Trigger Happy

Trigger Happy #1

by Steven Poole

Trigger Happy, Steven Poole's substantial examination of the world inside your console, combines an exhaustive history of the games industry with a more subtle look at what makes certain kinds of games more engaging than others. For example, what works in which genres--the RPG (role-playing game) versus the god game--and the relationship of video games to other forms of media.

A writer and composer, Poole makes the case that video games--like films and popular music--deserve serious critical treatment. "The inner life of video games--how they work--is bound up with the inner life of the player. And the player's response to a well-designed video game is in part the same sort of response he or she has to a film, or to a painting: it is an aesthetic one". Trigger Happy is packed with references not just to games and game history but to writers and theorists who may never have played a video game in their lives, from Adorno and Benjamin to Plato. At times this approach verges on the pedantic, dwelling at length on points that will seem obvious to serious gamers ("We don't want absolutely real situations in video games. We can get that at home"; "The fighting game, like fighting itself, will always be popular"). Nonetheless, Poole's book may be favoured bedside reading for both the keen gamer and the armchair philosopher looking to understand this cultural phenomenon. --Liz Bailey

Genres: Nonfiction, Games, Video Games, Game Design, Gaming, Cultural, History

Paperback

First published May 18, 2000

Reviews

[Pauline · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting book, worth reading for anyone who's interested in the history of video games. This is effectively a time capsule, having been written back in 2000 (although this is a revised edition from 2004). It's said to be one of the first books that ever looked at video games as art, and the author spends the whole book defending this opinion with many examples and parallels to other art forms; this is a point of view I *really* agree with, so of course I enjoyed the argumentation.

Let's do the "threes":

Three things I liked
1. The argument that games are art, and that many examples support that. Always a good conversation to have.
2. The predictions on the future of gaming - some were so accurate! Multiplayer, VR, motion control... Spot on.
3. The breadth of examples - good to see the author looking at many different game genres, including board games and my beloved Fighting Fantasy series.
Special mention: when discussing gender and how to reach the right audience, Poole states that designers should look at the quality of the game, not the dated studies on what men/women are supposed to like. Could. Not. Agree. More! Really refreshing to read this considering this book is from the early 2000s.

Three things I didn't like
1. It's kinda unfair, but well - I'm 16 years ahead of the author, so some arguments are quite outdated or have been argued at length and accepted by now, and so a few points felt redundant.
2. The PC gaming pessimism, which I guess was a trend back then. With hindsight, the prediction that PC gaming will be totally irrelevant in a few years is, um, cute.
3. The stance on interactive story-telling. While the author is all for it, which is great (and again something I really believe in myself), he states that games have not really achieved anything on that front, and that any improvements will be a long way off. I find it a bit short-sighted considering that games such as Baldur's Gate existed in the late 1990s (wherein a lot of quests/character arcs could be wildly different depending on your in-game choices), and looking at how important interactive story-telling has become in modern RPGs (Dragon Age, The Witcher, etc.). Sure, we're not at a stage where we can organically interact with the game by speaking/writing random words in it and get a human-like bespoke reaction, but we've come a long way! I wish this had been acknowledged.

All in all, interesting book that I recommend.
It would be nice if the author wrote an updated edition, would love to hear him talk about how accurate/inaccurate his predictions became.
Edit: He has! Trigger Happy 2.0. Will read that!

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a passionate and very English (and a decade old) cri de coeur for games to rise above their shortcomings and triumph as a platform for aesthetic wonder and transcendent magic! Yeah! Come on games! Has that happened? A decade on from 2001, that is? Umm . . . no. Not especially, though there are enough truly great games to contest this. Don’t look at me, I’m an observer, I am the horny fact collector.

The text is very flighty and academic: the author being a Cambridge lit graduate and Guardian columnist, so out come the Ancient Greek references and wide-ranging citations from French theorists to psychologists to Martin Amis. Poole begins with impish humour but ups his game when the passion kicks in and he’s banging on about symbols and the constant deficiencies he sees in games preventing it from achieving power as a wide-reaching artform on its own terms and conquering the world! Yeah! Go games! (I may be slightly drunk).

I liked it.

[Matt Hill · Rating 3 out of 5]

it's amazing how just 10 years have made a lot of what this book does irrelevant, but that is the case . . and i wasn't sure what the overall project of the book was . . . lots of it just seemed like riffing on different aspects of games, etc. . . that being said, it did have some good points and good overall reflections on games, differences between them and other media, their implications as far as why they're popular, what their future might hold, etc. . . in general, with such an evolving form though, newer is better

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

An intriguing, scholarly, and comprehensive study of the state of the art in videogames circa 2001; the author highlights an extensive range of links to culture, the arts, and human thought over the ages and now. This book will forever shatter any ideas the reader may have had of videogames being a simplistic or shallow form of entertainment and opens doors to some exciting possibilities for future developments and uses of the form.

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chiaramente data la velocità con cui si evolve il settore, su alcuni temi è invecchiatissimo, e la postfazione successiva di quattro anni, pur interessante, non cambia questa cosa. Ma su molti altri temi rimane ancora parecchio attuale ed è comunque affascinante (ri)scoprire come le cose venissero viste quasi vent'anni fa e quanto abbiano centrato il bersaglio le vare previsioni di Poole. In generale, rimane un libro di analisi del videogioco molto complesso e profondo, con alcuni capitoli davvero fondamentali.

[Christopher Walker · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoy videogames, but I much prefer reading about them to playing them myself - I'm just not much good at them. Steven Poole, a regular contributor to Edge magazine in the UK, treats videogame culture seriously - as it deserves to be treated - and looks at the ways in which it affects and is affected by popular culture. A very interesting collection of essays on the subject.

[Dawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read way back when; it is definitely showing its age now but it is still an interesting time capsule. A very easy and enjoyable read that is easy to follow and full of history for those dipping their toes for the first time.

[Hannah Stowe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really interesting writing and I loved taking a peak into the historical (if I can say that about such a recent book) perspective and see how video games were being discussed early on. I don't read very many essays and such but apparently I should do so more in the future

[Daniel · Rating 2 out of 5]

This has been on many lists of 'essential video game books,' so as an avid video gamer, I felt like this was a must-read for me. Unfortunately, reading in 2017, it fell flat, in the way that a lot of books about cutting-edge technology do when not read shortly after publication. It's an interesting historical document that I feel I would have enjoyed a lot more if I read it when it was published.

It's not you, Trigger Happy, it's me.

[TheSaint · Rating 3 out of 5]

(While reading Trigger Happy: Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution, my spouse wondered if videogames are a relevant academic topic. During my explanation as to "Yes, they are," I discovered that the author, Steven Poole, wrote a more recent book I purchased for the library, called Unspeak, which is pretty scholarly in itself. This isn't supremely relevant to this review, but highly coincidental.)
Anyway, the ideal reader for this book is most certainly one who plays and enjoys video games. The first parts of the book deal with the history of gaming (and of the games themselves) while the latter parts deal with the games' place in society. I have played, like, one game of Tetris on a hand-held once, and I still enjoyed this book.

[Wayne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Steven Poole has made a good attempt at taking a more scientific and academic look at video games and their evolution over the last 30 years or so. I wasn't expecting the book to be as analytical as it was, but it turned out to be a good thing. I think he did a great job of attempting to analyze the industry for multiple viewpoints and zeroing in on particular psychological and sociology ideas.

At times this book can start to get a little too close to the border between entertainment and philosophy, but I when he did seem to cross the line that my attention span rests on he didn't stay there for long and it was back to being the lighter-hearted read that I would expect from a book about the games industry.

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A look at video games as an art form, with discussions on how similar and different they are from other forms of art. Interesting, especially for the historical discussion of the medium, but also handicapped by age - Poole spends a lot of time talking about Tomb Raider II, for example, and I honestly can't remember the last time I played that game or any details about it. Due to the age, a lot of the discussion becomes obselete: games like Rock Band, World of Warcraft, and the modern incarnation of Grand Theft Auto make a lot of his points irrelevant, as do touch- and motion-controlled gaming systems like the DS, Wii, and Ipod. It would be interested to see a sequel to this written that takes those evolutions into account.

[Scott Smith · Rating 2 out of 5]

Another video game book for my paper. This is pretty old, written in 2000, which is ancient for game theory. There have been tons of huge changes in the scene since he wrote this. All that aside though, I personally don't agree with some of his theory. He focuses a lot on games as an imaginary world which exists inextricable to time, but doesn't at all discuss the process of detachment or identification with an avatar. I find it difficult to discuss video games academically if I'm not bringing up Lacan's mirror phase and Laura Mulvey.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Steven Poole is an excellent writer and I've been burning through this book rather quickly. It's entertaining mind-snap back to a time when I was a fringe gamer and not a serious geek in the sense that I knew the games were there, I just didn't have the time to play them (or was into just one so intensely that I didn't have time for the others). So Poole takes me into the guts of the games and explains very well how they evolved into the games we have today. Pity, we don't have an updated version to 2012...I'd like to see something covering the game-world since 2000.

[Bruce · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was written before EVEONLINE (released in 2003) and World of Warcraft (released in 2004) came on the scene. However it foreshadowed them and similar games. The author provides a history of video games from the first on an oscilloscope in government laboratory to the Lara Craft: Tomb Raider games of the late 1990s. Poole describes a number of the multitudinous games throughout the period and comments on their development. His final chapter, "The Prometheus Engine" is an essay on video games and their place in (and effect on) society.