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Trigger Happy
38
The name’s melodrama, of course, grew out of the
geopolitical tensions of the time. But despite the lurid
sci-fi connotations, the game itself, which you can still
play on the Internet,
6
was serene, austere, a thing of
alien beauty. Two dueling spaceships in a pas de deux
against an electronic starfield, firing lazy torpedoes at
each other in the silence of space, avoiding all the while
the lethal gravitational pull of a central sun.
A leap of faith had been made. What these
coffeeguzzling student pioneers realized was that new
technology made possible a new sort of experience.
The photons fizzing from the screen were conceived
as manipulable packets of pleasure in themselves,
rather than simply a fancy way for the computer to
tell its user the result of a calculation via a dull string
of numbers. Russell and his friends designed—or
redesigned independently, to give Willy Higinbotham
his due—the first symbolic visual interface. That,
along with the work done by Xerox Parc in the 1970s,
is why you use word processors and other software
based around “windows” and “icons” rather than text.
(Playing videogames, though, is generally
acknowledged to be more fun than using Microsoft
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6 Java-capable browsers can just point themselves at
http://lcs.www.media.mit.edu/groups/el/projects/spacewar