[1] Advert for Laser Squad, Krisalis Software Ltd.

[2]   The term `phantasmagoria' was invented in the early nineteenth century to describe exhibitions of optical illusions produced by magic lanterns, so its use here seems apt.

[3] It was many years between the making of Star Wars and LucasArts issuing an `official' game of the film. This allowed many other companies to program their own space- combat games based loosely on the film.

[4] Advert for Links 386 Pro published by U.S. Gold.

[5]   One of the first games to employ fractals for generating landscapes was Midwinter 2: Flames of Freedom produced by Rainbird in 1992.

[6] Theodor Adorno, `The Schema of Mass Culture', The Culture Industry. Selected Essays on Mass Culture, London 1991, p. 81.

[7] Ibid., p. 82.

[8] Adorno, Minima Moralia. Reflections from Damaged Life, London 1974, p. 201.

[9] In discussing chess Roger Caillois notes that the game takes on an independence in relation to the individual player who inherits a history and a practice of the game and is aware of their own small part in a continuum of chess playing. In computer gaming there is no comparable formalisation or recording, but the autonomy of game from player is solidified and made evident. Caillois, `L'Imagination rigoureuse', Cases d'un échiquier, Paris 1970, p. 39.

[10] Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne, London, 1977, p. 197.

[11] Benjamin, "Hashish in Marseilles", Reflections, New York, 1986, p. 142.

[12] Paul Presley, review of B17 Flying Fortress, PC Review, no. 12, October 1992, p. 60.

[13] Anon., `News', PC Review, no. 3, January 1992, p. 10.

[14] Gilman Louie, "Foreword: Operation Desert Storm", Falcon 3.0 Flight Manual, U.S.A. 1991, pp. ix- x.

[15]Cited in David Sheff, Game Over. Nintendo's Battle to Dominate an Industry, London, 1993, p. 375.

[16] Ibid., p. 285.

[17] The games company Spectrum Holobyte, for example, also makes military simulators.

[18] Real history, even when rewritten by the player, is not necessarily sufficient and some games use sci- fi departures from realistic reconstruction. Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, published by U.S. Gold, for instance, has the player fighting or operating experimental German planes that (thankfully) never flew.

[19] Paul Virilio has explored the relationship between visualisation techniques and military action in War and Cinema. The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller, London, 1989. Now computers as well as people `see' and instantly act on the data they receive. Jean Baudrillard's notorious views on war as simulation, produced in response to events in the Gulf, are dissected by Christopher Norris in Uncritical Theory. Postmodernism, Intellectuals and the Gulf War, London, 1992.

[20] Jean Baudrillard, `The Political Economy of the Sign', Selected Essays, Cambridge, 1988, p. 81.

[21] There is an ever lessening engagement of the player in peripheral activities such as note taking, map making, even remembering and thinking, which used to be essential to many games. These functions are increasingly taken over by automated facilities, and help keys.

[22] See the jokey article about the personalisation of computers by Michael Hewitt (`Sounding Off', Personal Computer World, November 1992, p. 175). He rightly points out that this phenomena is only seen with computers and does not extend to toasters or washing machines.

[23] A doubt about this point is that, as programs become more complex and the interrelations between modules of code ever more numerous, bugs become much more difficult to detect and control.

[24] There are a few sleazy games of a mild character marketed by the major software houses but sex, as opposed to Hollywood romance, is a subject generally avoided.

[25] This is for the game Obitus published by Psygnosis.

[26] Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire. A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, London, 1973, p. 135.

[27] Adorno, `Free Time', The Culture Industry, p. 164.

[28] Adorno, Minima Moralia, pp. 130- 1.

[29] There is an exception, when a character's action actually ends the game within a certain time limit, which the player generally knows of in advance. Then this character is allegorised into the principle of that act, whether destroying the universe or forcing the princess and, above all, ending the game.

[30] See Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 175.

[31]   See Angus Fletcher, Allegory. The Theory of a Symbolic Mode, New York, 1964, pp. 174- 5.

[32] Ibid., p. 176.

[33] At the time of writing the much- hyped Windows 95 has just appeared which Microsoft claim will run DOS games without crashing and will allow programmers to write advanced games directly for the new system. It is too early to tell whether these claims are justififed.

[34]   There are of course other devices: `false DOS' keys which apparently return the player to the operating system, programs for hiding entire directories and silencing noisy games.

[35]   Robert X. Cringely, Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date, London, 1992, p. 14.

[36] Benjamin, letter to Adorno, 9th December 1938, in Aesthetics and Politics, London, 1977, p. 141.

[37]   See Rolf Tiedemann, `Dialectics at a Standstill', in Gary Smith (ed.), On Walter Benjamin. Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, Chicago, 1983, pp. 278-9.

[38] Recent studies show little or no gender difference in expressed interest, type of game played or length of playing time among children. See Christine Ward Gailey, `Mediated Messages. Gender, Class and Cosmos in Home Video Games', Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 27, no. 1, Summer 1993, p. 86. Sheff notes that 46% of Western Game Boy players are adults (Game Over, p. 339.) Another study, published in 1983, found no significant differences in male and female attitudes to video arcades, though there were markedly more males actually playing the games (see Sidney J. Kaplan, `The Image of the Amusement Arcades and Differences in Male and Female Video Game Playing', Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 17, no. 1, Summer 1983, pp. 93- 8). This situation has changed a good deal since, and is still doing so.

[39]   Benjamin, `Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century', Reflections, p. 162.

[40] Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt, London, 1984, p. 125.