Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual 363

Trigger Happy

kill, you can find stylistic inspiration anywhere: in a detective novel, a film, a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, a heavy-metal album or a videogame. They won’t, however, implant the murderous desire in the first place.

A videogame can even be seen as positively valuable if it enables the formal imitation of dangerous or criminal activities in a safe and consequence-free environment. Sam Houser, president of Rockstar Games, which published Grand Theft Auto 2 in 1999, quotes the New York Police Department as happily approving of the joyriding and cop-killing in his notorious product: “We’d rather they did it in your game than on the street.”

And yet, precisely because of their huge commercial and cultural successes, videogames cannot be immune from ethical considerations. We have, after all, been discussing them as art.54 So let’s return to one of our primary themes: our old friend, the reality of the unreal world.

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54 “Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.” Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

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