Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 386)

Trigger Happy
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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