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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:
trighap@hotmail.com.
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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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