Trigger Happy
videogame at bottom is still a highly artificial, purposely designed semiotic engine. And its purpose is not to simulate real life, but to offer the gift of playing a game. When we are at play, whether in front of a videogame screen, in a chess cafÉ, at the bowling alley or in the park, we are citizens of an invisible city, built of signs.
We should not find that so surprising, because man, after all, is the symbolic animal. And this is exactly what videogames celebrate, challenge and feed. It’s no dumb accident that they appeared: once the technology was lying around, they simply had to happen. As Nolan Bushnell, the father of commercial videogaming, puts it dryly, videogames arose out of a natural wish to “make computers do fun things.” In this sense, they are an historically inevitable evolution of the play drive. To play a videogame is only human.
To win, of course, is divine.
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