kurt

"Trigger Happy"

Stephen Poole's Trigger Happy, which I picked up while in London over Spring Break, contains an interesting attempt to analyze the form of the video game and derive some theory about what games must do to become art. I find this project extremely inspiring and I find Poole's effort to be very worthwhile even though it seems tragically dated now, only three years after it was published (subtract another year for the writing process as well). The momentum of the game industry does not appear to be slowing so we must accept that all analyses of it will seem obsolete and try to salvage the valuable critical insight that is chronologically context-independent.

Reading Trigger Happy, I found that although Poole falls far short of a deep textual analysis worthy of Roland Barthes' S/Z, I enjoyed his proposals as to the satisfactions of game-playing for humans and the essential differences of games from any other media. So it may not contain the academic rigor that releases critical interactive media theory from the grip of the crossover film theorists, but it quite appropriately discourages reading video games as film texts. And I think that this is what Poole has done most effectively and lastingly: he has encouraged the reader to stop thinking of games as interactive movies but to (perhaps even more importantly) demand the same level of artistic refinement and reflection.

KMAC