Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual

Trigger Happy

the Timaeus, Plato’s eponymous speaker reasons that the entire universe is made up of simple geometrical shapes that can be represented by the first four numbers: one is a point, two is a line, three is a triangle and four is the simplest non-spherical solid, a triangular pyramid. Numerological essays in cabbalism spring from the same idea, and from medieval times onward religious thinkers hoped that applying geometrical analysis to the universe would enable them, in Stephen Hawking’s retrospectively apt phrase, “to know the mind of God.” In the thirteenth century, Roger Bacon praised the religious power of the developing tradition of “geometric figuring” in painting; making the figures in religious scenes as lifelike as possible, he argued, could induce in the pious a sense of actually witnessing the events depicted.

Artists began to experiment with geometrical analyses of that most important form, the human body. Engravings by artists such as DÜrer and SchÖn show how an understanding of corporeal proportion is aided by reducing the body to simple geometrical building blocks. But this method was not just a device or a trick. The Dutch artist Crispyn van der Passe, for instance, produced in 1643 a large encyclopedia of

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