Trigger Happy
watching, you’re doing. And when videogames are at their best, what you’re doing is something vastly more creatively challenging than watching a docusoap or a quiz show. Your reasoning, reflexes and imagination are tested to exhilarating limits. That hunk of molded plastic, that PlayStation or Dreamcast, is a magic box that allows you to play with fire. A Prometheus engine.
Bad company
Fire is not necessarily an unqualified good. It can burn. Back in 1982, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. C. Everett Koop declared that videogames were evil entities that produced “aberrations in childhood behavior.” Then, videogames were abstract pixellated contests of timing and skill, but now they offer superbly detailed animations of blood and gore while you shoot an opponent’s head off in Kingpin or mow down pedestrians in your car in Carmageddon. The latter game was grudgingly granted the equivalent of an NC- 17 rating in 1997 by the British Board of Film Classification, on the condition that the victims’ blood was changed in color from red (too human) to green (acceptably zombie).
People are worried by such exultantly
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