“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.

I also write a monthly column of the same title in the industry’s critical Bible, Edge magazine. All those columns (2000–2005 and 2008–present) are archived here, with an index of topics at right. 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 is 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.

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). ↩

There is something haunting about the posable wooden human figures designed for artists. The head a smooth blank mask; expressionless and sexless, the human body reduced to its geometric essence. Echochrome’s protagonist is one of these mannequins, hinting perhaps at an allegory of the relationship between player and game. The wooden doll in the artist’s shop is a mere tool, a puppet to be manipulated in the service of a project about which it knows nothing.

When you play a videogame, are you an artist manipulating your digital wooden puppet as you like on the screen? Or are you instead the puppet itself, led by the nose through a series of arbitrary contortions according to the artist-designer’s purposes, in a weightless dance that soon fades into nothingness? “Congratulations,” the game says at the end, “you adopted all the poses that were required of you. Now you can climb back into your cardboard box until the next time.” Continued →

I am tired of war. The relentless crump and shudder of explosions, and the whine-skip-puff of bullets that miss me by inches; my aching lower back; the cynical global machinations of the military-industrial complex. Sometimes I have to find a quiet place to sit and rest just to calm my shaken mind. War is hell. Continued →

Just when I thought I was out, they Pooled me back in. Videogames, I mean. In 2005, while I was writing my book Unspeak, I gave them up completely. I couldn’t afford the hours; I couldn’t afford the highly specialized and ultimately useless cognitive investment. But then, after nearly a year, when it came time to deliver the final manuscript and buy myself a little completion present, it was Sony’s little slab of black magic that whispered to me. Maybe, the PSP murmured, some ultimately useless cognitive investment is just what the doctor ordered when your brain is still spinning from having finished a book. You can’t just turn your brain off. It has to wind down at its own speed. Why not distract it in the meantime with some supernaturally sharp antigravity racing that fits in the palm of your hand? Continued →

Free book!

Update: see the new discussion of this experiment here.

As a follow-up to my post on Amazon’s crippled and hideous Kindle, and the discussion at Mark Pilgrim’s place, I thought I’d try an experiment, and give away for free an “ebook” version of my first book, Trigger Happy, with no “digital rights management” whatsoever. It’ll work on anything that can read a PDF.

Trigger Happy is a book about the aesthetics of videogames — what they share with cinema, the history of painting, or literature; and what makes them different, in terms of form, psychology and semiotics. It was first published in 2000; this is the revised edition with the Afterword written in 2004 2001. (Update: as requested in comments, the 2004 Afterword can now be read here.) The book is offered under a CC Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 license (see terms), for a limited time only. I’m not sure how limited that time will be, so grab it while it’s hot. Continued →

It’s six years since I began writing a little book called Trigger Happy. Back then my usual explanation of the project, when I was chatting to people at parties, was that it was about “the aesthetics of videogames”. It was an impressively efficient conversation-killer. Blank stares and silence while the interlocutor carried out a rapid internal monologue: “Okay, now how am I going to get away from this geek?” Almost worse was politely feigned interest – a long-drawn-out “Oh!”, and then, hesitantly, “You mean, how they look?” Well, not exactly. Not only. Can I have some more beer? Continued →