Trigger Happy
society. His final, polemical chapter holds that the modern world (he was writing in 1938) is anomic and impoverished precisely because games have been torn from their organic place at the heart of community and neatly cordoned off into such spheres as that of professional sports. If this is true, we should not be surprised that at the beginning of the third millennium, the eternal human need for play has sprouted once more in radical, electronic form, and will very soon constitute the world’s largest entertainment industry.
This might even be a cause for optimism. Videogames allow for, are often specifically built for, a form of social play activity. Indeed, a great many gamers, including me, find videogaming at its most pleasurable in such a context. At its smallest level, social videogaming involves two, three or four friends racing cars against each other or beating each other up through colorful digital surrogates on the screen. The videogame console is mediating and providing the visual forms for such contests, but the pleasure is largely a social one. Richard Darling of Codemasters agrees. “One of the most enjoyable times that people have when they’re playing games tends to be good multiplayer
288
