Video Game Aesthetics – Free eBook

Author Stephen Poole is giving away a PDF version of his book Trigger Happy: The Secret Life of Video Games here: http://stevenpoole.net/blog/trigger-happier/

“Trigger Happy is a book about the aesthetics of videogames — what they share with cinema, the history of painting, or literature; and what makes them different, in terms of form, psychology and semiotics.”

“I grew up with digital games.”

I immediately identified with Nate Garrelts’ opening sentence in Negotiating the Digital Game/Gamer Intersection. Although there was never a console or computer in my home as a child, I played games on the Atari console and Commodore 64 computer at my dad’s house. I played my first arcade game in 1980, the classic Pac-Man, and would go on to spend several of my teenage years obsessed with video games. I still remember the theme songs and sound effects of many.

Having spent the first five years of my life largely without television, but having jumped right into the Internet and World Wide Web (no, they are not one and the same) twelve years ago, I feel like I embody an odd combination of relationships to technology. I watched my dad build our first colour television from a Heathkit (it resides in my storage room and still works), I took extra curricular classes in electronics, cartooning, rocketry and photography when I was eleven (then theatre, anatomy and ‘cop shop’ when I was twelve), I read a lot, I took grade eleven computer science (SP/k on punch cards, then BASIC on Commodore PET computers) and I played Dungeons & Dragons along with the video games. Then came a long break in my technological fascination, which was rekindled at OCAD (‘Electronics for Artists’ and ‘Video for Artists’), but it wasn’t until I bought my own computer system early in 1996 that I reconnected with kind of intense engagement with electronic and networked media. And of course there were games: Wolfenstein 3D, Doom & Doom II, Quake, Tomb Raider, Warcraft and StarCraft. I still have most of my 1.0 CDs (Wolfenstein is on floppy disk) of these games (and a Windows95 machine that will run them if it actually boots up after so many years in storage). I played on Interlog’s Quake server when it was such a new phenomenon there was hardly anyone there, though I preferred playing on my own or with just one or two friends rather than amid the instant obliteration mayhem the game servers quickly became. The last computer game I played with any regularity was Diablo. Strangely, my waning interest in video games coincided with a career change from front line social work to IT.