pop culture

An intelligent, broad ranging discussion of videogames. Poole is right to regard videogames as a medium, and one that needs to be evaluated on its own terms instead of compared with books or movies. He brings in an intriguing array of references on art, semiotics, literary theory and other topics to the discussion, and his writing is accessible and smooth.

The flaw in this book is focussing too narrowly on twitch games, mostly the combat/exploration games like Tomb Raider or Metal Gear Solid. Poole can't be bothered with god-games like Populous or Sim-City or pure exploration-puzzle games like Myst, and says as much. He misses out on a huge realm of other styles of game and playing experience. This is a shame, because Poole looks like he has the intellectual chops to write a comprehensive book on this subject.

Pool is on to something in the last chapter, when he theorizes that the next frontier is making the player feel responsible for his decisions in the game world. You might feel bad when Aeris buys it in Final Fantasy VII, but it was in a cut scene so you don't feel responsible because it was beyond your control.

For the reasons Poole discusses earlier, this is hard to do in an adventure-style game. If a character dies in a cut scene, it isn't your fault. If she dies in gameplay, you just keep playing it through until she lives. (Kirk didn't accept the no-win situation; why should you?)

However, this is where his distaste for god-games trips him up. Players of Civilization or other management games don't have easy replay buttons. Anybody whose sim-city burns because they under-funded the fire department knows all about actions and consequences. We care about a place if we build it. We don't care about a place if we just wander around shooting things in it.

Also, instilling responsibility in games may be a dead end. Arguably, the whole point of play is to avoid responsibility. Play is a separate realm in which success or failure don't matter in the rest of world. Creating consequences for our actions in a game world would make it too much like work.

This may be why some people find on-line games so addictive. They become like work, instead of play, because there are consequences if you don't play hard enough. You can let down the other players, and your enemies can attack what you have created.

Poole doesn't write about on-line multi-player games, because they barely existed when he wrote this, only a couple of years ago. I think he could write another intriguing book on the subject, if he would just take his eyes off Lara Croft and take a walk through Riven.

If you love games like I do - I've been playing 'em all my life, and developing 'em for 6 years - you *need* to read this book. I've never read such a fascinating angle on gameplaying, situating video games in an illuminating context among art, cinema and books, and doing some really excellent thinking about how they work on your mind. This book was like a breath of fresh air to me.

I gotta defend the author too against the factually incorrect attacks by a reviewer below. The reviewer says: "this man touches very lightly the fact that videogames came into fruition and refinement in Japan". Hey, Poole rightly points out that Taito saved the gaming industry with Space Invaders, he calls Miyamoto "the god of videogames", and most of the games he says are great - Metal Gear Solid, Zelda 64, etc - are Japanese. What more do you want? Jeez, of course this reviewer says he didn't even finish reading the book! Don't listen to him. Buy Trigger Happy: you won't regret it.

This book is not a list of dates and events, it is an insightful look into what videogames really are, and their paradoxes and parallels to the real world. I normally dislike reading books without a story, but I literally had trouble putting this down. "I should go to sleep... one more page... okay, lemme just finish this chapter." Buy it now.