Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual

Trigger Happy

Videogames are powerful, but they are nothing without humans to play them. So the inner life of videogames—how they work—is bound up with the inner life of the player. And the player’s response to a well-designed videogame is in part the same sort of response he or she has to a film, or to a painting: it is an aesthetic one.

Alain and FrÉdÉric Le Diberder, authors of an excellent French book on videogames called L’Univers des jeux vidÉo, welcome this idea with open arms. They already declare that the videogame is the “tenth art.”3 Most people are not yet so progressive. But videogames clearly have the potential to become an art form, even if they are not there yet.

Here’s why. A videogame is put together by highly talented artists and graphic designers, as well as programmers, virtual architects and sonic engineers. Increasingly, first-class graduates in computer science from such universities as Cambridge and MIT are moving into videogames rather than academic research; there is also a large flow of animation talent

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3 Tradition (since the Athenian Greeks and Confucian Chinese) has held that there are six distinct arts: music, poetry, architecture, painting, dance and sculpture. The Le Diberders add TV, movies and bandes dessinÉes (graphic novels) to the list, and then declare the videogame the tenth.

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