Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual

Trigger Happy

were incinerated from afar; hospitals were bombed. Relying on pixels rather than eyes is perilous, because computers can malfunction, and pixels can lie. Moreover, if the modern pilot has been trained on souped-up videogame systems, we should not be surprised if, when he is performing exactly the same actions in exactly the same computerized context but in a real war zone, he fails utterly to realize that his actions now have a very real moral content. Behind the clean glowing lines of his computerized head-up display is an ugly mess of fire and blood. But he’s just playing a game.

This constitutes a lethal failure of imagination. And it is in this way that I do think videogames must have a type of moral responsibility. Of course, we cannot blame videogames for the deaths of Serbian civilians, yet videogame-seeded technologies have contributed to the potentially alienating culture of simulation that allowed them to be killed so easily, so cleanly. I think the duty of videogames, therefore, is an imaginative one—an aesthetic one.

The situation at present is not thoroughly black. The future is in the balance. Some videogames, for instance, have woken up to the favors they have exchanged with war technology, and are blushing.

393