Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 354)

Trigger Happy
356
watching, you’re doing. And when videogames are at
their best, what you’re doing is something vastly more
creatively challenging than watching a docusoap or a
quiz show. Your reasoning, reflexes and imagination
are tested to exhilarating limits. That hunk of molded
plastic, that PlayStation or Dreamcast, is a magic box
that allows you to play with fire. A Prometheus engine.
Bad company
Fire is not necessarily an unqualified good. It can burn.
Back in 1982, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. C. Everett
Koop declared that videogames were evil entities that
produced “aberrations in childhood behavior.” Then,
videogames were abstract pixellated contests of timing
and skill, but now they offer superbly detailed
animations of blood and gore while you shoot an
opponent’s head off in Kingpin or mow down
pedestrians in your car in Carmageddon. The latter
game was grudgingly granted the equivalent of an NC-
17 rating in 1997 by the British Board of Film
Classification, on the condition that the victims’ blood
was changed in color from red (too human) to green
(acceptably zombie).
People are worried by such exultantly bad-taste
imagery. Such scientific investigation as has been done