Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 404)

Trigger Happy
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might eventually come to represent a revolutionary
democratization of the nature of sport. Laurels are no
longer determined simply by the tyranny of genes.
Women and men, able-bodied and otherwise, can
compete on a level playing field, a digital city of play
where all are equal before the games begin.
Trigger Happy was written from the assumption that it
made sense to talk about videogames in artistic terms—
not in order to argue that games already constitute a
fully fledged artform, but in order to point out the
potential for such an eventual blossoming. It is clear,
however, that so far, videogames are still struggling to
emerge from their arrested adolescence.
Over the last eighteen months there have been ever
more examples of this aesthetic stasis: the incoherent
behavior of complex systems in driving or exploration
games; the simplistic and eventually tedious semiotics
of shooting or platform-jumping, and the slavish
plagiarism of the same old cinema aesthetics—slimy
biomechanoid spaceship interiors, moodily lit
warehouses, rocky dungeons and sandy dunes.
American McGee’s Alice (2001) was one of a few
brave attempts to extend the visual vocabulary of
videogame environments—with its surreally colored,