Trigger Happy
enough people for you to arrange with friends at work to all log on at eight o’clock in the evening and play selectively, just against each other. So it doesn’t have to be the way Internet communication is portrayed in the media, with people who are rather sad and lonely communicating with strangers on other continents.
Videogames, clearly, are embedded in a deep and long tradition of play, and they borrow formally from many other games. Yet each borrowing is accompanied by a radical transmutation. From dominoes to pentominoes to Tetris; from spearthrowing to Time Crisis; from whist parties to thirty thousand people logged onto the Internet playing a science fiction RPG: the videogame format takes something old and makes of it something startlingly new. But what kind of fun do videogames offer that is uniquely their own?
Get into the groove
There must be a reason so many of the people I know who enjoy videogames describe racing a good lap in Colin McRae Rally or clearing waves in Defender as a “Zen” experience. This is understood to be shorthand for a kind of
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