My hand hurts
I’ve become somewhat more interested in gaming again recently and I’m pretty amazed by the current developments in this area. The boundaries of what used to be defined as a more or less solitary activity in front of a machine is being radically redefined as a social and physical, by any means highly contextual thing. What’s the most surprising to me is the fact that this boost in developments seems to be happening in many aspects at the same time and – some of those developments seem to be somewhat contradictory.
Remmelt boxing on the Wii
Two days ago, I tried out the Wii for the very first time. I think it’s really wonderful and I’m happy for Nintendo that their approach seems to have such a great impact. The design of the hardware is just fantastic and the positioning and such works very well as praised on countless blogs already. In terms of games, tennis, bowling and especially boxing are just wonderful and utterly physical experiences. It’s immersive to an extent that it really feels good, not only aesthetically but bodily and this is something new, at least for a mainstream application. It’s astonishing how much the involvement of the body boosts the whole experience, I’ve only had that once before with a Japanese arcade machine where you could dodge when the yakuza were firing at you.
What I probably found the most surprising is that many movements, while actually being just a swivel of the hand and certainly looking pretty moronic, felt right. I used to play tennis a few years ago and the sensation of playing tennis on the Wii actually came relatively close to the real thing. I tried to watch my movements and the result in the games a bit more closely, and most of the time I just seemed to trigger my avatar to hit the ball, so it’s mostly about timing as in most games before as well. Still, the higher involvement of the body lead to a much greater sense of causality, so apparently our Körpergefühl seems to quite effectively fill in the blanks that had existed ever since the simulation of movement on the screen. It’s also probably the first time that I had sore muscles from gaming (if you don’t count the joystick-craziness of the Epyx-games), which also felt kind of healthy.
Soccer in SL
On the other hand, there’s the increasing simulation of physical space in virtual landscapes such as Second Life. Yesterday I was playing soccer and skiing with my friends in SL and that also felt good. I’m really still unsure what to make of this whole thing and/or hype, but the very fact that people build a skiing resort and we meet up there to buy equipment and ski down snowy slopes is rather remarkable. Next up was an actual political demonstration in SL where opponents of French nationalists Front National gathered in front of their SL headquarters to express their unwillingness to accept FN’s presence there. This was even more astonishing since the nationalists in SL all looked a lot like gay Nazis (tight uniforms, broad shoulders, short hair, leather bracelets and dark sunglasses). The demonstration however, was very much unlike a usual gathering would be: while some of the very diverse crowd were en discutant inside the slick office, some were outside generating various objects to increase the load on the server which eventually slowed down and crashed. Will such strategies one day also have an effect on real demonstrations?
Demonstration in SL, me still skiing
So presently, there’s at least two currents: Virtual engages the physical through sensing of movement or location and virtual simulates the physical by creating huge realms in which people are able to create almost anything they imagine (ironically, often without the constraints of the actual physical world). Are these developments part of the same process or are they oppositional? Anyone got thoughts on that? What they do share, though, seems to be the fact that the activities are inherently social.
The Wii opens the box to participation, both spatially as it requires much more space in front of the screen and in terms of skills, thus making it more easily accessible and fun to join in. SL (and WoW to a great extent) are also social games, that rely almost completely on interaction between players. Or as Kevin Slavin pointed out recently: “Since the introduction of the computer, we had been playing alone for 30 years.”. Exciting times – and please, artists, don’t call something interactive unless you’ve tried one of these.