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:

https://choveshkata.net/forum/viewtop...

[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 It's not as outdated as I thought, there are many sparks of ideas that would still be useful today, for designers, critics and players — including the works and the people from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.