Steven Poole: Trigger Happy Thought Showers and Gaming Adventures.
- Scott Millard
- Feb 10, 2018
- 7 min read
If you were to publish a list of the most important books on the video gaming industry, Steven Poole’s turn of the millennium book “Trigger Happy” would be right at the top of that list. It’s a book that documents the development of the games business through the late nineties.
It’s a catalogue of interviews and commentary of ideas and theories that was the very foundation of the enormous business video gaming is today. Since 2000, Poole has been an avid commentator of the games industry with regular columns in the tech bible “Edge” magazine. It was these columns that inspired his 2013 book “Trigger Happy 2.0”.
To pigeon hole Poole as a video game industry historian and commentator is somewhat short of the mark. His prolific articles can be found across a wide range of publications including The Guardian, The New Statesman, and the Wall Street Journal. He writes on a myriad of subjects examining the human condition. His most recent book was a satirical expose of modern office jargon titled “Who Touched Base in my Thought Shower.
As the gaming industry stalwarts return from the Tokyo Game Show to prepare for the Christmas 2014 and the world continues to drown in jargonistic language mazes we thought it a opportune time to pick the brain of Steven Poole.
IBR: One of the more interesting ideas that was very widely held in 2004 was that PC gaming would disappear and perhaps hold a 10% market share vs console based gaming. We all now know that that didn't eventuate. As a avid observer of the game business do you think its still very difficult to anticipate the future direction of the gaming industry?
Steven Poole: I’ve never been an industry analyst or forecaster, so I’m glad to say I never predicted that PC gaming would disappear. It seems clear that attempting to predict hardware developments a decade from now is very difficult, whether in videogames in particular or in the technology business in general.
IBR: In between your first and second book on gaming something very profound happened to Japanese game developers, in that they lost their dominant position in the content business. With Japanese development community seemingly lacking any interest in developing for the new generation of consoles do you ever see them returning to the powerhouse they once were?
Steven Poole: As long as studios like From Software (Dark Souls) and Kojima Productions (Metal Gear Solid V) are publishing on the new consoles, it would seem hasty to write Japanese developers off as a creative force.
IBR: Looking at the next generation consoles, and no matter how much of a positive spin Sony puts on the PS4, the numbers sold in the first 10 months of release in Japan are equal to what was sold in the first weekend of the PS2. Has the interactive entertainment industry changed that much in the past 10 years that the idea of dedicated console gaming is redundant?
Steven Poole: It evidently isn’t redundant. PS4 sales in the UK have just tripled on the back of the release of Destiny. But what no one saw coming 10 years ago is that most people are now carrying a powerful games console in their pocket, which also happens to be an internet appliance and a telephone. This has ushered in what I call an age of “ambient play”. And yet the wild popularity of mobile games doesn’t remove the interest a smaller but dedicated audience has in far more complex world-simulations of the kind you need more computing power to run.
IBR: The console game industry seems to have distilled itself down to a half dozen powerhouse franchises (GTA and COD etc.) how does this bode for independent game developers?
Steven Poole: It bodes very well because people increasingly exhibit frustration that big blockbuster games become these kind of giant travelling funfairs designed to appeal to everyone, yet which often are dismayingly clichéd. By contrast we are in a golden age of arthouse experiment in smaller games, which you can probably date to the beginning of easy digital-only distribution enabled by platforms such as Steam and the PlayStation Network.
IBR: E-sports has been around for a long time, particularly in places like Korea, but has only recently began to gain traction in western markets, why do you think it took so long to catch on?
Steven Poole: It was already happening a decade ago in America too; but perhaps it was something as simple as infrastructure, in that Korea had a much more advanced internet-café culture for online gaming before that was common in western countries. Now one can consider e-sports as just one aspect of the phenomenon of videogames as public performance, which also includes the way people now stream themselves playing games on services such as Twitch TV. I think that’s a fascinating new opportunity for artistic critique and celebration.
IBR: Given that Virtual Reality gaming is back on the agenda again, and the Facebook acquired Occulus Rift is at the heart of it, what do you think the world's expectation is compared to what the technology can deliver? Are you optimistic that this may herald a whole new cycle for game and interactive entertainment?
Steven Poole: The world’s expectation, at least as articulated in science fiction over the decades, is that you’ll be able to “jack in” to a completely immersive world, as in Neuromancer and The Matrix. Given this long-cherished dream, any actual technology that falls short will inevitably disappoint some. But Rift is fascinating, and does at least promise to be the first mainstream VR technology that works as claimed. Though whether it will just become a way to walk through giant Facebook ads remains to be seen.
IBR: There has been a lot of controversy over fan attacks and trolling in the games industry directed at developers and other players. Is this something that is inherently unique to the games business or just to youth in general?
Steven Poole: Well, you don’t see the same kind of thing in discussions of films or books. It is a toxic combination of the subset of adolescent youth that traditional console or PC-based videogames attract, which is overwhelmingly male and emotionally arrested, and the internet, which facilitates vicious cascades of sanctimonious witch-hunting and trolling. Perhaps one positive outcome of recent events, though, is that now the self-identified “core” gamers have efficiently outed themselves as misogynistic morons, the rest of the broad church of videogames can safely ignore them and continue to pursue more interesting and creative ideas.
IBR: Where do you see the games business by the time we are reading Trigger Happy 3.0?
Steven Poole: Games will be beamed directly into our brains while we live on the Moon.
IBR: Trigger Happy 2.0 is different type of book to the first, how did you approach writing the second book?
Steven Poole: The second book is based on my columns for Edge magazine, so it’s a collection of mini-essays about the art and politics of videogames, which are organized thematically into sections about time, psychology, society, and so forth. So the process was one of noticing recurring themes in my own writings — about freedom, or the portrayal of murder and torture, or issues of simulation and naturalism — and occasionally updating them in light of subsequent developments. For example, I had made the point in 2002 that GTA: Vice City was a work of historical fiction (because it is set in the 1980s), and wondered whether videogames could increasingly exploit history in more sophisticated ways for their narrative contexts. And then along came the Assassin’s Creed series, and so on.
IBR: Your latest book is not about games; it is about “Office Jargon”. This seems to be a natural follow on from your book on ‘Political Jargon’ “Unspeak. Are these two book ideas related?
Steven Poole: Unspeak is a form of linguistic propaganda: a kind of language engineered to obscure truth and shut down arguments. (Eg “war on terror”, “tax burden”, “pro-life”, and even “climate change”, which replaced “global warming” in official UN communications after lobbying from oil-rich states.) Office jargon — of the “leveraging synergies going forward” mind — is a maddeningly viral form of Unspeak too: it’s designed to deflect blame, complicate simple ideas, obscure problems, and perpetuate power relations. For example, saying that you have to “downsize” or (more recently) “rightsize” the company is a deadening euphemism for sacking people. The jargon also dehumanizes workers by figuring them as machines (with the appropriate “bandwidth”) or children, while enforcing a wheedling intimacy (“reaching out” to “touch base”), and pretending that office life (with its “drilling down” and “helicopter views”) is much more exciting than it really is.
IBR: What do think the driver of modern office Jargon is? The ultra competitive workspace or the need to be seen as ‘the expert’?
Steven Poole: There’s a sort of arms race of technical-sounding bureaucratic rhetoric that ambitious people feel they have to engage in, even if they privately find it ridiculous. Surveys repeatedly show that workers and managers hate business jargon, yet there’s a culture of fear that if you don’t talk that way, you won’t get taken seriously. It’s like a giant and very boring MMORPG, where instead of pretending to be an elf or a wizard, everyone pretends to be the kind of thrusting executive who somehow believes what he is saying when he talks about taking a deep dive into the key core competencies or opening the kimono to reveal the low-hanging fruit.
IBR: Can you imagine the workplace without jargon, did you find one whilst researching for your book?
Steven Poole: My own workplace is the reading rooms of the British Library in London. It is blissfully free of office jargon because no one is allowed to talk.
Links
Publications
Steven Poole (2000) Trigger Happy: Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution
Arcade Publishing: ISBN 1559705396
Steven Poole (2007) Unspeak: How Words Become Weapons, How Weapons Become a Message, and How That Message Becomes Reality
Grove Press: ISBN 0802143059
Steven Poole (2012) You Aren't What You Eat: Fed Up with Gastroculture
Union Books: ASIN B009ESQEH2
Steven Poole (2013) Who Touched Base in my Thought Shower?: A Treasury of Unbearable Office Jargon
Sceptre : ISBN 1444781847
Comments