, but by
the cartoonish method of jumping into platforms
underneath them to knock them over, then climbing up
and kicking them off the screen while they were still
dazed. Super Mario Bros. (1985) turned the platform
genre into a sideways-scrolling quest through a world
many times the size of one screen, and added powerups
(by eating a mushroom, Mario increased in size
_________________

9 In platform games, women are literally on pedestals, with men constantly
striving to attain their level. It is an interesting example of plinth ideology;
see, for the concept’s application in cognitive science, the rather eccentric
AndrÉ Tabrizifar, The Transparent Head, pp. 332–35.

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and could withstand one hit from an enemy), a system
whereby an extra life could be won after collecting a
hundred gold coins, and a regular “boss” battle at the
end of every level.

Fig. 3 Donkey Kong: get him over a barrel (© 1981 Nintendo)

Throughout its history the platform game has built
the most purely fantastical sort of gameworlds. In the
Mario universe, baby dinosaurs coexist with masked
birds and solid clouds, potent fungi and magical
crotchets hanging in the air. In an early platform hit on

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the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Manic Miner (1983), the
player controls a miner who must negotiate conveyor
belts and killer spikes while avoiding robots, malign
jellyfish, killer penguins and poisonous bushes to
collect keys before his air supply runs out. In the most
popular current platform game, and the closest
approach yet to a true interactive cartoon, Crash
Bandicoot 3, the eponymous orange marsupial rides on
the back of a speeding tiger across the Great Wall of
China or does battle with giant glassy-eyed men
wielding sledgehammers.

But now the very term “platform game” is
somewhat outdated; perhaps more appropriate is
“exploration game,” which has been the defining point
of platformers since Super Mario Bros. This is partly
because such games have quite recently made a
transition to three-dimensional rather than flat-plane
representation—most effectively in the astonishing
Super Mario 64 (1996)—and in the process the
gameplay has necessarily changed. The old, simple
lines denoting “platforms” are now solid ledges or
columns made of brick, wood, earth or steel, and while
essential features of the platformer are retained, such as
the problem of figuring out a series of jumps to get
from “here” to “up there,” there are hybrid factors

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from a number of other game types. The first Tomb
Raider game, for example, was clearly a development
of ideas in the classic 2D platformer Prince of Persia
(the first game in which a character could grab on to
ledges and pull himself up), yet it is also a
threedimensional block-moving puzzle game with
added combat elements. And Crash Bandicoot 3 is not
really a platform game at all, even though it requires
you very traditionally to jump on enemies’ heads and
collect fruit. Apart from in the two-dimensional bonus
levels, there are very few platforms. Its major influence
is in fact the racing game with a dynamic obstacle
course: rather than figure out complicated routes in a
vertically oriented environment, you must run full tilt
“into” (or sometimes “out of”) the depth of the screen.
It qualifies partly as an “exploration game” because of
the player’s simple desire to see what surreal beauties
the designers have hidden around the next corner.

The old “platform game” is no longer a discrete
game type in itself, but denotes an aspect of gameplay
that may occur in many different genres. Even
firstperson shooters like Turok (1997) cravenly require
the player to negotiate platform elements, even though
current 3D engines make such a task infuriatingly

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random rather than pleasurably challenging. What is
left of the platform game, then, is just the defining
physical ability that Shigeru Miyamoto gave to his
original monkey-battling woodworker. Go ahead, jump.

Sometimes you kick

Ah, how good it feels to boot a friend in the head
several times before applying an armlock and hurling
him to the ground. Especially if he’s bigger than you.
Fighting games allow players to battle each other’s
characters onscreen with an array of absurdly
exaggerated martial arts moves; with fists and feet or
with swords and flame. Of all the videogame genres,
the fighting game, or beat-’em-up, is one where the
solo, or player-against-computer, mode is most
pointless. It’s a two-player genre.

Early beat-’em-ups were particularly popular on the
home computers of the day. Way of the Exploding Fist
or Yie Ar Kung Fu (both 1985) took, as did most early
fighting titles, a relatively sober approach to martial­arts gameplay, with a possible sixteen different

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moves.

10

As videogame consoles and arcade machines

became more technically accomplished, however, the
temptation was to show off the graphic power with ever
more visually appealing displays, and never mind the
realism. Street Fighter II (1991), the first of the really
modern breed of fighting games,11 featured enormous
blue light trails from swishing limbs and fireball
attacks, while Mortal Kombat (1992) attracted
vituperative noises from the American Senate and the
British Parliament for its terrifically gory “death
moves,” where a victorious character would rip out his
opponent’s spine and hold it bloodily aloft.

One of the attractions of modern beat-’em-ups is
the player’s ability to choose to play as any one of
numerous different characters, each with his or her
own strengths and weaknesses but all lusciously
pictured and animated. Do you want to be a blond,
sandal-wearing Greek woman in a miniskirt, or a
supernatural pirate with two enormous broadswords
(Soul Edge)? A Croatian behemoth or a Hawaiian
_________________

10 With exceptions such as Barbarian, in which your friend could be
graphically decapitated with a broadsword. There was media criticism of
this game—not, however, for the violence, but for the fact that it featured a
semi-clad model in its advertising.
11 In terms of visual excess, that is. Street Fighter’s legacy otherwise
continues in a cult sub-genre of the fighting game that eschews
threedimensional, “solid”-looking characters in favor of a flat-plane,
comicbook style with characteristically jerky animation.

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Sumo wrestler (Ready 2 Rumble Boxing [see fig. 4])?
Bruce Lee in a gold lamÉ leotard, a pogo-happy alien
cyborg or a tiny, annoying dragon (Tekken 3)? Black,
Asian or Caucasian; male, female or indeterminate
xenomorph? Beat-’em-ups are nothing if not politically
inclusive; it is much more common for European men
to play as women or as Korean jujitsu experts than as
digital avatars of their own ethnic origins. It doesn’t
matter who you are in real life; here, the idea of play as
experimentation extends to your own genes.

Fig. 4. Ready 2 Rumble Boxing: Croatian tank Boris Knokimov
(left) takes on cuddly Hawaiian Salua Tua. Rumble bumble . . .
(© 1999 Midway)

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Since fighting games broke into 3D with Virtua
Fighter, the physical contact of these lightbeam
warriors has grown ever more convincingly thudding
and solid. The stunningly graceful animations,
meanwhile, are developed with a technique that films
real martial artists and digitizes the results as movement
code that can be applied to the imaginary game
characters. This is known as “motion capture.”

But herein lies a problem. Beat-’em-ups boast ever
more complex control methods, with at least three
buttons beside the joystick, and baffling combinations
of button hits and circular shapes made with the stick
unleashing ever more spectacular and lethal activity on
screen. These preset special moves, also known as
“combos,” actually require the player to memorize a
string of ten button-presses; there might be hundreds of
such strings in a game. This is the Achilles’ heel of the
genre, for you cannot design on the fly your own
strings of moves that have the same speed and fluidity
as the preset combos. You must learn the sequences the
programmers have built in to the game—and, okay,
there are hundreds of them, but that does not constitute
freedom.

Not only is it (understandably) impossible to
perform a move for which there is no animation, but

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motion-capture techniques mean that once an animation
has started, it must finish before the next one can start.
You can’t change tactics mid-move. That rules out true
feints, which are critical in real fighting sports such as
fencing. Oddly, beat-’em-ups such as the Tekken series
have extremely complex input methods, but threaten to
offer the player far less creative freedom than almost
any other kind of game with a much simpler interface.
Robotron gives you two joysticks: one to move, one to
fire. Simple. But with those tools, there is a huge
tactical potential of feints, misdirections and
apocalyptic vengeance.

The excessively deterministic, combinatorial
template, however, seems to be happily on the wane,
overtaken by newer versions such as Power Stone for
the Sega Dreamcast (1999), where the controls are very
simple and the tactical gameplay is transferred to use of
objects (benches, lampposts) and hilariously magical
power-ups (guided missiles and the like) in the fighting
arena itself; or Ready 2 Rumble Boxing, which mixes
pleasingly simple controls with beautifully judged
tactics. The fighting game, like fighting itself, will
always be popular.

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Heaven in here

Oh yes, the computer can make us divine. Should you
want to build a city from scratch, construct a
substructure of water pipes, sewers, power lines and
underground trains, populate it with citizens, determine
tax levels, build museums, parks, houses and office
blocks, and then destroy the whole imaginary
metropolis by calling an earthquake on their heads—
sure, you can do that. It’s called SimCity. Or perhaps
you want to operate on a larger scale: create a neolithic
tribe and over the course of thousands of years send
them out to colonize the land, discover ironwork,
sailing and electricity. Play Civilization. Compete
against other gods in a polytheistic mythology?
Populous. There are similar “God games” for the fields
of global industry, railroad building and even
amusement parks.

There are two basic attractions of games like
SimCity. The first is that the virtual city itself, with its
apparently autonomous population, functions as a pet.
If neglected, it will pine and eventually die; if nurtured,
it will flourish. A player might form some sort of
emotional attachment to the gameworld. This is the
principle abstracted and miniaturized with such
extraordinary success by the Japanese company

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Bandai, with their keyring digital pet, Tamagotchi.
Notice, however, that a SimCity or Civilization pet
panders to a peculiarly narcissistic instinct in the
player: if he or she does well, monuments will be
erected and museums named in honor of the masterful
deity. It’s a kind of fame.

The second potential pleasure of a God game is a
function of the very artificiality of the soi-disant
“simulation.” Now, of course, God-game variables are
“kludged”—simplified and imprecise—and their reality
is laughably clean compared to the infinitely chaotic
and messy real world. As J. C. Herz tartly observes in
Joystick Nation: “You can build something that looks
like Detroit without building in racial tension.” But
what they do offer by virtue of their machine habitat,
and what makes them slightly different from what they
would be otherwise— complex board games—is the
modeling of dynamic processes. Time can be sped up
or slowed down at will, and interactions of data over
time can be readily visualized. In this way, for instance,
fiddling with the fiscal and monetary operators of
SimCity for a couple of minutes and observing the
results for the next accounting period provides a
remarkably intuitive way to understand the
fundamentals of balancing a budget in a capitalist state.

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Now, I have conscientiously played these games in
the interests of research, and I find them exceptionally
tedious. Even so, God games are highly successful.
Many people who aren’t at all interested in any other
sort of videogame—such as the high-speed, colorful
action experiences of racers or exploration games—
will often confess a sneaky addiction to Civilization or
Age of Empires. Some people simply prefer the
challenge of fiddling relaxedly with a process to that of
a high-speed test of reactions.

It seems, anyway, from the method by which God
games model dynamic processes, that they are not
primarily about cities or tribes or any of the putative
content. They are process toys. Time is transformed
from prison to Play-Doh. Perhaps the fantasy appeal is
really about a chance to observe the world over a
longer, more sober chronological span than that of a
single human life. But if the classic shoot-’em-up or
platform game is triumphantly individualistic—one
hero against the hordes—the God game is quite the
opposite. The individual doesn’t matter. He or she may
as well be an ant (in SimAnt, the individual actually is
an ant). The gameplayer doesn’t count as an individual:
he or she is, after all, God. What matters is the
inexorable march of the corporate machine. There

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seems to be a pernicious subterranean motive here:
such games offer you a position of infinite power in
order to whisper the argument that, as an individual in
the world, you have none at all.

Two tribes

Armchair generals are well catered for by the God
game’s sibling genre, the real-time strategy game. Its
natural milieu is that of war. Again in a godlike
position (single-handedly overseeing all military
operations), the player is briefed by advisers (actors in
video clips), and must then carry out certain missions
by issuing commands to numerous small troop units on
the battlefield. The player clicks on a certain unit and,
for instance, tells it to move somewhere, to attack
another unit, to defend itself or to scatter. The
stupendously successful Command and Conquer series
of games offers with every sequel more lovingly
recreated “theaters of war” and conflict situations
drawn from twentieth-century history, yet at the same
time litters the battlefield with increasingly fantastic
depositories of hi-tech weaponry for your troops to pick
up and bash the Axis with.

Real-time strategy games are, at base, congruent
with the traditional class of wargame played on a large

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table at the weekend by men pushing little figures
around with brooms—only now the computer allows
the precise calculation of thousands of variables. This
swamp of numbers, terrains and troop typologies
effectively disguises the complementary fact that, as
videogames, their formal root is Atari’s panic-inducing
arcade game Missile Command (1980), which
originally grew out of a military simulation to see how
many nuclear warheads a human radar operator could
track before overload set in. As we noted of simulation,
though, as games become ever more complex and
hybridized, the essential elements of realtime
strategy—control of multiple game pieces and tactical
calculus—may crop up in several other genres.

Real-time strategy games do not provide the instant
control and feedback of the more visceral videogame
genres, yet nor are they such leisurely affairs as God
games. Decisions about the disposition of troops and
units must be made in “real time”: if you don’t react
quickly enough, you’ll be overrun by the enemy. A
certain pleasurable level of sweating tension is thereby
induced. This median level of response requirement
makes strategy games perfect for the burgeoning field
of online play.

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Owing to different modem connection speeds, it is
often difficult to play a satisfying game of Quake over
the Internet against someone on the other side of the
world, because that game is a very rapid-response
shoot-’em-up. But a real-time strategy game such as the
amusing alien wargame Starcraft (1998) is the perfect
vehicle for such global connections, and moreover can
handle far more than merely two players at a time.
Starcraft’s American server, at one point on its 1998
launch weekend, had thirty thousand players connected
simultaneously. Earth is truly humming, as you are
reading this, with the smoke and crackle of imaginary
warfare.

The cognitive demands made on the player of
realtime strategy games are among the most complex
any videogame offers, and the attraction of logical,
combinatorial thinking allied to often beautiful graphics
(such as in the extraordinary Commandos 2) makes for
a powerful experience. Wargames, too, are the most
complex and satisfying example of the videogame
pleasure of control: you are in charge not just of one
tank or airplane, but of an entire army. You are not to
be messed with.

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Running up that hill

Perhaps the most perverse-looking class of videogame
on first inspection is the sports game. After all,
videogames are supposedly played in darkened rooms
by people who never get any real physical exercise. But
in their hovels they can be tennis demons, baseball stars
or gifted golfers, or control a whole football or
basketball team to world victory.

In its own sweetly abstract way, Pong, of course,
was the first sports game. Subsequent refinements of
the Pong engine claimed to simulate soccer with four
paddles and two sets of goalposts, but the games were
unconvincing. Chris Crawford understandably claimed
in 1984: “I suspect sports games will not attract a great
deal of design attention in the future”12 —just before
higher-resolution graphics on home computers saw a
new wave of sports games become highly successful.
Konami’s Track and Field, Epyx’s Summer Games and
Winter Games, and Ocean’s Daley Thompson’s
Decathlon were all early hits on machines such as the
Spectrum and Commodore 64, multi-event games that
required the player to control tiny but well-animated
_________________

12 Crawford, The Art of Computer Game Design, p. 28.

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pixel humans in approximations of sprinting,
shotputting, ice-skating, ski-jumping and the like.

Variations on tennis, soccer (classic examples were
Match Day and Sensible Soccer), ice hockey and
baseball followed; graphics became more detailed,
control methods more complex, and environments more
colorful and detailed. The promising sub-genre of
“futuristic sports,” where designers, freed from the
limitations of having to reproduce a messy, real sport,
could attempt to create the perfect physical game, threw
up a few fine moments—most notably the wonderful
Speedball, a violent, sci-fi kind of taghockey that is still
considered by many to be the best sports game ever
made. But the unbeatable advantage of “real” football,
soccer, basketball and hockey games is that the rules
are given and everyone knows them: you don’t have to
spend precious time studying a manual to learn how to
win.

When videogames cracked 3D representation in the
mid-1990s, sports games flourished as never before.
Today the world’s largest software publisher is the one
that has the most impressive stable of sports games:
Electronic Arts, which for the financial year 1998–99
broke the billion-dollar turnover mark. The soccer
game is one of the most popular videogame genres of

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all, with one of the best being Konami’s ISS Pro
Evolution (see fig. 5). In EA’s World Cup 98, not only
are real players licensed, their faces digitally mapped
on to computer figures, but the actual French stadia are
lovingly rebuilt on the screen. Hoardings around the
virtual playing field carry real advertisements; hours of
soccer commentary are recorded by real TV
commentators, with suitable comments retrieved from
the disc to suit onscreen events; and slow-motion
replays from multiple angles allow the repeated
savoring of a goal.

Sports games have grown up, but in the process
they have almost defected to another medium. Of
course soccer videogames are in one sense continuing
the heritage of mechanical games like Subbuteo, but
now solid-looking players can run smoothly around the
soccer field or the hockey rink and be viewed from
different camera angles, just like on TV. The modern
sports game is no longer a re-creation of an actual sport
so much as it is a re-creation of viewing that sport on
television. With a little more involvement than simply
shouting at the players over your six-pack.

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Fig. 5. ISS Pro Evolution: the beautiful game (© 1999 Konami)

It’s a kind of magic

Dungeons, dragons, elves and wizards, treasure,
trolls and spells. Yes, it’s the role-playing game (RPG),
the synthesis of classic text-based games like ADVENT
and the 1970s teenage-male leisure phenomenon,
Dungeons & Dragons fantasy boardgames. The
computer becomes the dungeon master and rolls all the
polyhedral dice to determine the outcomes of
incantatory duels.

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They are very popular, especially since, as with
wargames, their relatively slow pace ensures popularity
on the Internet. In April 1999, a player’s “character” in
Ultima Online, with impressive quantities of treasure
and magic amassed over a period of six months, was
sold at auction for hundreds of dollars in real money. If
you can’t be bothered to construct a new identity for
yourself, you can always buy one.

We can see immediately an instructive contrast
between the appeal of traditional RPGs and that of God
games. If God games hold out the opportunity of
transcending one’s individuality, RPGs offer the player
a chance to be fully individual in a world where an
individual has real power, where the inexplicable is no
longer actually supernatural but domesticated and
quantifiable (magic, assessed numerically, is stripped of
all its magicality), and where actions always have
deterministic consequences for character or events. It is
a seductive simplicity. But what RPGs really have
going for them is the sense (or perhaps the illusion) of
being involved in an epic, mythical story, however
clichÉd its details might be. In this way they also have
roots in the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks written by

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Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone (the latter is now
head of videogame publishers Eidos) in the 1980s.

Modern, complex RPGs owe their shared
paradigms to one game series in particular: Final
Fantasy, the first game of which was released in 1987.
It had detailed, colorful two-dimensional graphics, and
a traditional story line involving an ancient evil once
again on the loose, with rapacious pirates on the oceans
and demons in the bowels of the earth; the player was
required to choose four people to make up a team of
Light Warriors to save the world. The systems of magic
and fighting grew more and more complex with each
sequel, until Final Fantasy VII (1997) not only offered
sumptuous movieistic scenes to advance the plot, but
updated the milieu to one of magic futurism. Yet it is
still based on a remarkably old-hat “turn-based” system
of combat, with roots clearly in the dice-throwing game
played by unsocialized boys.

In essence, however, an RPG need not inhabit
exclusively such puerile, sub-Tolkien milieus. The
basis of any RPG is that the player “becomes” a
character in the fictional world. On a basic level, nearly
every videogame ever made is a role-playing game.
You play the role of a missile turret defending Earth
from the space invaders; you play the role of a

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ravenous yellow disc being chased by ghosts. In
generic RPGs, however, character is not merely a
pretext to the gameplay, but part of it. Character is
defined by talents, strength, cunning and even certain
psychological traits, measured strictly quantitatively in
points. Whereas the player is constantly getting killed
in shoot-’em-ups, the survival and growth of an RPG
character, the acquisition of new skills, are paramount.
(Because of this emphasis on character, the RPG is the
nexus of developments in what is called “interactive
storytelling,” of which more later.)

Donkey Kong designer Shigeru Miyamoto’s Zelda
games are all RPGs. Even his phenomenal Legend of
Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998) is one, although on the
surface it is a seminal 3D exploration game, because
the character the player controls learns more about his
past and acquires numerous new skills according to his
success in the gameworld. One of the most
revolutionary home-computer games of the 1980s,
Elite, is usually thought of as an early 3D space game.
But it is just as much an RPG too, in that success
depends on carving out a career, over a period of
several real-world weeks or months, as an intergalactic
trader in minerals or narcotics. RPGs are the single
most popular genre of videogame in Japan, and

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encompass a far wider and more creative range of
subjects, from gardening to schoolday romance.

Role-playing elements are creeping crabwise into
any number of other genres, as a way of bolting on a
framework of narrative drive to the old repetitive game
style. Even arcade-style driving game par excellence
Ridge Racer: Type 4 (1999) is an RPG, in that the
player is required to complete a full Grand Prix set of
races with a particular team manager, who comments
on your performance and reveals his or her own
fictional preoccupations. And ever more complex
roleplaying games will be possible with the increased
storage and visual capacities of future hardware. Sega’s
fabulously ambitious Shenmue (2000), which chooses
the 1980s as a historical period so that the characters
wear leather blousons and acidwashed blue jeans,
points the way forward. And Japanese software giant
Namco has set up a whole department dedicated to
producing RPGs for the PlayStation2. From the genre’s
trollish beginnings, wonderful things may yet emerge.

We can work it out

While playing videogames may not constitute an
intellectual pursuit, they do challenge the mind in a

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more primitive, kinetic way—in much the same way, in
fact, as playing sports. Yet the closest thing to sport in
videogames is not necessarily a sports game. Reflexes,
speedy pattern recognition, spatial imagination—these
are what videogames demand. This is perhaps their
fundamental virtue. If so, the king of videogame genres
is arguably the most abstract, the least representational,
the most nakedly challenging: the puzzle game.

At the most basic level, a videogame puzzle
presents the player with a required action that cannot be
performed directly. You must therefore find the
intermediate steps and execute them in the right order.
Puzzle elements abound in all sorts of game genres. As
we mentioned earlier, Tomb Raider is in one sense a
puzzle game, in that it requires manipulation of blocks
in 3D space to unlock certain passages or secrets.
Object-manipulation or switch-tripping puzzles abound
in classic platformers like the early Mario games. Even
a shoot-’em-up like Defender in one sense poses very
high-speed puzzles measured in fractions of a second.

But a great puzzle game in its own right requires a
combination of perfect simplicity (both in terms of
rules and gameplay) and lasting challenge. Classics of
this particular genre are therefore thin on the ground.

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The 1980s curio Sentinel was an intriguing attempt at a
sort of three-dimensional, simplified chess: the player
had to negotiate a checkered landscape, avoiding the
immolating gaze of the sentinel, until he occupied the
higher ground, at which point the sentinel could be
defeated by having its energy sucked out. A superb, and
much simpler, concept is that of Bust-A-Move (also
known as Puzzle Bobble). Brightly colored bubbles
hang from the top of the screen; new ones are slowly
added. Your job is to fire bubbles at them in such a way
that three of the same color meet; they then burst, and
take any others that they were supporting with them.

But really, to understand puzzle games you only
need one word: Tetris. Created by a Soviet
mathematician, Alexei Pajitnov, Tetris became the
subject of a fascinating intercontinental copyright war
(detailed in David Sheff’s excellent Game Over), and
Nintendo’s acquisition of the handheld rights to the
game helped to sell thirty-two million Game Boys in
one year, 1992.

The game itself is viciously simple. It’s raining
blocks. Some are square, some sticky-outy, some long
and thin, some infuriatingly L-shaped. In some unreal
universe of fractional gravity, they float down the

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screen and must be rotated and laterally shifted so that
they all fit together at the bottom. When they do, the
horizontal line that they complete vanishes, and you
have a bit more breathing space. Your job is to clear all
the blocks away for as long as you can. Simple, but one
of the purest, most addictive videogame designs in
history. Where are you in the game? Nowhere. You are
pure mind, engaged in a purely symbolic struggle. As
in Space Invaders, you know that you can never win,
that eventually the blocks will descend so quickly that
the screen will be filled with a hideous jumble. Still you
try, for maybe this time you will do just a bit better.
Herein lies the demonic power, stripped naked of
graphical tinsel and story-lined misdirection, of every
videogame there is.

Family fortunes

This scoot around videogame genres is not meant to
be utterly exhaustive. But it’s a working sketch, a
snapshot. There isn’t room here for many videogames
through the years that defy easy genre categorization,
such as Deus Ex Machina, Parappa the Rapper, Skool
Daze, Nights or Ecco the Dolphin.

But one useful lesson is that the videogame
ecology is one rife with inter-species breeding: the

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lines between genres are gradually being erased. Just as
Hamlet’s Polonius happily burbles through the
permutational possibilities of dramatic genre—
“tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical,
historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical­comichistorical-pastoral . . .”—so at the beginning of
thetwenty-first century we are offered driving-RPG
games, RPG-exploration games, puzzle­explorationshoot-’em-up games and more. And
increasingly, large-scale exploration games in particular
are incorporating “sub-games” of different styles within
them, as a reward for completing certain sections. Sonic
Adventure (1999) lets you play pinball or go
snowboarding; Ape Escape (1999) has a mini-boxing
game locked away inside.

But despite the myriad cosmetic and formal
differences, all videogames in fact share similar
concerns under the hood. When talking about racing
games, I mentioned a particular type that seemed very
serious and detailed: the simulation. Now, the concept
of “simulation” is actually rather pervasive in all sorts
of videogames. After all, God games and real-time
strategy games seem to present recognizable, real-life
phenomena like cities and armies, while exploration
games model seemingly realistic human beings

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wandering through recognizable environments built of
stone or wood.

But how closely can certain videogames ever hope
to recreate something from the real world; and how
does another sort of videogame, one that is built around
a purely fantastic world, persuade us that it is in some
sense real?

How can you simulate what doesn’t exist?

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3

UNREAL CITIES

Let’s get physical

You are playing a flashy, modern 3D videogame whose
theme is space combat. As your craft spins and yaws
around the fighting in response to frantic thumbpresses
and stick-yankings, the view from your cockpit shows
gorgeously rendered models of battlecruisers with
scarred gray hulls, detailed planet surfaces with moving
weather systems, accurately mapped constellations and
galactic dust-clouds floating serenely by in the distant
void. This must be the closest it is possible to get to
experiencing actual interstellar dogfighting. You feel
almost airsick, but exhilarated. Tracking, homing,
rolling, diving, firing, cackling in triumph. It’s pretty
real, isn’t it?

Actually, no. Consider this. You fight to get an
enemy craft in your sights, you fire off your lasers,

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but—damn!—you didn’t aim far enough ahead of the
fighter. By the time your lazy laser bolts reach their
destination, he’s sailed past. Videogames have nearly
always displayed lasers in this way, from the simple
fire-ahead of Space Invaders or Asteroids to the
rainbow-hued pyrotechnics of Omega Boost (1999).
But it’s wrong. Firing laser beams is not like skeet
shooting, because lasers are made of light,13 and light
travels very, very fast, at 300 million meters per
second. At the sort of distances modeled by
videogames, where fighting spacecraft are never more
than a mile or two apart, lasers will take about a
millionth of a second or less to hit home. It has been
demonstrated that the human mind cannot perceive as
separate events things that occur less than roughly three
thousandths of a second apart, so you will never have to
wait and watch for your lasers to hit home because, to
you, they will do so immediately.

But what of your enemy? Say he’s a nippy little
xenomorph, flying at thirty thousand feet per second.
That’s about twelve times faster than Concorde.
Unfortunately, even if he’s two miles away, and flying
directly across your sights (perpendicular to your line
_________________

13 Light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation, to be precise.

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of aim) at that high speed, he will have moved a
pathetic total of four inches sideways in the time it
takes your laser beam to travel from your guns to his
hull. So unless he is very small, he is still very blown
up. Eat dust, little green man.

But perhaps our alien has very, very quick
reactions. Maybe he can spot your lasers firing, and
immediately engage some sort of warp drive to get him
the hell out of there in time. No, again. Because he
cannot see your lasers coming until some light from
your firing guns has traveled to his eyes. Unfortunately,
your lasers arrive at precisely the same time. As soon as
he sees you fire, he’s dead.

14

And thanks to Einstein’s
theory of special relativity, one of whose principles is
that light appears to travel at a constant speed
regardless of the speed and direction of travel of any
observer, the alien is still fried the moment he sees you
fire even if he is running away in the opposite direction
as close to the speed of light as his little fusion engines
can manage.

That’s not all. Most of the time the lasers in this
epic space battle should be completely invisible. The
multi-hued rain of laser fire all around, a paradigm
_________________

14 This example is modified from one given in Lawrence M. Krauss’s, The
Physics of Star Trek, p. 165.

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whose early apotheosis was defined by the beautifully
chaotic red and green laser bolt choreography in the
film Star Wars (1977)—that’s wrong too. A laser is a
very tightly concentrated ray of photons that have been
lined up so they are all traveling in exactly the same
direction (unlike a normal light source, which scatters
all over the place). Like any sort of light, a laser is only
visible if it reflects off something. At a club, for
instance, the low-powered circling laser beams are
visible because they are reflecting off small particles in
the intermingled clouds of dry ice and cigarette smoke.
However, anyone who tried to smoke a cigarette in the
interstellar void would have his brains sucked out
through his face (in fact, he wouldn’t be able to light
the cigarette in the first place, owing to the lack of
oxygen). There is no dry ice, either—space is, more or
less, a vacuum. Which means there is nothing that light
can reflect off on its way to the target. Hence, lasers are
invisible, unless they are coming straight at you, in
which case you are dead.

One corollary of this, of course, is that if the
cunning enemy aliens were to build their craft with
perfectly mirrored hulls, they would be impervious to
laser attack, because the light would just bounce off
them. You’d have thought they’d have worked that one

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out in all the time they’ve had since Space Invaders,
getting thoroughly vaporized time and time again.

Why, then, do videogames get it so wrong? The
answer is they get it wrong deliberately, because with
“real” laser behavior it wouldn’t be much of a game. It
would be far too easy to blow things up. The challenge
of accounting for an enemy craft’s direction and speed,
of aiming appropriately off-target, and the concomitant
satisfaction of scoring a fiery hit, are artifacts of this
unrealism. Generally, the world-building philosophy of
videogames is one in which certain aspects of reality
can be modeled in a realistic fashion, while others are
deliberately skewed, their effects caricatured or
dampened according to the game’s requirements.

The most intriguing way in which videogames are
apparently becoming more “realistic” is in the arcane
world of physical modeling. Laser behavior may be a
fantastical paradigm, but such games nevertheless
enforce very strict systems of gravity and motion.
Videogames increasingly codify such natural laws,
such as those of Newtonian physics and beyond, in ever
more accurate ways. This sounds abstruse and
technical, but you have already experienced it if you’ve
ever played or seen a game even as old as Pong (1972).
Pong was modeled on simple physics: the way

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the ball bounced off the bat obeyed the basic law “angle
of incidence equals angle of reflection.” Approach a
stationary bat at an angle of forty-five degrees, and
you’ll leave it at the same angle. Elementary stuff.
Similarly, Asteroids enjoyed a smattering of physics
modeling in the fact that your spacecraft had inertia:
you carried on moving across the screen even when
your engines stopped firing. And mastering this inertial
control system (later refined and made much trickier in
games like Thrust) was part of what made the game so
enjoyably challenging. Now processor speeds are such
that ever more tiny variables can be computed “on the
fly”—near instantaneously, as and when required—to
give the player a sense of interacting with objects that
behave just as they would in the real world.

At the vanguard of physics modeling is a company
called Mathengine. Their airy, relaxed Oxford
headquarters is crammed with casual young
mathematicians and physicists gazing intently at the
screens of muscular computers. One displays a crude
wireframe representation, in blocky green lines, of a
human calf and foot. “Modeling a simple ankle joint,”
the programmer confides. This sort of thing will soon
have applications in, for instance, soccer games: the

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virtual players will respond to physical knocks and
tackles through a system based on detailed mechanical
models of the human musculo-skeletal system, rather
than through predetermined animations. Motioncapture
techniques, based on filming human actors and
digitizing the results, synthesize “realistic” movement
from the outside, and so in-game possibilities are
strictly limited to those that have been filmed in the
development studio. Physical modeling, on the other
hand, synthesizes movement from the inside, from the
interaction of fundamental parts, and so allows a
theoretically infinite range of character movement.

Other Mathengine demonstrations include a ball
bouncing onto a slatted rope bridge, whose resonant
swings and twists differ every time according to where
exactly the ball was dropped; and a string-puppet
articulated elephant, controlled just as in reality by a
wooden cross from which the strings hang, and which
can be tilted on two axes by manipulating a
motionsensing joypad attached to the computer. One
begins to have an ever stronger sense of moving
objects, rather than mere patterns.

Mathengine provides a software development kit
for games designers and other industries that allows
the developer to use “real,” very accurate and

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processor-cheap physics in his or her applications. If a
game company is writing a racing game, for instance,
using a kit like Mathengine’s the car can be defined as
a certain mass resting, through a suspension system, on
four wheels, which have a certain frictional relationship
with the road. From this very simple mathematical
definition, it turns out that “realistic” car behavior, such
as oversteer and understeer, loadshifting and tilting,
comes for free. Whereas games developers used to have
to “kludge” the physics, to laboriously create something
that approximated to realistic behavior, physical
modeling makes it all happen as behavior emerging
from a simple set of definitions.

And this process directly affects the videogame
player’s experience. As Mathengine’s product manager
Paul Topping puts it, “Dynamic properties are a very
intuitive thing.” We are used to handling objects with
mass, bounce and velocity in the real world, and we can
predict their everyday interactions pretty well. You
don’t have to be Paul Newman to know roughly how a
pool ball is going to bounce off a cushion; you don’t
have to be Glenn Gould to know that striking a piano
key with force is going to produce a louder sound than
if you’d caressed it. And anyone who plays tennis is

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automatically doing pretty complex parabolic calculus
without any conscious thought. Appreciation of
dynamic properties is hard-wired into the species—it’s
essential for survival. This, then, is one of the most
basic ways in which videogames speak to us as the real
world does, directly to the visceral, animal brain—
even as they tease the higher imagination by building a
universe that could never exist.

Furthermore, just as timing a good shot in tennis is
a pleasure in itself, there is a direct link between
convincing videogame dynamics and gameplay
pleasure. A game that is more physically realistic is
thereby, Topping says, “more aesthetically pleasing,”
because the properly modeled game enables us
pleasurably to exercise our physical intuition. “All
great games have physics in them—that’s what gives it
the lovely feel,” Topping points out. And this is just as
true for classic games such as Defender or Asteroids as
it is for modern racers like Gran Turismo 2000. In
Defender, you aim your ship to face left or right and
then thrust, and the simple inertia means that you can
flip around and fire at aliens while still traveling
backward; the subsequent application of forward thrust
takes time to kick in. Even a very simple puzzle game
such as Bust-A-Move exercises the intuitive

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knowledge of Pong-style (or, in the real world,
squashstyle) angular reflections, as bubbles may be
bounced off the side walls to achieve tactically
desirable formations that are impossible by aiming
directly.

Even so, the physical systems that games can model
so accurately are never totally “realistic.” Just as with
the operation of lasers, videogames deliberately load
the dice one way or another. If you put a Formula One
racing driver in front of an accurately modeled racing
game, Topping says, he would still crash the car,
because of the gulf between controllability and visual
feedback. And an ordinary player would find the game
merely boring and frustrating. So, Topping explains,
“You’re gonna fake the physics. Increase friction, make
the car smaller— you choose what you model
properly.”

The lesson is that even with whiz-bang math
programming, a videogame in important ways remains
defiantly unreal. Videogames’ somewhat paradoxical
fate is the ever more accurate modeling of things that
don’t, and couldn’t, exist: a car that grips the road like
Superglue, which bounces uncrumpled off roadside
barriers; a massive spacecraft with the maneuverability
of a bumblebee; a human being who can survive, bones
intact, a three-hundred-foot fall into water. We

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don’t want absolutely real situations in videogames. We
can get that at home.

Let’s stick together

Naturally, the player doesn’t mind this fakery, this
playing fast and loose with the laws of nature in the
name of fun. But a critical requirement is that the
game’s system remains consistent, that it is internally
coherent. Crucially, it is lack of coherence rather than
unrealism that ruins a gameplaying experience. This is
largely but not exclusively a phenomenon of more
modern videogames, whose increasing complexity in
terms of space, action and tasks clearly places a greater
strain on the designer’s duty to create a rock-solid
underlying structure.

Videogame incoherence has three types: it can
apply to causality, function or space. Incoherence of
causality, firstly, appears, for ex-ample, in a driving
game such as V-Rally (1997), where driving at full
speed into another car causes a slight slowing down,
but hitting a boulder at the road’s edge leads to a
spectacular vehicular somersault. Another example
crops up in Tomb Raider III, where a rocket-launcher
blows up one’s enemies into pleasingly gory, fleshy
chunks, but does no damage to a simple wooden door,

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for which one simply has to find a rusty old key.
(Indeed, having traveled far from the austere
nearperfection of its original incarnation, Tomb Raider
III boasts many instructive examples of design
incoherence.) In direct contrast, Quake III incorporates
the hilarious but highly coherent idea of
“rocketjumping.” You’ve got a rocket-launcher. If you
point it at the floor and then fire as you jump, you’ll be
catapulted much higher into the air by the recoil of your
foolishly potent weapon. Eminently reasonable.

Incoherence of function is more serious. In many
games one encounters “single-use” objects, such as a
magic book that only works in a particular location or a
cigarette lighter that can only be used to illuminate a
certain room. Resident Evil typifies this lazy approach
to game design, with all manner of special scrolls,
gems, books and other things that are used once as
puzzle-solving tokens and then forgotten about. Tomb
Raider’s rocket-launcher fails on this count too,
because its use is artificially restricted in the game. If a
game designer chooses to give the player a special
object or weapon, it ought to work consistently and
reliably through all appropriate circumstances in the
game, or the believably unreal illusion is shattered.

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By contrast, perfect coherence of function is great
fun. It is just one virtue of Zelda 6415 that, despite the
colorfully huge gallimaufry of in-game objects, they are
hardly ever single-use items; it is an unprecedentedly
rich and varied yet highly consistent gameworld. The
titular ocarina, a clay flute, has a different function
according to what tune is played on it: if Link plays
certain songs he has learned (the gamer must physically
play the notes using the control buttons), he may cause
day to turn to night, invoke a storm, warp to a different
place in the gameworld or cheer up a miserable rock­eating king. Link’s hoverboots can be used in several
different places for several different results. The bow
and arrow might be used to kill a far-away enemy, or
(in one brilliant problem) to melt a frozen switch by
firing an arrow through the flame of a blazing torch
while standing on a revolving platform.

But of course a bow and arrow isn’t going to open
locked doors. You wouldn’t expect it to. The hookshot,
a retracting chain device with a hook on the end, may
be used to kill enemies, but it is also a means to get up
to hard-to-reach places, Batman-style. Even here there
_________________

15 Shorthand for the remainder of this book for Legend of Zelda: Ocarina
of Time.

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is a thoughtful, stern consistency based on properties of
physical substances: Link’s hookshot will bounce off
stone, but if it hits wood it will sink in and let him
swing up. And the player can be sure that a burning
stick will always light a torch, wherever it may be
encountered.

The third type of incoherence is that of spatial
management. Tomb Raider III adds to its heroine’s
series of possible moves—which already include
implausibly high jumps and rolls—a crawl, so that the
player can move around in low passageways. But at a
certain stage in the game Lara finds herself at the end
of a low tunnel, giving out onto a corridor. Try as the
player might, it is impossible to get Lara out into that
corridor, owing to the game’s basic construction around
a series of uniformly sized blocks. If the tunnel
entrance were a full block above the corridor floor,
Lara could get out. But the getting-out-of-a-tunnel
animation requires her to lower herself fully down the
side of the block while hanging from her hands, and the
tunnel exit does not achieve the required altitude. So
the move becomes impossible. This sort of
inconsistency also rears its gory head in Resident Evil,
where the player is not allowed simply to drop
unwanted objects on the floor, but must stow them

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away in one of several chests—and, risibly, an object
put in one chest may be retrieved from another chest
three floors higher up in the building.

By these standards, Tomb Raider III and Resident
Evil are arguably inferior to Space Invaders or Pong,
both of which exhibit total consistency in the laws of
the imaginary world. As Chris Crawford says in The
Art of Computer Game Design, special-case rules
(which roughly map on to our causal, functional and
spatial incoherences) are bad: “In the perfect game
design, each rule is applied universally.” This is easy to
verify if you consider the situation in other types of
game—chess, for instance: Garry Kasparov would be
profoundly, glaringly unimpressed if his opponent
sought to stave off defeat by pronouncing that, actually,
at this particular juncture, the black queen was not
allowed to move diagonally.

Tomb Raider III also illustrates perfectly another
potential danger of trying to increase “realism” in a
game—in this case by adding extra ranges of
movement to a human character. Because the hero of
Manic Miner lives in such a resolutely bizarre world,
where flying electrified lavatories are the least of his
worries, we do not worry that our character is able only
to walk and to jump. But in the far more

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naturalistic milieu of the Tomb Raider series, the
bolted-on possibilities of movement that are added in
each sequel only serve to remind the player how odd it
is that Lara can run, swim, crawl and jump, but cannot
punch or kick an assailant, for instance. She cannot
even sit down, although given her lecherously
siliconenhanced curves, it is probably just as well, for
she would never get up again.

This is not to say that expanded physical
possibilities in human characters are bad—in
themselves they are good—but their introduction poses
other problems of design that must be attended to. In
Zelda 64, for instance, Link’s inability to punch or kick
is never an issue, for by the time he is first in danger he
already permanently owns a sword. A sword is better
than a fist, so the player doesn’t feel that anything is
missing. By contrast, Lara Croft often goes about
unarmed among enemies, having had her guns
confiscated, and so her unwillingness to punch and kick
is frustrating.

To complain about these aspects in a game, of
course, is not incompatible with happily accepting that
the heroine must on occasion do battle with a slavering
Tyrannosaurus rex. There is a crucial difference
between axiomatic principles of the fantastical world

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on the one hand—for instance, the laser behavior
considered earlier, or Manic Miner’s winged cisterns—
and inconsistencies in the fantastical system—such as
Lara’s rocket-launcher or Resident Evil’s item boxes—
on the other.

Life in plastic

Of Sweeney’s 16three certainties of life,
videogames have so far largely eschewed birth and
copulation. But, as if in sardonic compensation,
they are triply teeming with death. And their
particular reinvention of death is but one of a
whole lexicon of happily irrealist principles that
videogames have amassed over their history.
Death in a videogame is multimodal: it means one
thing for your enemies, another thing for certain
other types of enemies, yet another for you. Shoot
a space invader and he is gone for ever. Kill a
dungeon skeleton in Zelda 64 and it is dust—but if
you leave and then reenter the room, it has
horribly regenerated, there to be fought all over
again. But what does death mean for you, the
player? If the aliens’ rain of bombs becomes
overwhelming and one hits your ship, blowing it
to pixelated smithereens, it is certainly bad news.
But wait—suddenly a gleaming new ship
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16 Protagonist of T. S. Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes, that is.

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appears at the bottom of the screen, under your control,
and you can continue the never-ending battle from the
point where you left off.

We are used to thinking of “life” as a single,
sacred thing, the totality of our experiences. But
videogames redefine a “life” as an expendable,
iterable part of a larger campaign. In part this
resembles the brutal calculus of war, where a human
life, normally the definition of total value in
peacetime, is arithmetized as being worth, say, one
hundredth of the value of taking the next ridge. But
videogames offer a multitude of lives to the same
individual. It is instant reincarnation, though
reincarnation in a body indistinguishable from the
original. It is instant expiation for the sin of failure.
The standard number of lives granted at the
beginning of a game is three, which corresponds to
the paradigmatic number of tries allowed in many
other games, from a baseball hitter’s number of
strikes to a javelin-thrower’s attempts at the gold, to
the number of doors from which a contestant must
choose in the American gameshow Let’s Make a
Deal,17 or the number of “acts” or significant
subdivisions of the protagonist’s story in classical
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17 Source of the amusing “Monty Hall Paradox” in probability theory. For
an excellent explanation, see Deborah J. Bennett, Randomness (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1999).