Trigger Happy
Martin Amis astutely pointed out in 1982 that the burgeoning criticism of videogames even then was simply a repeat of “the heated debates about snooker and pool earlier in the century.”
Games are not serious, runs this argument, they are somehow intellectually degrading. Play, anthropologist Johann Huizinga happily concedes, is at base “irrational.” Though certain games might require a very high-level exercise of reason (chess), there seems to be no rational excuse for playing in the first place. One is simply spellbound. But games, rather than being a wasteful offshoot, are central to the formation of culture. Huizinga believes that play underpins all forms of ritual, and even religion itself. Ancient Greek mythology, for example, has a tradition of “theromorphia”—imagining people as beasts, like Zeus as a swan—and Huizinga argues that this can best be understood in terms of the play attitude. (This is, by the way, another play tradition that finds its way into modern videogames, for instance in the beat-’emup game Bloody Roar 2, where the humanoid fighters turn into monsters in order to inflict ever more ridiculous damage upon each other.)
Huizinga’s overarching contention in Homo Ludens is that play is indeed essential to civilized
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