Trigger Happy
Videogames are still a very young medium. Yet videogames already—it can hardly be denied— constitute a type of entertainment every bit as revolutionary, in its form, as cinema was for Benjamin. If it’s adventurous traveling the chthonic prisoner is after, videogames can deliver in spades, for the player is free to wander at will around an imaginary world, meet interesting people and burst things asunder by the dynamite of the sixtieth of a second.
Benjamin’s reference to “far-flung ruins and debris” is, of course, far more deeply ambivalent about the desirability of such a detonation. And there is more to say about the negative interpretation of such destruction in videogames. For the moment I should point out that, though the videogame world may currently be enslaved to Hollywood aesthetics, there is no reason why this should not change in the future. Director David Cronenberg has said: “In the graphic sense, many videogames can already be viewed as art, but overall I see a propensity to imitate Hollywood, which could be termed the ‘anti-art.’ Great videogame designers may have to struggle against this trend.”
If Hollywood is home to the anti-art that videogames must resist, where better to continue our investigations?
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