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.

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 →