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.

Space used to be simple. Not necessarily the cosmic “outer space” of sci-fi, just space, as in the space between my ears, or the space behind your sofa. The seductive wraparound voids of Asteroids or Defender conjured infinities of space with a simple lack of luminescence. (Though they were 2D, they implied a limitless Z-axis.) Space meant potential for movement; a stage on which to enact your own choreography of spitting lasers and whirling dodges. Both Asteroids and Defender offered a risky hyperspace option, in which you might zap instantaneously either to safety or into the middle of a rock or mutant: the shocking discontinuity of this option really served, by contrast, to enhance the feeling of flow and smoothness in the gamespace.
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We don’t think only with our minds. Our bodies think too. As psychologist Timothy Wilson shows in a book about what he calls “the adaptive unconscious”, our sensory systems monitor and filter information all by themselves, and then decide what to present to our conscious attention. Your muscles go through an intense high-speed choreography just to avoid bumping into someone in the street, without your having to deliberately perform all the separate twists and steps. Athletes and musicians deliberately train “muscle memory”, so that legs and fingers will work of their own accord in dizzyingly complex harmony. When I am writing, my fingers sometimes appear to construct sentences by themselves and my mind then decides whether it’s garbage or not. To mean anything in the real world, as certain robot-centric AI researchers already believe, intelligence must be embodied.
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The wind is whistling past my ears as I crawl up the side of the Empire State Building. Just as I think I’ve reached the top, I see there’s a mast: to scale it I have to jump over a jutting concrete platform. I actually have a slight feeling of vertigo. Then I reach the top and stand upright. Manhattan is laid out in all its glory below. The Hudson River glitters in the sunlight. It’s beautiful. So I jump off. A beautiful swan-dive through thousands of feet of rushing air. The walls of skyscrapers are a blur. At the last second, I sling a web-line outward and describe a graceful pendulum arc, before somersaulting forwards to continue my aerial journey through the streets.
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Structure is a critical component of all art. Whether it be uses of the golden ratio in painting, the sonata form in music, or the three-act architecture advised by theorists of contemporary screenwriting, the shape of a work is not just a wrapper for the content, it is what allows the content to have meaning. Even those aspects of modernist art that sought to abandon traditional structures most often smuggled in new ones in their places: T S Eliot’s poem The Waste Land looked like it was in randomly cut-up “free verse” but was very tightly organised. Free-jazz musicians instinctively impose structure on the fly: here the bass player noodles around on his own for a while; now let’s all honk our heads off for a climax.
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Occasionally I like to go on safari, well-slathered with mosquito cream and toting a rifle, through the peculiar jungle that is academic writing about videogames. Partly this is to ensure that I don’t disappear any further up my own arse than I might already be located by certain sections of the beloved Edge readership. Partly it is out of sheer curiosity, and the strange mixture of fascination and incredulity that washes over me when I read a lot of this stuff.
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Extra final chapter from the 2004 US edition of Trigger Happy

Over the last four years, as the new generation of videogame hardware — Sony’s PlayStation2, Microsoft’s Xbox, and Nintendo’s GameCube — came to maturity, there were a handful of standout videogames. One of the most heavily anticipated was Japanese master Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid 2 (2001), and it represented an ultra-refined concept of the much-hyped though problematic “convergence” with cinema.

As we saw in Chapter 4, the marriage between Hollywood and videogames is an uneasy relationship at best. Since this book was first published, newer examples have only confirmed the problems. Two Tomb Raider films (2001, reviewed here; 2003), starring the admirable Angelina Jolie, destroyed all the dynamic, gymnastic grace of the digital heroine in a mash of fast-cut editing, while ropey computer-graphic special effects and insultingly bad scripts ensured a thoroughgoing cinematic farrago, of which the second iteration was even worse than the first. Meanwhile, Japanese videogame-makers Square spent a reported $80 million on a movie of their long-running Final Fantasy. The new-agey computer-animated feature that resulted, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001), was so poorly received that Square had to shut down their newly created film studio almost immediately. Continued →

So there I was, playing Far Cry, scampering around the tropical undergrowth like some sort of oversized beetle, albeit a beetle who can drive boats and use a sniper rifle. “Look at the water!” I told myself. “Look at the trees! Look at the ragdoll physics! This is great, isn’t it?” Yes, it is. Ummm… “Next!”
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The setting: Blood Gulch, one of the multiplayer maps in Halo. The characters: two Master Chiefs, one red, one gold. “You ever wonder why we’re here?” asks Red. Gold replies: “It’s one of life’s great mysteries, isn’t it? Are we the product of some cosmic coincidence, or is there really a God watching everything, you know, with a plan for us and stuff? I don’t know, man, but it keeps me up at night.” “What?” splutters Red. “I mean why are we *here*, in this canyon?”
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