Trigger Happy
287
Martin Amis astutely pointed out in 1982 that the
burgeoning criticism of videogames even then was
simply a repeat of “the heated debates about snooker
and pool earlier in the century.”
Games are not serious, runs this argument, they are
somehow intellectually degrading. Play, anthropologist
Johann Huizinga happily concedes, is at base
“irrational.” Though certain games might require a very
high-level exercise of reason (chess), there seems to be
no rational excuse for playing in the first place. One is
simply spellbound. But games, rather than being a
wasteful offshoot, are central to the formation of
culture. Huizinga believes that play underpins all forms
of ritual, and even religion itself. Ancient Greek
mythology, for example, has a tradition of
“theromorphia”—imagining people as beasts, like Zeus
as a swan—and Huizinga argues that this can best be
understood in terms of the play attitude. (This is, by the
way, another play tradition that finds its way into
modern videogames, for instance in the beat-’emup
game Bloody Roar 2, where the humanoid fighters turn
into monsters in order to inflict ever more ridiculous
damage upon each other.)
Huizinga’s overarching contention in
Homo Ludens
is that play is indeed essential to civilized
