Trigger Happy
videogames are also part of a different lineage. The arcade, which today is normally a fluorescently lit space crammed with the latest monster videogame cabinets and their ever more inventive control mechanisms—lightguns, life-size kayak oars, motorized snowboards, electronic drumkits, big plastic horses—has changed little from a sociological point of view in around a hundred years.
Back in the late nineteenth century, penny arcades also lured in a cross-section of visitors from all walks of life, especially in America, where they boasted coinoperated phonograph machines, candy dispensers, kinetoscopes and even X-ray machines (the latter were phased out as public amusements after it was shown that repeated use led to death, by what we now know as radiation poisoning). The next generation of technological fads was led by the mutoscope, a quasicinematic device that was, however, controlled by a mechanical crank, so that the viewer was able to choose the speed at which the film was played, to stop it or even to send it spinning backward.
Videogames are clearly part of a project that began more than a century ago, and whose aim was to domesticate the machine. Automatic textile-processing technology, for example, had only seventy years
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