Trigger Happy
appears at the bottom of the screen, under your control, and you can continue the
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
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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).
