Trigger Happy the Babylonian techno palace on Ibiza. Lately, electricity has become the preferred fire—eminently biddable and plastic—of the moderns. Electric light freed us from the tyranny of the dark, hastening the march of technology. The movies came along and “broke our prisons asunder”: reality was recorded and recreated anywhere, through light. Then there was television: a tumultuous inferno of electrons, arcanely marshaled and beaming more reality into each lucky home. Through the gift of fire in its latest incarnation, everyone was to have their horizons expanded, their minds cultivated, their hopes nurtured. That didn’t last. The fire became not an illuminating flame but a cauterizing one, dulling the nerves. You can shout at the television, but it will just keep on pumping out its moronizing radiation. You can switch channels. You can switch it off. And now videogames—the television screen reclaimed for our control. What potential—if television replaced the log fire or the wireless as a focus of domestic attention, the videogame reengineers the television’s relentless blaze as a colorful zone of play, a new world to explore, a rich and strange place to pit your wits against the dazzling inventions of others. The pixels dance to your tune. You’re not
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