Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual CinÉ qua non?

Trigger Happy

videogames present information to our eyes in the same way as films?

CinÉ qua non?

Since the upstart videogame form shattered film’s monopoly on the moving image, the two media have been engaged in a wary standoff. As their powers of graphic realization have increased, videogames have begun superficially to look a bit more like films, while films have become more interested in videogames as visual furnishing and conceptual subject matter. Videogames have lovingly appropriated set-piece forms from the cinematic milieux of horror, action and science fiction (the enormous monster, the car chase, the space dogfight), while films have stolen ever more brazenly from videogames’ hyperkinetic grammar (the exaggerated sound effects, the disregard for classical gravitational laws) in executing those same forms on the silver screen.

It is, of course, understandable that the mass media, in having to deal with the vast but to them incomprehensible culture of videogames, naturally reach for the vocabulary of film—apparently the nearest medium in visual terms—in order to describe such games as Silent Hill. But before we start positing

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