Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy User Manual
Page 348
Trigger Happy
350
videogame at bottom is still a highly artificial,
purposely designed semiotic engine. And its purpose is
not to simulate real life, but to offer the gift of playing a
game. When we are at play, whether in front of a
videogame screen, in a chess cafÉ, at the bowling alley
or in the park, we are citizens of an invisible city, built
of signs.
We should not find that so surprising, because man,
after all, is the symbolic animal. And this is exactly
what videogames celebrate, challenge and feed. It’s no
dumb accident that they appeared: once the technology
was lying around, they simply had to happen. As Nolan
Bushnell, the father of commercial videogaming, puts it
dryly, videogames arose out of a natural wish to “make
computers do fun things.” In this sense, they are an
historically inevitable evolution of the play drive. To
play a videogame is only human.
To win, of course, is divine.