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'Trigger Happy' has always felt like a strange umbrella title for Steven Poole's games writing; he never seems to waste a bullet. Witness: his latest book kicks off by listing some of the cultural inroads games have made in the last decade or so. Slavoj Žižek has a Black Ops poster on his wall, Will Self and John Lanchester have written articles about games, and the V&A even included a few in a recent exhibition on British design. Specifics aside, it's an opener a dozen writers might have chosen, but only Poole would conclude this victory lap by kicking a little gravel into the stands. "And a surprising proportion of American teenage males say they want to be snipers when they grow up," he writes. "A dream that was surely nurtured by stealthy console-based ultraviolence."That juxtaposition gets to the heart of Poole's work, I think. He's not valuable because he's a broadsheet type who loves games and is willing to serve as a booster for them in the golden savannahs where the Amises and the Updikes graze. He's valuable because he takes games seriously - and because he sees no reason not to. Across the 114 pages of Trigger Happy 2.0, you get to witness games examined with a disciplined eye and an occasionally wild mind; you'll often find them held to account, too. The subtitle for the book is 'The art and politics of videogames.' It delivers on both fronts, and is particularly good in the areas where the two blur into one another.
Back in 2000, the original Trigger Happy was an examination of video game aesthetics - close reading at a time when most books on the form contained pull-out maps and strategies for taking down Sephiroth. 2.0, however, is a collection of Poole's Edge columns; what it lacks in sustained investigation, it makes up for with range. Poole's the ideal writer for this kind of approach. He's deft in setting things out and quick to get to the heart of a serious subject, and he sees the potential kernel of an idea everywhere. A trip to the opticians might inspire a piece on games' laziness when tackling different perspectives (what would a second person singular game look like?), girls chatting about princess pirates in the supermarket leads to a rumination on animism.
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