Book Snippet: Trigger Happy - Steven Poole (2000)

Quick snippet on Steven Poole’s Trigger Happy (2000): a tutor recommended it to me and years later I bought my own copy because it was such a brilliant book. I describe it as a nonlinear tale full of fact but written in a jovial and insightful way. It peers at game culture under a lens and in a general context. 

He looks at games and films and the inevitable comparisons of their conventions, idiosyncrasies and industries;

‘The media buzz is that cinema and videogames are on convergent paths. If this is true, Hollywood ought to be worried that videogames are going to swallow it whole’ p. 78

He puts to the reader a question of why horror games seem to hold filmic similarities,

‘Why is it particularly the horror genre, and to a lesser extent science fiction, that largely provides the aesthetic compost for supposedly ‘filmlike’ videogames? No one has yet claimed that a videogame is like a good comedy film…, or that a videogame tells a heart breaking romance’ p. 79

His answer is ‘the horror genre can easily do away with character and plot; it is the detail of the monsters, the rhythm of the tension and shocks that matters’ (p. 79).

He ends with what he hopes will be achieved, however he speaks of clichés and conventions that have been done and redone;

‘With the advent of the next generation of hardware videogame designers do have a broader canvas to work on. But they could easily continue to paint the same old compromised clichés in prettier colours; and, as in any cultural form, most of them probably will’ p. 254

Overall, he wishes for games to carry on with their journey into a respected artist landscape;

‘This book was written from the assumption that it makes sense to talk about videogames in artistic terms – not in order to argue that games already constitute a fully fledged artform, blossoming’ p. 254.

However the book was published 2000 and since then, and during that time, there have been shining examples of games that are still on their respectful pedestals.