Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual

Trigger Happy

might eventually come to represent a revolutionary democratization of the nature of sport. Laurels are no longer determined simply by the tyranny of genes. Women and men, able-bodied and otherwise, can compete on a level playing field, a digital city of play where all are equal before the games begin.

Trigger Happy was written from the assumption that it made sense to talk about videogames in artistic terms— not in order to argue that games already constitute a fully fledged artform, but in order to point out the potential for such an eventual blossoming. It is clear, however, that so far, videogames are still struggling to emerge from their arrested adolescence.

Over the last eighteen months there have been ever more examples of this aesthetic stasis: the incoherent behavior of complex systems in driving or exploration games; the simplistic and eventually tedious semiotics of shooting or platform-jumping, and the slavish plagiarism of the same old cinema aesthetics—slimy biomechanoid spaceship interiors, moodily lit warehouses, rocky dungeons and sandy dunes. American McGee’s Alice (2001) was one of a few brave attempts to extend the visual vocabulary of videogame environments—with its surreally colored,

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