Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual 284

Trigger Happy

direct forerunner of the twentieth-century board game Risk, and in turn, technologically prostheticized and expanded, of real-time strategy videogames such as Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun.

Here is an account of the “judicial duel” in medieval English law:

Though sometimes fought to the bitter end, the judicial duel shows a tendency to assume the features of play. A certain formality is essential to it. The fact that it can be executed by hired fighters is itself an indication of its ritual character, for a ritual act will allow of performance by a substitute. . . .

Also, the regulations concerning the choice of weapons and the peculiar handicaps designed to give equal chances to unequal antagonists—as when a man fighting a woman has to stand in a pit up to his waist—are the regulations and handicaps appropriate to armed play. In the later Middle Ages, it would seem, the judicial duel generally ended without much harm done.42

This process, whereby combat is sublimated into a play form, leads all the way to modern beat-’em-up videogames such as Tekken Tag Tournament or Soul Calibur, where the abstraction is complete. Here, too,

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42 This description is taken from the cultural history of play by Johann Huizinga, Homo Ludens.

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