"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. Poole looks inwards, not outwards, not so much at what games do but at what they're about. The book is witty, well-written, and thoroughly-researched [...] I don't agree with all of Poole's conclusions, but that's all right: I admire the breadth of his vision and his willingness to wear his heart on his sleeve." Ernest Adams, Designer's Notebook, Gamasutra, Feb 2005

Trigger Happy, originally published in 2000 with the subtitle "The Inner Life of Videogames", is a book about the aesthetics of videogames: what they share with other artforms, and the ways in which they are unique. You can download it here. The extra final chapter from the 2004 US edition is posted here.

For five years I also wrote a monthly column of the same title in the industry's critical Bible, Edge magazine. All those columns are archived here, with an index of topics in the sidebar, below right. The column resumed in summer 2008 and will continue to be posted here as it appears in print. A few sample subjects: What I've Learned from Gaming; Why Games Are Like Boring Jobs; Cosmetic and Functional Space; Moral Maths; Existentialism; On Murder Simulators; Political Subtexts in Games.

I also presented a BBC TV documentary entitled Trigger Happy: The Invincible Rise of The Video Game (I did object that a rise could not be invincible, but in vain) in 2004. An interview with me about the book can be found at Polygonweb. Also here: a biography of Lara Croft for the Guardian, a review of the Tomb Raider film for the New Statesman; a diary of being confined to a luxury hotel while playing Final Fantasy XIII; and a 2001 article for Modern Painters on visual trends in videogame design.

It’s when I have two men and a dog happily balanced on the undulating form of my giant quadrupedal anthropomorphic caterpillar and then eat a house that I realise this is either one of the most important videogames of recent years, or somehow not a videogame at all. What is this crazy thing called Noby Noby Boy? Continued →

Can a videogame be like a poem? Well, back in the 1980s, Tir Na Nog and Dun Darach raided the mythology of the Celtic sagas; and Lara Croft has just finished doing the same for Norse mythology. Perhaps the Metal Gear Solid series updates the medieval allegory Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, replacing the Green Knight with nuclear-armed giant robots, which is obviously an improvement. The Zelda saga rehearses the epic, episodic romance quest narrative of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Maybe cracking a particularly tough battle in Advance Wars sparks a dopamine rush akin to that furnished by one of William Empson’s anfractuous, hyper-dense poems, and Killzone 2 is the digital equivalent of the comforting ditties of Pam Ayres. Continued →

With all the guff surrounding the coming of President Barack Obama, it was easy to overlook one thing: that he had declared war on videogames. “The time has come,” he said in his inauguration address, “to set aside childish things.” He then outlined a vast programme of console destruction, with videogames to be replaced by enforced listening to Brahms, and communal readings of the Federalist Papers and Goethe. America needed to grow up, because playing with virtual soldiers on your Xbox inevitably makes you want to play with real soldiers and send them en masse to attack far-off countries — which had been, after all, one of the many lamentably childish habits of the outgoing administration. Dick Cheney, watching from his wheelchair, muttered “Go fuck yourself”, and then tilted the giant calcified potato of his head back downwards to continue his game of Advance Wars. (Cheney is a particular fan of levels involving Fog of War, and hallucinates unseen weapons of mass destruction in every obscured square.) Continued →

As everyone knows, the two best podcasts on the planet are BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time and Resonance.fm’s One Life Left. You can imagine how thrilled I was this week to appear as a guest on the final episode of OLL’s current season. Or, instead of just imagining it, you can actually listen to the show, here or on iTunes.

In the snowy early days of 2009, I am setting my metronome and practising fingering studies on my beautiful new guitar. Every few days or so, I find I can bump the tempo up a notch, getting a satisfying confirmation of my improvement; and then I will allow myself to plug into Guitar Rig and lay down some punishing heavy-metal nonsense. All told, it’s much more fun than a videogame.

Knowing this, friends often ask me what I think about Guitar Hero and Rock Band. Well, from a few casual plays, I have developed no interest in learning to play an oversimplified imitation of my axe. But for a musician to express contempt towards the game, and insist that Guitar Hero fans should dump it and go learn to play a real guitar, would be a harshly purist view of how one should spend one’s dwindling stock of hours on Earth. It would also be a little like saying to a Tomb Raider fan: Why don’t you just go outside and climb some rocks and shoot some bears for real? Sure, it would be more challenging, and maybe even more fun, but the game is not intended as a perfect simulation of the real thing. Continued →

It’s a curious experience to be playing Tomb Raider: Underworld a full dozen years after the first game’s appearance. Sure, Lara now slaps petulantly away at innocent fronds of vegetation, and the arms-at-her-sides pose when she is balancing sideways on a beam is pretty cute (although arguably thematically inconsistent — it looks like a posture someone who wasn’t used to balancing on things would adopt). And yet the game’s core pleasure is the same as it was 12 years ago: the best bits of Underworld, like the best bits of all the previous games, are when you wandering at leisure around a beautiful puzzle-environment, trying to figure out how the massive machine you are inhabiting works, free of time pressure or pointless attacks by badly animated lizards and idiotic spiders. (Talking of appalling bugs, Lara’s propensity to get stuck in geometry is a sad sign of a rush job, but I observe it with a certain nostalgic warmth: yes, it’s still like the Tomb Raider of yore.) Continued →

The best game I played this month¹ had zero polygons and no particle effects; it was unscripted, cost nothing, and didn’t even require any electricity.² It did have physics, though.

The game involves a tree stump, some nails, and a hammer — the type where the back end of the head is a thin blade rather than a fork. The object of the game is simple: each player takes a nail and tries to bang it into the stump using the thin end of the hammer head. You get one swing at a time, and if you miss the nail completely you have to drink some beer. There you go: the best bloody game ever made. Hammer happy. Continued →

1. This column was written in October 2008. «
2. Edge changed this to “didn’t require plugging in to the power”, which sounds like something Derek Zoolander might say. But perhaps they were making the subtle point that there is still electricity involved in the game, in the form of the electrical impulses in human bodies and brains. True! «

I am an air traffic controller! The rhythm of a shift is unpredictable. One minute I am idly tapping my foot along to blippy electro-funk; the next I am frantically giving orders to six aircraft at once and breathing a huge sigh of relief as one plane that is landing just misses blasting into the rear of another plane taking off from the same runway. Keep your holding pattern, flight 701. Flight 305, you are cleared to taxi. Flight 504, go to gate 16. Oh no, hang on…

There is a class of videogames built specifically to inculcate a feeling of what we might characterise as “cognitive panic”. Caught in a blizzard of decision procedures, the player has no leisure to plan but must manage a constant emergency. Moments of cognitive panic provide the adrenaline juice in most action games, whether you are defending an immobilized tank from marauders on all sides in COD4 or slicing round a corner while making weapon-management decisions in WipEout HD; but it’s real-time strategy games — such as the DS’s lovely Air Traffic Chaos — that are, fundamentally, hardcore cognitive-panic toys.

The obvious question is: why is cognitive panic pleasurable? When we experience it in real life, on one of those days where everything goes wrong simultaneously and there seems to be a never-ending hail of demands on your attention, it’s not usually very welcome. Indeed, the phrase “cognitive panic” is sometimes used in psychiatric medicine, to describe a panic attack with the mental symptoms (”fear of losing control or going crazy”) but not the physical ones (”feeling of choking”, “nausea”) described in the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual (DSMIV). Why would videogamers seek out the kind of stress that makes people seek professional help? Continued →

Gamers have long had it too easy. I for one applaud Quantic Dream’s approach to cybernetics, as revealed in Edge 193’s preview of Heavy Rain. If you want to hide, the system dictates that you keep a random, awkward combination of buttons held down. The discomfort you feel in your fingers mirrors the discomfort of your character, folded up into an airing cupboard. And so you relate to your character because you share her pain. This is an excellent idea, and it only remains for other courageous developers to take the next logical steps. I for one am working on a design document for an interactive-storytelling extravaganza, provisionally entitled Chubby Drizzle, which will be packaged with a £150 peripheral that you attach to the ceiling above your sofa and connect to a nearby tap. The game will then squirt cold water down on you while you are playing, so you feel that you really have entered a world where it is always raining. Continued →

Below is the text, more or less, of the keynote presentation I gave at the very awesome F.R.O.G. conference, which took place in Vienna, October 17–19 2008.

Working for the Man: Against the Employment Paradigm in Videogames¹

Videogames are often discussed under the concept of “play”, but this is not always how gamers themselves talk about their experience: they use instead vocabularies of desperate competition or violence. Take the very common expression of satisfaction after completing a game: “I beat the game.” What exactly does it mean to beat a game? You can’t have a meaningful contest against an inert digital artefact. From the game’s point of view, you did not beat it. On the contrary, you did exactly what the game wanted you to do, every step of the way. You didn’t play the game, you performed the operations it demanded of you, like an obedient employee. The game was a task of labour. From this perspective, playing a videogame looks as much like work as play.

Of course work is a large component of many types of game. The professional chess player competing in a tournament game does not have the carefree, leisurely attitude sometimes implied by the term “playing”: she is performing massive amounts of cognitive work. Similarly with poker players or tennis players: they are not merely fooling around but labouring mightily. Because it has rules, a game is never just a game but also a system of coercion, freely entered into. This in itself is not surprising: as Johann Huizinga reminded us, the idea of play can comprehend, and is not threatened by, a fanatical seriousness.² And the workload of videogames in particular is recognised in their description by some scholars as a species of “ergodic literature”.

But videogames seem more and more to resemble work in a different sense: working for the Man. They hire us for imaginary, meaningless jobs that replicate the structures of real-world employment. Continued →

1. I also considered the alternative titles “I Got All the Fucking Work I Need“, and “Fuck You, I Won’t Do What You Tell Me“, but I wasn’t sure about the etiquette of swearing in the titles of papers for academic conferences. «
2. Huizinga, Johann, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (1944; London, 1980). «