Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Video Games
Steven Poole
Fourth Estate, £12, 254pp
Buy it at BOL
"A pastime of illiterate wretched creatures who are stupefied by their daily jobs, a machine of mindlessness and dissolution." Seventy years ago the French novelist George Duhamel thus characterised the cinema. Such venom, argues Steven Poole, is a frequent reaction to all new art forms, particularly those which are dependent on new technology.
Video games, an art form which now grosses more than cinema box office or video rental receipts, have attracted their share of opprobrium. The teenage killers at Colombine High School in Denver, Colorado, played Doom, the first-person shooter; ergo, video games cause violence. The New York police, on the other hand, commenting on the car-jacking, cop-killing game, Grand Theft Auto, told the game publisher: "We'd rather they did it in your game than on the street."
Poole isn't afraid to confront the big issues that are most often associated with gaming in the public mind, but his major contributions are quite unique in the annals of writing on video games. In Trigger Happy the phenomenon of games and gaming is soberly deconstructed. Plato is called as a witness on the role and nature of play and his concept of mimesis or representation shown to be central to the inner life of video games.
Graphical realism or photorealism has long been the Holy Grail of both developers and gamers, but Poole warns us to be careful what we wish for. Video games bear little resemblance to reality and are all the more entertaining for that. Much better the virtual interstellar dogfight, lasers blazing, than the prosaic reality: by the time you see the enemy's laser, you're dead. Reality, then, would be brutally short-lived, even with "infinite saves".
Heidegger, Nietzsche, Sophocles, Shakespeare and Wittgenstein all make cameo appearances as Poole attempts to define the central components of the video game and the essence of its appeal. He examines in depth the convergence between gaming and films but concludes that, despite mainly superficial common elements, the "two media have been engaged in a wary standoff".
The action genre in film has supplied video games with both form and content, but too many film licences translate into less than cutting-edge gaming. "Atari, having acquired the rights to produce an ET video game... produced nearly 6m copies. One fly in the ointment: the game was terrible. Gamers aren't stupid. Most of the cartridges were eventually buried in a landfill site in New Mexico, where one hopes they will eventually provide some amusement for archaelogists in the distant future." Some tie-ins do work. Goldeneye 007, the Bond game for the Nintendo 64, almost singlehandedly kept the company's head just above water as it struggled to match the PlayStation software catalogue.
Poole's thesis is not only that the degree of convergence is exaggerated, but that it is highly undesirable. "For the moment it is hard to see how video games and cinema could ever converge without losing the essential virtues of both." Cinema "is first and foremost a ride, like a fairground rollercoaster, part of whose pleasure is exactly that you are not steering, and you cannot decide to slow down. A video game, on the other hand, is an activity." Games are critically different from other art forms such as film, theatre and literature. "What do you do with a video game? You play it."
No book on games would be complete without the obligatory attempt to tackle that most problematic issue: why women don't play them. Traditionally it has been accepted that women prefer puzzle games, like Tetris. But as more young women drive fast cars, once the preserve of boy racers, it's quite common to see groups of women at trade shows queuing to go head to head in Gran Turismo, the racing game.
However, Trigger Happy's conclusion that women are quickly catching up has to be taken with a pinch of salt. "In 1998 in the US, female buyers accounted for the sale of fully 49% of PC games, and the purchasers of 51% of console titles were women." It seems much more likely that these purchasers are mothers buying games for their sons.
Given his profound understanding of the history, design and appeal of video gaming, and the central role of social play in our lives, it is disappointing that Poole does not deal more widely with online gaming. Playing games with your friends on a local area network is surely the highest form of play, but internet gaming, albeit mostly with strangers, is at last beginning to deliver.
Despite this one shortcoming, Trigger Happy is a critical contribution to our understanding of a still growing entertainment phenomenon which just won't go away. Universities and colleges in the UK are now offering courses on game design: Poole's work should be marked essential reading.
