Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 275)

Trigger Happy
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videogames are also part of a different lineage. The
arcade, which today is normally a fluorescently lit
space crammed with the latest monster videogame
cabinets and their ever more inventive control
mechanisms—lightguns, life-size kayak oars,
motorized snowboards, electronic drumkits, big plastic
horses—has changed little from a sociological point of
view in around a hundred years.
Back in the late nineteenth century, penny arcades
also lured in a cross-section of visitors from all walks
of life, especially in America, where they boasted
coinoperated phonograph machines, candy dispensers,
kinetoscopes and even X-ray machines (the latter were
phased out as public amusements after it was shown
that repeated use led to death, by what we now know as
radiation poisoning). The next generation of
technological fads was led by the mutoscope, a
quasicinematic device that was, however, controlled by
a mechanical crank, so that the viewer was able to
choose the speed at which the film was played, to stop
it or even to send it spinning backward.
Videogames are clearly part of a project that began
more than a century ago, and whose aim was to
domesticate the machine. Automatic textile-processing
technology, for example, had only seventy years