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.

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 →