Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy User Manual
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Trigger Happy
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affected by videogames in one way or another. Even if
you’ve never played Tomb Raider, you can’t escape the
clutches of Lara Croft.
People are always loath to admit that something
new can approach the status of art. Take this rather
aggressive ejaculation: “A pastime of illiterate,
wretched creatures who are stupefied by their daily
jobs, a machine of mindlessness and dissolution.” Such
high moral bile is typical of the attacks on videogames
today.
But this sentence wasn’t written about videogames;
it was written seventy years ago by French novelist
Georges Duhamel, about the movies. Yet today, few
people would argue that filmmaking is not an art form.
An art form that is dependent on new technology
always makes some people uneasy. The German
philosopher and musicologist Theodor Adorno
expressed his wariness of jazz (dependent on a recently
invented instrument, the saxophone, as well as
emerging recording technologies) in similar terms
during his correspondence with philosopher and critic
Walter Benjamin.
Videogames today find themselves in the position
that the movies and jazz occupied before World War II:
popular but despised, thought to be beneath serious