Friday, February 20, 2004
Digital sunsets
Torill speaks eloquently about the physical sense of changing seasons, and points to the lack of sensory experience in the virtual world as its ultimate limitation.
She's right. The internet can't show you what sun feels like, and looking clothes online doesn't give you the chance to feel them and try them on. Torill's mention of video games that engage the body, like dancing games, is important, because even at their most bodily inclusive these days, like those where people step into "skis" and navigate their digital avatar as it careens down a slope, the body essentially becomes a large, complex controller, limited to a certain number of inputs. It's the same as when a person picks up an Xbox control and has twelve buttons, plus two directional sticks and one directional pad. Part of the problem isn't that we cannot code sensory experiences. It's that our level of interactivity with virtual worlds is so limited. There are only certain things you can do, very specific limits to the ways you can interact.
Yet at times I find myself amazed by the virtual worlds I can encounter--the first time I played Halo I spent more time walking around and looking at the trees and the rocks, and zooming in on the arc of the ring world above that I practically forgot to shoot things. And sometimes I play the newer Grand Theft Auto games, like Vice City, not to accomplish anything, but to simply fly around in the helicopter, park on top of a building, and watch the sunset over the water.
Torill's analysis is likely to hold true for a long, long time--it will take unknown, science fiction-styled leaps to make digital realities as involving as real ones. But one of the barriers for that is breaking down in the new generations of games--you're still limited by how you physically interface with virtual realities (i.e., with controllers), but what you do within them is changing; people are discovering the games we want to play more and more are the ones that give us opportunities to be who we are--or who we want to be--within them. We're already limited in how we can physically interface with virtual realities; these days it seems binding to play a game that tells you exactly how you should act, too. It seems to me that the game that best has the opportunity to surprise me is the game that will take me someplace I have never been to, and to give me the choice to do everything, or nothing at all, there.
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