Trigger Happy
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society. His final, polemical chapter holds that the
modern world (he was writing in 1938) is anomic and
impoverished precisely because games have been torn
from their organic place at the heart of community and
neatly cordoned off into such spheres as that of
professional sports. If this is true, we should not be
surprised that at the beginning of the third millennium,
the eternal human need for play has sprouted once more
in radical, electronic form, and will very soon constitute
the world’s largest entertainment industry.
This might even be a cause for optimism.
Videogames allow for, are often specifically built for, a
form of social play activity. Indeed, a great many
gamers, including me, find videogaming at its most
pleasurable in such a context. At its smallest level,
social videogaming involves two, three or four friends
racing cars against each other or beating each other up
through colorful digital surrogates on the screen. The
videogame console is mediating and providing the
visual forms for such contests, but the pleasure is
largely a social one. Richard Darling of Codemasters
agrees. “One of the most enjoyable times that people
have when they’re playing games tends to be good
multiplayer games—like Super Bomberman and Micro
Machines,” he says. “There’s so much more fun in
