Trigger Happy
The name’s melodrama, of course, grew out of the geopolitical tensions of the time. But despite the lurid sci-fi connotations, the game itself, which you can still play on the Internet,6 was serene, austere, a thing of alien beauty. Two dueling spaceships in a pas de deux against an electronic starfield, firing lazy torpedoes at each other in the silence of space, avoiding all the while the lethal gravitational pull of a central sun.
A leap of faith had been made. What these coffeeguzzling student pioneers realized was that new technology made possible a new sort of experience. The photons fizzing from the screen were conceived as manipulable packets of pleasure in themselves, rather than simply a fancy way for the computer to tell its user the result of a calculation via a dull string of numbers. Russell and his friends designed—or redesigned independently, to give Willy Higinbotham his due—the first symbolic visual interface. That, along with the work done by Xerox Parc in the 1970s, is why you use word processors and other software based around “windows” and “icons” rather than text. (Playing videogames, though, is generally acknowledged to be more fun than using Microsoft
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6Java-capable browsers can just point themselves at http://lcs.www.media.mit.edu/groups/el/projects/spacewar
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