Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 158)

Trigger Happy
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Videogames are still a very young medium. Yet
videogames already—it can hardly be denied—
constitute a type of entertainment every bit as
revolutionary, in its form, as cinema was for Benjamin.
If it’s adventurous traveling the chthonic prisoner is
after, videogames can deliver in spades, for the player
is free to wander at will around an imaginary world,
meet interesting people and burst things asunder by the
dynamite of the sixtieth of a second.
Benjamin’s reference to “far-flung ruins and debris”
is, of course, far more deeply ambivalent about the
desirability of such a detonation. And there is more to
say about the negative interpretation of such destruction
in videogames. For the moment I should point out that,
though the videogame world may currently be enslaved
to Hollywood aesthetics, there is no reason why this
should not change in the future. Director David
Cronenberg has said: “In the graphic sense, many
videogames can already be viewed as art, but overall I
see a propensity to imitate Hollywood, which could be
termed the ‘anti-art.’ Great videogame designers may
have to struggle against this trend.”
If Hollywood is home to the anti-art that
videogames must resist, where better to continue our
investigations?