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Categories - Sociology / History & Culture / Video-games
“From the design standpoint, I haven't seen any better history of the game industry, and more importantly what that history means, than Steven Poole’s Trigger Happy. Poole looks inwards, not outwards, not so much at what games do but at what they’re about. The book is witty, well-written, and thoroughly-researched [...] I don’t agree with all of Poole's conclusions, but that’s all right: I admire the breadth of his vision and his willingness to wear his heart on his sleeve.”
- Ernest Adams, Designer’s Notebook, Gamasutra, Feb 2005 -
Amazon.co.uk Review
Trigger Happy, Steven Poole's substantial examination of the world inside your console, combines an exhaustive history of the games industry with a more subtle look at what makes certain kinds of games more engaging than others. For example, what works in which genres--the RPG (role-playing game) versus the god game--and the relationship of video games to other forms of media.
A writer and composer, Poole makes the case that video games--like films and popular music--deserve serious critical treatment. "The inner life of video games--how they work--is bound up with the inner life of the player. And the player's response to a well-designed video game is in part the same sort of response he or she has to a film, or to a painting: it is an aesthetic one". Trigger Happy is packed with references not just to games and game history but to writers and theorists who may never have played a video game in their lives, from Adorno and Benjamin to Plato. At times this approach verges on the pedantic, dwelling at length on points that will seem obvious to serious gamers ("We don't want absolutely real situations in video games. We can get that at home"; "The fighting game, like fighting itself, will always be popular" ). Nonetheless, Poole's book may be favoured bedside reading for both the keen gamer and the armchair philosopher looking to understand this cultural phenomenon.
--Liz Bailey --
Trigger Happy: Videogames & the Entertainment Revolution by Steven Poole(2001)
Free book!
Update: see the new discussion of this experiment here.
As a follow-up to my post on Amazon’s crippled and hideous Kindle, and the discussion at Mark Pilgrim’s place, I thought I’d try an experiment, and give away for free an “ebook” version of my first book, Trigger Happy, with no “digital rights management” whatsoever. It’ll work on anything that can read a PDF.
Trigger Happy is a book about the aesthetics of videogames — what they share with cinema, the history of painting, or literature; and what makes them different, in terms of form, psychology and semiotics. It was first published in 2000; this is the revised edition with the Afterword written in 2001. (Update: as requested in comments, the 2004 Afterword can now be read here.) The book is offered under a CC Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 license (see terms), for a limited time only. I’m not sure how limited that time will be, so grab it while it’s hot.
Creative Commons License
If you link to this post, please do not hotlink to the file directly. For the avoidance of doubt, license to distribute is not hereby granted to any for-profit organization and may not be so granted by you. If you wish to redistribute the work you must do so under the same license and terms as stipulated here. “Attribution” should consist of the author credit and a link to this page.
Alternatively, you could buy my latest book, Unspeak.
Happy reading!
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Website - http://stevenpoole.net/blog/trigger-happier/
If you like the book, you can leave a tip via PayPal
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Enjoy learning Con|Cen.
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