Trigger Happy
In this, videogames are again part of a larger tradition: this time, that of the technological prostheticization of play in general. Tennis, for example, has been transformed over the past few decades by material racquet technologies and stringdampening. Serious chess players routinely use computer analysis and million-game CD-ROM databases to prepare for matches, or to work on correspondence games. Golfers may avail themselves of carbon-fiber clubs and balls coated with space-age Kevlar, so that they fly more truly through the air. The whole running shoe industry is predicated on a promise that an extra air pocket, say, will somehow make you run faster. And serious running is now itself in part a game of numbers made possible only by timing devices that count in the thousandths of a second.
Role-playing videogames began as a technological prostheticization of the Dungeons & Dragons board game, with the computer taking over the onerous duties of numerical calculation. Many videogames have arisen in this way, building on preexisting game formats. Time Crisis, for instance, the lightgun game, is at heart nothing more than a technologically enhanced version of fairground duck-shooting with airgun pellets, except that whereas the latter retains
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