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Steven Poole

Trigger Happy: Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Hardcover – September 29, 2000

by Steven Poole (Author)

20 ratings

3.5 on Goodreads

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A thought-provoking cultural study of videogames traces the history of this popular form of entertainment and explains why videogames will become the dominant popular art form of the twenty-first century. 20,000 first printing.

Print length

256 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Arcade Publishing
Publication date

September 29, 2000
Dimensions

6.5 x 1 x 9.5 inches
ISBN-10

1559705396
ISBN-13

978-1559705394
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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Steven Poole's substantial examination of the world inside your console combines an exhaustive history of the games industry with a 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 also 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 favored bedside reading for both the keen gamer and the armchair philosopher looking to understand this cultural phenomenon. --Liz Bailey, Amazon.co.uk

About the Author

Stephen Poole is a journalist and writer who has contributed articles to the Guardian, the Independent, and the Times Literary Supplement and has worked as a composer for television and short films.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Arcade Publishing; First US Edition (September 29, 2000)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1559705396
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1559705394
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.2 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 1 x 9.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #6,014,758 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #9,341 in Video & Computer Games
- #12,527 in Computer & Video Game Strategy Guides

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20 ratings

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Steven Poole

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Steven Poole is the author of Unspeak, Trigger Happy, and You Aren't What You Eat. He was born in London, and writes for various publications including the Guardian, the New Statesman, the Times Literary Supplement, and Edge. More information at http://stevenpoole.net

Customer reviews

5 star		31%
4 star		28%
3 star		11%
2 star		11%
1 star		21%

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Top reviews from the United States

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Aaron Cammarata

Awful. Juuuust awful.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 21, 2001

Verified Purchase

This book takes itself WAY too seriously...
It does an adequate job of describing the various genres of games, but if you've any experience at all with gaming, you'll find the first third of the book useless. I might recommend it to my grandfather to read as an overview, but no-one under 50.
Moving past the content, the writing style itself is horrid. It smacks of journalism school and grammatical showmanship. It swings wildly between "adverbially rich, and stuffily haughty" (a phrase one might expect to find in the book) and "tragically hip":...
And get your motion sickness bags out for this beauty on the subject of realism in games:...
Bottom line: it's just not a good read. I couldn't get past the writing style to enjoy the content, which, from what I could see, covered a hodge-podge of topics to an apparently random depth, leaving you wanting more at times and starved for the next chapter at others.
Unless your granparents are curious about why you spend so much time with videogames, pass this one up. For the love of Mike, pass it up.

7 people found this helpful

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Peri

Wow. Just Wow.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 17, 2021

Pretentious, pompous, incomplete, often inaccurate, mystifying, and very often unintentionally funny. The book being unintentionally funny may be the biggest reason to read this book.

This description of the very first video game Spacewar, near the beginning of the book, should give you a very good idea of what to expect from this book:

"The name’s melodrama, of course, grew out of the geopolitical tensions of the time. But despite the lurid
sci-fi connotations, the game itself, which you can still play on the Internet, was serene, austere, a thing of
alien beauty."

The name's melodrama? Spacewar is melodramatic?

The game's melodramatic name, of course, grew out of the geopolitical tensions of the time?

WTH is he talking about? The game was inspired by the writing of Edward E. Smith, in particular "The Skylark of Space". One gets the feeling that the author does this type of thing throughout the book. Why do research when you can just guess or pull information out of your you know what?

Helpful

Peter Tupper

Doesn't go far enough

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 23, 2002

An intelligent, broad ranging discussion of videogames. Poole is right to regard videogames as a medium, and one that needs to be evaluated on its own terms instead of compared with books or movies. He brings in an intriguing array of references on art, semiotics, literary theory and other topics to the discussion, and his writing is accessible and smooth.

The flaw in this book is focussing too narrowly on twitch games, mostly the combat/exploration games like Tomb Raider or Metal Gear Solid. Poole can't be bothered with god-games like Populous or Sim-City or pure exploration-puzzle games like Myst, and says as much. He misses out on a huge realm of other styles of game and playing experience. This is a shame, because Poole looks like he has the intellectual chops to write a comprehensive book on this subject.

Pool is on to something in the last chapter, when he theorizes that the next frontier is making the player feel responsible for his decisions in the game world. You might feel bad when Aeris buys it in Final Fantasy VII, but it was in a cut scene so you don't feel responsible because it was beyond your control.

For the reasons Poole discusses earlier, this is hard to do in an adventure-style game. If a character dies in a cut scene, it isn't your fault. If she dies in gameplay, you just keep playing it through until she lives. (Kirk didn't accept the no-win situation; why should you?)

However, this is where his distaste for god-games trips him up. Players of Civilization or other management games don't have easy replay buttons. Anybody whose sim-city burns because they under-funded the fire department knows all about actions and consequences. We care about a place if we build it. We don't care about a place if we just wander around shooting things in it.

Also, instilling responsibility in games may be a dead end. Arguably, the whole point of play is to avoid responsibility. Play is a separate realm in which success or failure don't matter in the rest of world. Creating consequences for our actions in a game world would make it too much like work.

This may be why some people find on-line games so addictive. They become like work, instead of play, because there are consequences if you don't play hard enough. You can let down the other players, and your enemies can attack what you have created.

Poole doesn't write about on-line multi-player games, because they barely existed when he wrote this, only a couple of years ago. I think he could write another intriguing book on the subject, if he would just take his eyes off Lara Croft and take a walk through Riven.

22 people found this helpful

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E. Viets

Well written, but dated

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 4, 2009

While preparing for a class I'm running on video games I opened up Trigger Happy which, for the most part, was a very well written and researched book on video game theory. However, while reading it, I became aware very quickly aware of how dated the book had become in just under a decade. The references to Tomb Raider 3, in particular, are rampant, a game that is not even a blip on the radar of gaming conciousness anymore. However, the ideas presented on asthetics and persistent worlds offer a look into video games that is still relevant today.

Helpful

Amazon Customer

Nice... but where's the rest?

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 4, 2003

Poole has a good point to make, and he makes it in the first chapter (that gamers are not social outcasts and games are a form of storytelling every bit as viable as film or literature). Unfortunately, he has about fifty other half-points to make and never finishes a single one of them. He makes a huge deal out of gender (hello... women have made up a nice percentage of gamers since the Pac-Man days!), which seems really counterproductive. His memoir-like descriptions of E3 and its Tokyo equivalent are entertaining, and he is a gifted writer, but 'Trigger Happy' reads like a conversation with a friend who missed an entire generation of gaming.

6 people found this helpful

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Trigger Happy: Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Hardcover – September 29, 2000

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Steven Poole

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