Video games, an art form which now grosses more than cinema box office or video rental receipts, have attracted their share of opprobrium. Poole isn't afraid to confront the big issues that are most often associated with gaming in the public mind, but his major contributions are quite unique in the annals of writing on video games. In Trigger Happy the phenomenon of games and gaming is soberly deconstructed. Plato is called as a witness on the role and nature of play and his concept of mimesis or representation shown to be central to the inner life of video games. Graphical realism or photorealism has long been the Holy Grail of both developers and gamers, but Poole warns us to be careful what we wish for.
Video games bear little resemblance to reality and are all the more entertaining for that.
Heidegger, Nietzsche, Sophocles, Shakespeare and Wittgenstein all make cameo appearances as Poole attempts to define the central components of the video game and the essence of its appeal. The action genre in film has supplied video games with both form and content, but too many film licences translate into less than cutting-edge gaming. Gamers aren't stupid. Most of the cartridges were eventually buried in a landfill site in New Mexico, where one hopes they will eventually provide some amusement for archaelogists in the distant future. Some tie-ins do work.