Trigger Happy

to beat your opponent or beat the computer at flicking this ball back.” Modern games, vastly more visually thrilling though they are, must still answer the same need. “We play videogames because they’re fun to play. You’re not playing it to further your education, you’re playing it as a means of leisure,” Smith emphasizes.

“And the games business now over the last six or seven years has gone from being a geeky, sad anorakperson in their bedsit playing games, to being a completely accepted culture of life. You can watch videos, listen to music or play a videogame—and at the moment I think playing videogames is top of the list.”

Ashes to ashes

The jewel in the crown of what videogames offer is the aesthetic emotion of wonder.

A beautifully designed videogame invokes wonder as the fine arts do, only in a uniquely kinetic way. Because the videogame must move, it cannot offer the lapidary balance of composition that we value in painting; on the other hand, because it can move, it is a way to experience architecture, and more than that to create it, in a way with which photographs or drawings

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Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual Ashes to ashes