Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual 286

Trigger Happy

must construct larger shapes—except the videogame challenge is again a dynamic one, introducing time pressure on the player.

And children have always made up their own “exploration games,” playing, for instance, in a deserted house and imbuing it with magical qualities. Now the technological prosthesis afforded by a videogame such as Tomb Raider or Zelda 64 allows such activity to be far more complex and cognitively challenging, so that the gamer really can, in Walter Benjamin’s phrase, “calmly and adventurously go traveling.” Again, Shigeru Miyamoto has said that he draws his inspiration from childhood memories of exploring the Kansai countryside around his home, finding caves and hidden paths through the woods.

History also tells us that seeing people at play has often angered those in power. In Saint-Omer in 1168, gameplayers were pilloried; in Basel in 1386, a backgammon player who had ignored an injunction to avoid the game had his eyes put out; the same punishment was common in fifteenth-century Amsterdam; and in Germany players might have limbs judicially amputated or be executed by drowning.43

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43 For more on the bloody history of gameplayers’ persecution, see Alain and FrÉdÉric Le Diberder, L’Univers des jeux vidÉo.

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