Trigger Happy: Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution (review)

Although Poole's book is not targeted at an academic audience, the first chapter makes it clear why scholars working on contemporary popular culture need to think seriously about videogames. Compared to television and film, videogames in Asia, Europe, and North America now dominate the leisure time of a large segment of the middle-class youth and even adult populations. Too quickly, although convincingly, Poole sketches how videogames have come to saturate the cultural landscape through media convergence with film and music in a mass market driven by powerful information technology companies like Sony and Sega. The question remains, as it always has, what is the cultural significance of this new media?

On this question, Poole's book is a disappointment. Yet, to be fair, the author seems less interested in cultural analysis than in providing a framework for making sense of the aesthetic dimension of videogames and game playing. It is on this axis that the book becomes an important contribution to a topic of study about which almost nothing has been written. We know already that videogames are the latest media to be implicated in traditional culture wars with games like Doom and Quake taking their place alongside television and film violence as elements of the alienated antisocial culture of late modernity. With only the most oblique reference to Columbine and American Senate hearings on videogame violence, Poole bypasses this debate by treating videogames as a legitimate pop cultural art form complete with its own technologically determined history.

The book thus goes beyond most current discussions of videogames (academic or otherwise) by providing relatively detailed overviews of videogame genres (platform games, God games, first-person shooters) as they relate to both the material conditions of game design (the limits of computer chips and interface technology) and latent cultural expectations for what makes a game good (suspense, surprise, challenge, control, realism, and so on). While Poole's account of the technological innovation of games from their early schematic form (as exemplified by games like Pong and Space Invaders) through an increasing emphasis on visual realism (in games like Tomb Raider and Metal Gear Solid) makes for a potent historical narrative, his analysis of the social psychology of game play depends too much on interviews and commentary from the game designers themselves. Too often, the proof of a "good" game for Poole seems to stem from the game's relative popularity as represented in sales and marketing, and this is a factor that may have little to do with the actual social-psychological dynamics of playing the game (in spite of what the designer may say).

In addition to providing an overview of videogame history and genres, the book goes some way toward an investigation of videogame culture by looking at the mass-market appeal of key videogame characters like Lara Croft, Mario, and Crash Bandicoot. Poole is correct to emphasize the importance of Japan as the major exporter of both the games themselves and game culture, but the crucial question of how Europeans and Americans have appropriated Japanese videogame culture (or not) is not addressed. Scholars interested in questions of reverse cultural imperialism could certainly look to videogames as an important case study, and Poole's book does provide some useful starting points.

The book is impressive for the array of personal and technically informed observations presented by the author and disappointing for its lack of analysis. However, Poole's writing shifts significantly in chapter 9. Here, in spite of himself, the author begins to develop a theory for making sense of the specificity of videogame play. Drawing on some basic ideas in semiotics, Poole presents an analysis of the game Pac-Man (an iconic symbol of an opening and closing mouth in a possible parable about runaway consumption) and neatly exposes dimensions of hermeneutic and pragmatic imagination at work in playing the simplest games. In my reading of this section of the book, videogames form coherent but open-ended...