Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 30)

Trigger Happy
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evaluation. Yet today there is a huge critical literature
that has expanded our understanding and appreciation
of films and jazz music. In half a century, I don’t doubt
that this will also be true for videogames.
I’m not trying to argue that there’s going to be a
revolution. Like it or not, the revolution has already
happened. Videogames are an enormous entertainment
business. The numbers, as we’ve seen, are huge. When
people talk about videogames, they tend to compare
them with forms they already know and love: film,
painting, literature and so on. But there’s one critical
difference that we need to bear in mind, and it throws a
huge spanner in the works of any easy equation
between videogames and traditional art forms. It’s this.
What do you do with a videogame? You play it.
In his Laws, Plato defined “play” like this: “That
which has neither utility nor truth nor likeness, nor yet,
in its effects, is harmful, can best be judged by the
criterion of the charm that is in it, and by the pleasure it
affords. Such pleasure, entailing as it does no
appreciable good or ill, is play.” It looks as if today’s
graphically astonishing videogames do have something
like “truth” or “likeness.” A casual observer would
certainly note the vast improvements in graphic style