Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 157)

Trigger Happy
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it did boring first-person shooter sequences with
weapons such as the cow-launcher.
If film, as Jean-Luc Godard said, is “truth, twenty-
four times a second,” then modern videogames are lies
that hit the nervous system at two and a half times the
frequency. Videogames, as we have seen, have
borrowed from movie visuals. But films, too, have
borrowed from videogame dynamics. Such proximities,
however, are purely cosmetic, far outweighed by the
structural dissimilarities. Videogames, far from being
an inferior type of film, are something different
altogether. The comparison between the forms—
initially so inviting because they both look like they are
doing similar things—is in the final analysis an
informatively limited one.
Here is one description of the cinematic experience
itself—Walter Benjamin’s poetic appreciation of the
perceptually liberating effect of early film:
Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our railroad stations
and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly.
Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by
the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the
midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and
adventurously go traveling.