Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 282)

Trigger Happy
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direct forerunner of the twentieth-century board game
Risk, and in turn, technologically prostheticized and
expanded, of real-time strategy videogames such as
Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun.
Here is an account of the “judicial duel” in
medieval English law:
Though sometimes fought to the bitter end, the judicial duel
shows a tendency to assume the features of play. A certain
formality is essential to it. The fact that it can be executed by
hired fighters is itself an indication of its ritual character, for
a ritual act will allow of performance by a substitute. . . .
Also, the regulations concerning the choice of weapons and
the peculiar handicaps designed to give equal chances to
unequal antagonists—as when a man fighting a woman has to
stand in a pit up to his waist—are the regulations and
handicaps appropriate to armed play. In the later Middle
Ages, it would seem, the judicial duel generally ended
without much harm done.
42
This process, whereby combat is sublimated into a
play form, leads all the way to modern beat-’em-up
videogames such as Tekken Tag Tournament or Soul
Calibur, where the abstraction is complete. Here, too,
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42 This description is taken from the cultural history of play by Johann
Huizinga, Homo Ludens.