Trigger Happy
evaluation. Yet today there is a huge critical literature that has expanded our understanding and appreciation of films and jazz music. In half a century, I don’t doubt that this will also be true for videogames.
I’m not trying to argue that there’s going to be a revolution. Like it or not, the revolution has already happened. Videogames are an enormous entertainment business. The numbers, as we’ve seen, are huge. When people talk about videogames, they tend to compare them with forms they already know and love: film, painting, literature and so on. But there’s one critical difference that we need to bear in mind, and it throws a huge spanner in the works of any easy equation between videogames and traditional art forms. It’s this. What do you do with a videogame? You play it.
In his Laws, Plato defined “play” like this: “That which has neither utility nor truth nor likeness, nor yet, in its effects, is harmful, can best be judged by the criterion of the charm that is in it, and by the pleasure it affords. Such pleasure, entailing as it does no appreciable good or ill, is play.” It looks as if today’s graphically astonishing videogames do have something like “truth” or “likeness.” A casual observer would certainly note the vast improvements in graphic style
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