Trigger Happy
291
enough people for you to arrange with friends at work to all
log on at eight o’clock in the evening and play selectively,
just against each other. So it doesn’t have to be the way
Internet communication is portrayed in the media, with
people who are rather sad and lonely communicating with
strangers on other continents.
Videogames, clearly, are embedded in a deep and
long tradition of play, and they borrow formally from
many other games. Yet each borrowing is accompanied
by a radical transmutation. From dominoes to
pentominoes to Tetris; from spearthrowing to Time
Crisis; from whist parties to thirty thousand people
logged onto the Internet playing a science fiction RPG:
the videogame format takes something old and makes
of it something startlingly new. But what kind of fun do
videogames offer that is uniquely their own?
Get into the groove
There must be a reason so many of the people I know
who enjoy videogames describe racing a good lap in
Colin McRae Rally or clearing waves in Defender as a
“Zen” experience. This is understood to be shorthand
for a kind of high-speed meditation, an intense
