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Trigger Happy
102
appears at the bottom of the screen, under your control,
and you can continue the never-ending battle from the
point where you left off.
We are used to thinking of “life” as a single,
sacred thing, the totality of our experiences. But
videogames redefine a “life” as an expendable,
iterable part of a larger campaign. In part this
resembles the brutal calculus of war, where a human
life, normally the definition of total value in
peacetime, is arithmetized as being worth, say, one
hundredth of the value of taking the next ridge. But
videogames offer a multitude of lives to the same
individual. It is instant reincarnation, though
reincarnation in a body indistinguishable from the
original. It is instant expiation for the sin of failure.
The standard number of lives granted at the
beginning of a game is three, which corresponds to
the paradigmatic number of tries allowed in many
other games, from a baseball hitter’s number of
strikes to a javelin-thrower’s attempts at the gold, to
the number of doors from which a contestant must
choose in the American gameshow Let’s Make a
Deal,
17
or the number of “acts” or significant
subdivisions of the protagonist’s story in classical
_________________
17 Source of the amusing “Monty Hall Paradox” in probability theory. For
an excellent explanation, see Deborah J. Bennett, Randomness (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1999).