Trigger Happy
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the fighting is performed on the player’s behalf by a
digital “substitute”; here, too, unequally skilled human
players may have a sporting match by tweaking the
videogame’s built-in “handicap” device. Not only has
bloody violence been transformed into a choreography
of light, but the animus between contestants that gave
rise to the judicial trial is now but a folk memory
underlying cheerful competitiveness. So the physical
and jurisprudential content has leaked out over the
years, but the form endures.
The very fact that such forms still induce pleasure
when played as videogames today seems to
demonstrate that, though they initially grew out of
practical concerns, ancient games could never have
been wholly functional exercises in the first place. In
other words, whatever other purpose they served,
games must always in part simply have been fun.
Even such apparently purist, abstract videogames as
Tetris have some similarities with older forms of play.
Tetris itself is from one angle a dynamic jigsaw, in its
demands of shape-matching; its designer, Alexei
Pajitnov, on the other hand, has said that his original
formal inspiration was pentominoes, a family of
puzzles involving twelve differently shaped blocks,
each made up of five squares, from which the player
