Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual

Trigger Happy

beating your friends and competing with your friends than doing the same thing with computer-controlled opponents.”

This is similar to the pleasure of playing doubles in tennis, or playing a rubber of bridge; perhaps it is closer, however, to that of board games, which have always been advertised as social tools, fun for friends and family. Indeed videogames might be seen in this way as the logical next step from board games. The history of the board game sees a gradual moving away from the physical apparatus of the board, and an increased focus of attention on the players themselves, from the totally board-dependent games like chess and checkers, to games such as Monopoly or Risk where a lot of the action (alliance-forming and back-stabbing) takes place off the board, to Trivial Pursuit, where the board does little more than keep track of the score. Videogames extrapolate from this trend ad infinitum, because there is no physical stuff being moved around at all, just patterns of photons.

But the social aspect of board games and certain sports is multiplied innumerable times in the burgeoning phenomenon of online videogaming. Now there is a possibility of social play that is far greater than at any time before in human history. Users can

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