"Games are popular art, collective social reactions to the main drive or action of any culture. Games, like institutions, are extensions of social man and of the body politic, as technologies are extensions of the animal organism. Both games and technologies are counter-irritants or ways of adjusting to the stress of the specialized actions that occur in any social group. As extensions of the popular response to the workaday stress, games become faithful models of a culture. They incorporate both the actions and the reactions of whole populations in a single dynamic image."

---Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

I've always wondered what McLuhan would make of the videogame world today. He was an enthusiastic intellectual pioneer when TV and computers were in their infancy. This quote offers some perspective on how McLuhan would have read videogames. First, he sees games and technologies as meeting the same need, but coming from different sources. The "extensions of man" that are at the center of the McLuhan philosophy are very deliberate outgrowths of the biological--feet turn into wheels, nervous systems into computers.

Games, on the other hand, he labels as extensions of the social. He goes on in this chapter to describe games as relevant and interesting to people because the games reflect accurately the sorts of systems we interact with in daily life.

In the videogame, we see the confluence of the social and the organismic extension of people. The videogame brings together these independent themes.

What of it? I think that on its surface this coming together of social and organismic elements argues that videogames are more unique as a medium than we sometimes suppose. I cannot think of another medium that seamlessly blends the technological extensions with the social. The electronic rulesets and images have combined in the videogame to create a social-mechanical cyborg that is truly sui generis.

As a quick side note, this area of McLuhan might provide some insight into why pinball has failed to reach the same audience over time as videogames. Pinball and videogames are extensions of both the organism and the social aspects of people. But pinball extends the mechanical aspects of humanity while videogames extend the electronic. In the McLuhan perspective, the mechanical extensions of people are of the past era, the electronic extensions are of this era. In that way, pinball is simply the proto-videogame--something that shows the desire to merge he extensions of the organism and the extensions of the social into one object.

This quote was taken from the New American Library edition, Seventh printing, second edition, 1964.