Trigger Happy
drama.18 In a universe where guns have infinite ammunition and spacecraft infinite fuel, it is life itself that becomes a resource whose loss is survivable.
Yet a videogame “life” is not just a resource but also a possible reward. Games such as Defender or Space Invaders offer “extra lives” when a certain score is achieved (usually a multiple of ten or twenty thousand). It resembles an ethically inverted form of Buddhism. In the Eastern philosophy, if you commit wrongs, your growing karmic debt means you are constantly reincarnated into a new existence in order to suffer anew. But whereas Buddhism’s final aim is to jump off the exhausting carousel of constant reincarnation and to be no more, life in a videogame is always a good thing, and killing is the morally praiseworthy action required to resurrect it. The fact that simple survival edges the player closer, as the score increases, to an extra life argues
The concept of multiple videogame “lives,” then, bespeaks an arena of strategic experimentation in
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18 The claim that classical drama was born from the gameplaying instinct is made persuasively in Johann Huizinga, Homo Ludens.
