Trading Places
I bought an Xbox 360 last year but didn’t spend all that much time playing it until recently. It’s a fantastic system, particularly when connected to an HDTV and a decent surround sound system. In the best games — Bioshock, Halo 3, Portal — the detail is jaw-dropping; the controller rattles with tactile expressiveness, sending little earthquakes through your hands (if you rest it on your lap, your whole body shakes); the booming sound envelops you. Sit close enough to a very large screen and you just might forget for a moment that you’re at home, on your couch, holding a little plastic controller, staring at a bank of light-up pixels. Disconnect after a few hours of play and your eyes will throb slightly, your nerves will be a bit twitchy, and the real world will feel slightly less sharp, a foggy, uncertain place in comparison to the clear, clean constructs of the game. No, it’s not you-are-there-convincing; it doesn’t achieve, say, the panicky, could-this-real? quality of a dream. But it’s totalizing in the way it demands and controls your attention, as overwhelming and immersive as any fake experience I’ve ever had.
The engrossing quality of a well-constructed game is fundamentally different from any other art or entertainment experience I can think of. Novels, both highbrow and low, offer escape from the real world into your own mind, a chance to swim in the currents of your own imagination guided by an author. Movies give you a completely realized story and world, but you’re outside of it, separate from its reality, free to judge it. The gaming world, though, puts you and your experience at its center, particularly in the first-person games I’m most fond of.
And what they offer isn’t an escape; it’s an exchange. These games don’t come with instruction manuals; they teach you how to play through trial and error, through digitally lived experience. The end result is that you give up your self and your experience, learning the rules and rituals of the game world from scratch, trading your own life for the one provided by the game.
Similar experience here. It’s both scary and thrilling to think what will be available ten years down the line.
Incidentally, suggest you try Fallout 3 if you haven’t already. I was sceptical at first, but the more I play it, the more convinced I become that it’s a masterpiece.
— Anthony · Mar 30, 11:03 AM · #
You could combine this discussion with the discussion of Monsters versus Aliens (3D) and the legalization of marijuana and the Narnia pot room at NYU. Everyone’s working to find the best providers of fake experiences.
(I still think that the next revolutionary video game system will work with glasses, not big screens.)
— tom · Mar 30, 06:27 PM · #
Fallout 3 is the next game on my list.
— Peter Suderman · Mar 30, 06:47 PM · #
“I still think that the next revolutionary video game system will work with glasses, not big screens.”
1) Right now, if you’re a game maker, you take for granted the display infrastructure already in place for you – almost every house has TVs, and will soon have HDTVs.
2) People still gather to play video games in groups at houses. Glasses would remove the social display, making it a more solitary experience. But the market for gamers who would play in this style is done growing – nobody has an eye on hardcore, antisocial gamers’ money anymore. The eye is on casual gamers, the people who an antisocial display would turn off.
3) A non-negligible amount of these casual gamers would get motion sickness from a head-borne display.
4) It’s not clear-cut, and it is related to my first point, but there is a certain financial incentive not to do this by game system makers – for example, Sony makes both TVs and game machines.
5) Wrap-around display glasses would make a more immersive experience for first-person games. A case can be made for some level of added benefit for any game where more screen makes for a richer experience, like real-time strategy games where more of the field is more better. This case is harder to make for fighting games, for games like The Sims, platformers, and other games where the size of the screen is built into the game (Tetris, for example).
— bcg · Mar 30, 10:03 PM · #
My girlfriend’s 360 just got the red ring of death. It’s a damn shame; she was just getting me back into gaming. It’s the one problem that keeps me from an all-out endorsement of the system though.
Oh well…so much for resolving our disagreements with Soul Calibur duels.
Also, I’m not a Halo fan at all, but I absolutely second the brilliance of Portal (which I have on my laptop), and Bioshock was probably the first FPS I actually enjoyed.
And these capchas are still amusing. Slain 7,090,800? I certainly hope that’s NPCs.
— Joseph · Mar 31, 07:50 PM · #
I’d recommend:
Mass Effect – what I’d call the first RPG for the 21st century
Gears Of War 1 & 2 – invigorating, kinetic and a visceral joy to play
— Ali Choudhury · Apr 1, 07:31 PM · #
Fallout III is pretty good; I’m playing the second installment of downloadable content (“The Pitt”) right now. But to echo what others have said – Mass Effect is a must-play on the system (and cheap as hell, second-hand.) GTAIV is a must-play as well, the degree to which it simulates a living, breathing city is unparalleled. Incredibly immersive, in the sense that you’ll rapidly be committing the contours of a city that doesn’t exist to memory alongside the city in which you live.
But, geez, there are other games besides shooters, Peter. Castle Crashers – a hand-drawn side-scrolling co-operative multiplayer swords-and-sorcery brawler – is the most fun up to four people can have on an Xbox. Incredibly fun, incredibly funny. Best ten bucks (!) you’ll spend on your Xbox. (It’s an XBLA downloadable.)
— Chet · Apr 1, 07:44 PM · #
Winter is long and dark out here. More than once my wife and I have said, “We ought get one of them game system things.” But we don’t seem to have the bug, so we end up watching home improvement shows instead.
— Tony Comstock · Apr 1, 09:00 PM · #