Trigger Happy 2.0: The Art and Politics of Videogames

Trigger Happy #2

by Steven Poole

Why can’t a wargame be anti-war? Why does “gamification” spit on the downtrodden? And why do so many videogames take the form of boring jobs? Investigating the aesthetics, politics, and psychology of modern videogames, the mini-essays in this long-awaited follow-up to 2000's Trigger Happy are an edited and revised selection of Steven Poole's much-loved columns for Edge magazine. In it, you'll find out why the Tomb Raider series is like the oeuvre of Mark Rothko, why Nietzsche might have enjoyed Donkey Kong, and what "self co-op", "cognitive panic" and "unreliable agency" mean when you're gripping a joypad or clawing at a mouse.

Praise for Trigger Happy:

"A seminal piece of work" — Edge
"A bright and beautiful writer" — Tony Parsons
"Splendid… witty, comprehensive and passionate" — Times
"A critical contribution to our understanding… Essential reading" — Guardian
"A delightful and insightful romp" — Evening Standard
"A witty, erudite treat" — Select
"From the design standpoint, I haven't seen any better history of the game industry, and more importantly what that history means, than Steven Poole's Trigger Happy" — Ernest Adams, Gamasutra

Genres: Games, Video Games, Nonfiction

Kindle Edition

Published July 1, 2013

Reviews

[Kalin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Recommended. I'll let my reading notes speak for themselves:

~

What is the Citizen Kane of videogames? In the constantly churned field of gamer chat, this is a zombie question: one you thought was righteously killed long ago, but that keeps popping up anew, shambling around the internet dripping gobbets of putrefying flesh, with a terrifying void where its higher intellectual functions used to be. Is it actually credible, for a start, that all these people should adore Citizen Kane so much? Do they have walls fully papered with Citizen Kane posters? Do they watch it on Blu-Ray every month after lighting candles and putting on their special socks, embroidered at the ankles with twin likenesses of Orson Welles’s chubby face? Is the sound of a dying man wheezing “Rosebud” what they use as a ringtone on the “smart” phones they moaningly stroke on public transport? 
No; presumably the incantation of this film’s name has just become anxious shorthand for something like “a medium-defining masterpiece”. So we could ask, if you prefer: What is the Battleship Potemkin of videogames? Or, What is the Seventh Seal of videogames?
But why stop there, since we are already having so much fun? It must be equally fascinating to ask other cross-medium questions. I hereby demand to know: What is the Wire of popular song? What is the Paradise Lost of television? What is the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” of classical ballet? What is the Love’s Labour’s Lost of pottery?

~ While Poole can be snarky at times (or excessively vehement in denying the connection of video games to other art forms), his voice is unfailingly intelligent and entertaining. Such as here:

Once upon a time, for a start, scores meant something. When the high-score table of the Asteroids machine at my local fish-and-chip shop had STV at number one, people looked at me in the street with a new kind of respect. (Or perhaps they were paedophiles: who knows, it was a more innocent age.)

~ Here's a criticism of quick time events I hadn't considered before:

The diving, meanwhile, is pure QTE: press square, then square and X, then point your stick downwards (because you’re diving, like, down into the water?). At this point there is no difference between watersports and Heavy Rain, apart from the arbitrary illustrative visuals that you are only half-watching because you’re concentrating on the tiny symbols. This is, of course, the permanent aesthetic defect of QTEs: whatever is happening “behind” them — ie, actually in the gameworld — is demoted in consequence, because it could be literally anything. Note to the IOC: for Rio 2016, I propose QuickTime Eventing as the most boring possible demonstration sport.

~ I didn't know about this doctrine of "national-security ideology." Now I'm a wee bit scared.

(...) reflect anew on how what one might call “national-security ideology” is uncritically internalized in so many videogames today.
Take Splinter Cell: Conviction Periodically throughout the game you meet a person whom you are not allowed to shoot (hello, white-X reticule) but must instead “interrogate”, basically so that you know which door to go through next. Pressing B in response to the repeated on-screen prompts to “interrogate” each such person results in your character performing various acts of close-up violence: smashing a guy’s face into a desk; pinning him against a wall and choking him; kneeing him in the stomach, and so forth. This kind of thing is what the Bush-Cheney administration called “enhanced interrogation techniques”; or, in other words, torture. 
Of course we are not meant to take these scenes in Splinter Cell seriously: the torturee’s symbolic role is merely that of a malfunctioning vending machine, which needs to be slapped a few times with the action button so that it dispenses the appropriate informational token. And one is hardly going to weep for these characters, given the hundreds of others one mercilessly necksnaps or headshots. But it’s the very fact that such “interrogation” scenes are so automatic and unproblematized that reveals how deeply the game is immersed — or, to use an appropriate buzzword about the relationship between war and the media, embedded — in national-security ideology: the proposition that, when it comes to anything that can be labelled “terrorism”, any and all behaviour is not only acceptable but morally necessary. 
The bin Laden boss might have been defeated, but national-security ideology is always on the lookout for a new monster. The British police now keep tabs on a category of citizens called “domestic extremists”: not obsessive vacuumers and washers-up, but activists for various causes who have never committed any violent action. Videogames can surely learn from these developments to create exciting new fantasy justifications for violence. Personally, I can’t wait for the game that has you “interrogate” campaigners for animal rights and gay marriage, or “kettle” a crowd of peaceful anti-cuts demonstrators. After all, you never know: they might be about to turn into zombies.

~

A more troubling approach, for me, came a couple of years ago in Shadow of the Colossus. My enchantment at the kinetic challenge and haunting beauty of the game was quickly replaced by a sense of waste and guilt at my serial murdering of these dumb giants. I suspected that this was perhaps going to turn out to be the point, but I couldn’t bear to carry on. The aesthetic pleasures weren’t enough, for me, to outweigh the powerful regret the game so astonishingly succeeded in engendering. If a game of violence is so effective in its message of anti-violence that you actually stop playing, does that mean it was a success or a failure?

Hell ... yeah?

~ Let's go out with a snicker:

The debate continued to simmer in the serious press, however, as to whether books retard children’s development. The author of a new government-commissioned report, Kanye Mould, announced this morning: “It’s obvious that videogames like Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth teach our children the critical life-skills of logic and deduction, and offer them valuable preparation for careers in academic philosophy as argumentation theorists. On the other hand, parents are rightly worried that too many children are spending hours a day slack-jawed on the sofa, passively consuming books that brainwash them into thinking that it is possible to have sexual intercourse with vampires, or that there exist schools for wizards.”

[bubez · Rating 4 out of 5]

A selection from Poole's Edge column, organized thematically, spanning ~2000-12. It's not as outdated as I thought, there are many sparks of ideas that would still be useful today, for designers, critics and players — including the works and the people from outside the video game world that are cited, from philosophy, literature, music, etc.
Poole has always very strong opinions, many are political ones, most of them are very fresh and almost unheard in the discussions during the last decade.
He hates the gamification scam so much he ends up trashing "Reality is broken" while comparing it to "Cart life" (it makes more sense if you read it), and denounces the cultural imperialism and the national security ideology that are so pervasive.
There are also words of beauty for games like Echochrome.

Fun fact: I always described Uncharted 2 in the exact same way he does here, the fancy corridor, the DTV movie, ...

[Henrik Kamstrup-nielsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a bang on and sometimes witty slap in the face to games and game culture as well as Steven Poole is great at underlining why people outside of gaming are plain snobs when they say that games are culture.
Great read even though I've read all the columns before in Edge, it's nice to see them collected here to form a kind of overall comment on different subjects.