Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual

Trigger Happy

the fighting is performed on the player’s behalf by a digital “substitute”; here, too, unequally skilled human players may have a sporting match by tweaking the videogame’s built-in “handicap” device. Not only has bloody violence been transformed into a choreography of light, but the animus between contestants that gave rise to the judicial trial is now but a folk memory underlying cheerful competitiveness. So the physical and jurisprudential content has leaked out over the years, but the form endures.

The very fact that such forms still induce pleasure when played as videogames today seems to demonstrate that, though they initially grew out of practical concerns, ancient games could never have been wholly functional exercises in the first place. In other words, whatever other purpose they served, games must always in part simply have been fun.

Even such apparently purist, abstract videogames as Tetris have some similarities with older forms of play. Tetris itself is from one angle a dynamic jigsaw, in its demands of shape-matching; its designer, Alexei Pajitnov, on the other hand, has said that his original formal inspiration was pentominoes, a family of puzzles involving twelve differently shaped blocks, each made up of five squares, from which the player

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