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 for free here. The extra final chapter from the 2004 US edition is posted here. I also write a monthly column of the same title in Edge magazine, and I 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.

Below you can browse some Edge columns and features on videogames for the mainstream press. Also: Working for the Man, my polemical F.R.O.G. conference paper against the “employment paradigm” in games.

The fastest-selling cultural product in history was created by people you’ve probably never heard of. While this year’s Oscars honoured films in which the movie business sweetly congratulates itself on its own birth — The Artist, Martin Scorsese’s Hugo — the most rapidly dollar-hoovering entertainment release ever is not a film, still less an album; it’s a videogame. Continued →

1. An edited version of this article appeared in the Guardian‘s Weekend magazine on March 10, 2012. ↩

As I sighed and sheepishly typed in “wings” yet again, I knew what I was doing. I was satisficing. Scribblenauts, one of the most deeply frustrating amazing games I have ever played, dares you to be as surreal and inventive as possible. It awards bonuses and style points, and challenges you to complete the same level in different ways. It is a glorious feeling when you see that, yes, sure, you can rope that sheep to a hot-air balloon and fly it back to his friends. And yet, if inspiration runs dry, you find yourself falling back on a few old standbys: even if some of what should be uber-powerful objects are cunningly weakened (it is somehow heartbreaking even to a non-believer to see how easily God can be killed), you develop a small repertoire of get-out-of-jail-free cards. You feel guilty, but you do it anyway, because there’s always the next level to check out. In decision theory and economics, this kind of behaviour — choosing a good-enough approach rather than seeking to optimize or maximize — is called satisficing. And I think videogames too often encourage it. Continued →

One of the strangest novels ever written sees the hero, disgusted with bourgeois society, lock himself away in solitude to pursue artificial pleasures. Des Esseintes, the hero of Huysmans’s À Rebours (1884), constructs a device to blend liqueurs in unprecedented combinations, sows a garden with freak plants, tries his hand at making perfume and has a tortoise’s shell encrusted with gems. The book was later said to be part of a fin-de-siècle artistic movement, characterised by a kind of aestheticised neuroticism, whose members were dubbed the décadents.

Locking oneself away to pursue artificial pleasures, of course, is one possible description of playing videogames. You could write a contemporary version of À Rebours in which the hero isolated himself from society with a house full of consoles, which would add to Huysmans’s principled décadence a more depressing cast of decadence in the modern English sense of unhealthy self-indulgence. Continued →

Top 10 videogames of the decade

Everyone seems to be compiling lists of the best games of the decade,¹ so here, with minimal special pleading or argumentation,² is mine. A link is given if I have previously written about the game in question. Nota bene: this is not just some personal list of games that I happen to have liked during the noughties; this is The One True Objective Trigger Happy™-Endorsed List of the Ten Best Games of the Decade, and any different list is simply wrong, mmkay?³
Continued →

1. Apart from Action Button, who are doing the 33 best games of all time. Their list is wrong, of course, but interestingly wrong. ↩
2. Except in footnotes. ↩
3. Especially if it has Bioshock on it. Jesus. ↩

Watching the latest season of 24 with increasing apathy, punctuated by bitter, incredulous chuckling, I realised that a lot of TV execs still don’t get it. They think that, since they are competing with videogames for viewers’ time, they have to make something that is just as hyperactive and contemptuous of the audience’s intelligence as they imagine videogames to be. The truth is that 24, in its long downward spiral into crayon-scrawled decadence, is now far stupider than many videogames.

From the heights of season 2′s finale (a feast of finely choreographed unarmed combat and then shooting that paid knowing homage to Lee and Norris in Way of the Dragon), 24 has become a freakshow of moronic and illogical tactics, with cause and effect floating morbidly untethered. Jack kills a hitman adversary by throwing a screwdriver hard enough to pierce a Kevlar vest. Tony prevents his colleague from shooting an FBI agent, only to kill the agent himself with his bare hands. Jack and Tony pick off a couple of thugs in the docks by luring them into an ambush of silenced fire; and then, instead of continuing this winning tactic, decide to engage the rest of the enemies all at once even though they are still vastly outnumbered. None of it makes sense any more, cries the impotently fist-pounding viewer.

The irony is that for a large proportion of the audience, what makes sense to us in such fictional situations is what we have been taught by videogames. Continued →

Wandering the streets of an unfamiliar city, I catch myself thinking “Hey, this is a pretty open-world experience” — one of those uncanny moments when you see life in videogaming terms, like scouting out ideal sniper positions on actual rooftops or visualizing yourself performing a nifty bit of CQC on an antisocial fellow commuter.

As an advertising promise, “open world” is the new AI. Even iD, kings of the two-and-a-half-dimensional maze shooter, are going all Fallout 3 with the upcoming Rage. Of course, the roots of the open-world ideal lie in 8-bit-era classics such as Elite and Tir Na Nog. But in the modern era, largely thanks to the success of GTA3 and its successors, “open world” has become a must-have fashionable feature, even for games that an open world renders more irritating and less fun. Continued →

How ought we to respond to fulminations against videogames by people who don’t play them? A great many, of course, may be safely ignored. But when an interesting writer decides to take a passing kick at games, it can be worth digging for the grain of truth in the stereotypical criticism. A case in point: recently, I was reading an article by the philosopher Zygmunt Bauman, published in the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza last spring, which after a meditative beginning about language and exile suddenly targets videogames, along with TV and cinema – they all purvey, he argues, a kind of Manichean pornography. Continued →

It’s a brilliant, evocative work of interactive folktale that interrogates our assumptions about choice, success and failure, and the medium of the videogame itself. It’s a supremely boring collection of FMVs with pretensions to interactivity that very quickly wears out its joke about control and becomes a tedious slab of nihilistic whimsy. Continued →

It was when I climbed to the mountain lodge, hid inside a bush across the wooden drawbridge, and fired a single shot from my flare pistol. The flare ignited the lodge, and the guards started running around in a blind panic. I just sat there, listening to the cries of my target inside the lodge as it smoked and burned, until he fell silent. Job done. I got off the mountain fast and proud. That’s one stealthy psychotic safari outing. That’s power. Continued →

You can’t always get what you want. I have just offered my enemies money for reconstruction, and they laughed in my face: in view of my recent “security actions” (um, political assassinations using Apache helicopters), no one believes that I really mean well. To add insult to injury, opposition members of my own government have called my tenure a “comedy of errors”. I realize that everything I do is an act of symbolic communication, and so my actions need to represent a consistent narrative. Lesson learned: I ease border controls and trade restrictions, arrest a few of my own extremist nutters, and eventually another offer of aid is accepted. I do better in the polls, and soon I am rewarded with a video of bikini’d babes walking along a beach, tickled by the “Winds of Peace”. I have reached a pacific milestone. But the tension is not over yet. Continued →

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.