Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 276)

Trigger Happy
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previously been causing an unimaginable upheaval in
the lives of millions, forcing people out of work and
instigating the formation of resistance groups such as
the Luddites.
41
The lesson was quickly learned. By the
1890s, the fruits of applied science were deliberately
offered to the public in a markedly different way: not as
labor-replacing devices, but simply as entertainments.
Progress, the arcades argued, could be fun.
High technology today is thoroughly domesticized.
The process is complete. Many living rooms are
furnished with a television, video recorder and hi-fi
system—not to mention, in twenty million European
homes, a PlayStation, whose very name continues the
proselytizing argument: it is the antithesis of a
workstation, a place where one taps seriously away at a
beige PC on spreadsheets or word-processing software.
A PlayStation puts the kind of computational power
that was the stuff of science fiction just a few decades
ago to the sole purpose of entertaining the user. Not
only can it be argued that videogames played a
significant part in quelling the fear of technology, they
have made technology our friend, our playmate.
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41 For an excellent history, see Kirkpatrick Sale, Rebels against the Future.