New: the book is currently available as a free download. The extra final chapter from the 2004 US edition is posted here.

"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. 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. 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 below, with a full 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.

The 2004 updated North American paperback edition of Trigger Happy, subtitled "Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution", is still available, eg from amazon.com. If you buy it, kittens will be happy.

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.

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 →

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 →

After a rather depressing interlude wandering round dank, gloomy caves, the sight of sunlight pouring through a hole in the roof is quite dazzling. Speleology, I decide, is not for me. Slowly I emerge into a greenish-yellow haze under a gorgeous forest canopy. I can almost feel the fluid pressure of the thigh-deep water against my legs as I wade wearily to dry land. I’m tired, and hurt. I salve and bandage my burns, and eat a tasty rat I knifed back in the caves. Now, what do I do about a bullet bee that is still burrowing into my abdomen? Continued →

Half-Life 2 makes me sick. Not in the way that it is doubtless making rival developers sick, in that it’s so astonishingly good, has so casually raised the bar way beyond what other games are doing or even had thought of doing. No, sadly, this masterpiece gives me stomach-churning motion sickness. Some people get it with any FPS; the Japanese are known to be more susceptible. But it’s not something I’ve experienced since I watched a friend complete a level on Goldeneye purely by slapping the enemy around. Back then it was a combination of alchohol, low framerate and watching, rather than doing, that made me feel queasy. Here I don’t know what it is - I’ve tried widening the field of vision and reducing graphics settings to near-3D Monster Maze quality, to no avail - but I can’t be Gordon Freeman any longer for the moment. The depressed citizens of City 17 will have to suffer a little longer without me. Sorry, guys.
Continued →

A darkened room. I am leaning forward in concentration, grasping a controller and getting ready to press a button while I watch a pattern of glowing and flashing multi-coloured lights that moves around to the accompaniment of various pseudo-mechanical sound effects. Where’s this going? How many was that? Did I miss one? Quick, press three times. A computerized female voice, of the sort that announces facility alarms or self-destruct countdowns, confirms: “One, two, three.” And they’re off again. Okay, let’s make sure we get it right this time. I’m enjoying this.
Continued →

It’s a strange world I live in. Morality has been mathematized. Utterly incommensurate actions are all given points on the same two-dimensional scale of good or bad. If I physically abuse a child who is bullying another, that is a good deed. (Violence is the only language they understand, you see.) However, if I physically abuse a child who wants to commit vandalism and theft, that is for some reason a bad deed.
Continued →

Sometimes you just want to chill out. Sometimes, surveillance cameras triggering floods of armed guards, or slavering demons from hell jumping out at you from around every corner, is just too, well, stressful. You can get that at the local supermarket. You don’t necessarily want to recreate the experience at home. I have on occasion compared the philosopher Walter Benjamin’s description of the new-fangled cinema to the potential of videogames: he wrote in awe about a form that enabled the spectator to “calmly and adventurously go travelling”. But there’s nothing calm about Riddick or Far Cry, great games though they are.
Continued →