To many people, Sony represents the cutting edge of consumer electronics and entertainment, with it’s high end televisions, video game systems, and dvd players, not to mention the fact that it is one of the largest publishers of both music and movies in the world. Sony even helped usher in the new age of optical disc storage devices, Blu Rays. Although, on a personal note, I feel as if Blu Ray’s victory over HD DVD had less to do with politics and more to do with the effect its language has on its auditor: the mental image evoked by the term ‘Blu Ray’ is something colorful and high tech – a beam of radiant blue light, whereas the term ‘HD DVD’ elicits… nothing. If anything, it conjures the mental image of just another plain DVD. What would you be drawn to? But, this is besides the point; what I really want to bring up are two poor design choices I see in the controls of Sony’s Playstation 3 and Playstation Portable.

Sony was one of the first to release a controller with dual analog sticks. These sticks not only offered players more precise control over anything a D-Pad would be used for, but the fact that two were added, one in addition to the D-Pad and a second to the right side of the controller, opened up a whole new range of inputs players were capable of; it essentially added more functionality and it expanded the potential complexity of games. (We should also note that Nintendo was close to offering two analog sticks with it’s 64 controller; instead, it had a D-pad and a single analog, but they were oriented in such a way that really only rendered one usable at a time, and, if a game were to allow a player to use both, they’d need to sacrifice usage of the main buttons, unless, of course, Nintendo expected players to twist their right thumb at an odd angle. Also, Nintendo was even closer to offering dual thumbsticks with the release of its Gamecube, although the little yellow C-Stick was hardly a fine tuned analog – it was clumsy and offered about as much control as if a small mammalian teet had been placed there instead.) But, one of the most important changes Sony’s twin analogs made to the interface between player and game world was bestowing the player with the power to dynamically control the camera.

Before these double sticks, the level of control a player had over their perspective on their game world was very limited, and there were two distinct ways designers would handle the camera. There were either fixed camera positions on the world – much like surveillance cameras, whose field of view a player could move around in, that, should the player move outside the realm of, would change orientation, or the other option was to have a camera following the player’s avatar. With this, there were a handful of views a button press could cycle through. Although, there were some games that enabled the player to move their view around 360 degrees with control of either the D-Pad or a single analog stick, but doing so would usually require the player to temporarily stop moving, as movement had almost always been controlled with that single D-Pad or analog. It was as if the player had just put a quarter in one of those pivoting telescopes you find on top of skyscrapers and other tourist locations, you know, the ones that give you just about enough time to find your focus before switching off. Regardless, the addition of the analogs, specifically the right one, freed players of their oppressed perspective and allowed players to position the camera nearly wherever they want (within limit), and, most importantly, they could do so without relinquishing control over their avatar’s primary movement.

It was a major step for gaming, as these analogs enhanced the intimacy between a player and his/her illusory world; examining virtual spaces became one step closer to feeling more like the way we move through and inspect our surroundings organically.

Now, the dual thumbstick control layout has been standardized to some degree – not with regards to their orientation in relation to each other, but just the fact that two exist on the controller. Each of the main home gaming consoles have it – the Xbox 360 has it, the Playstation 3 has it, and even though the Wii doesn’t offer two thumbsticks per se, the nunchuck’s analog in tandem with the Wii mote’s multi-direction functionality can be used to create a very similar control scheme as its competitors. This standardization is of no surprise; as we’ve mentioned above, it was these controls that have acted as the framework for immersive controls and game mechanics to be built off of for fully navigable 3D worlds; but, what is a surprise, is Sony’s failure to include a second analog on its PSP.

The PSP was released long after the introduction of dual analog controllers, so what could possibly be the reason for Sony’s exclusion of it for their handheld gaming platform? Of course, the system itself hasn’t failed miserably because of it; the PSP has been very successful, even outselling the DS at times in Japan, but I’m curious how much more appealing and capable the system would be if a second analog had been included.

Even if you were to create an atari controller with a screen and market it as a modern portable gaming console, developers would still do their best to create fascinating and alluring games of nearly every genre, and it’s been no different for the PSP; game development studios have done everything they can to ensure that every demographic and flavor of gamer is covered, but it’s obvious how many games would have benefit from the added control, first person shooters and third person action/adventure/platformers especially. On the PSP, shooters feel contrived; they’re more like a 3D Galaga or a glorified Doom, with players strafing around, clumsily acquiring and dispatching targets. (As an aside, shooters on Nintendo’s DS play much better than any on the PSP. The use of a stylus to aim functions in a very similar manner to an analog, and that in tandem with a D-Pad makes for a similar layout to the PS3 or 360, of course, minus all the extra buttons and triggers.) Adventure games work to some degree, as many games in that theatre work with set camera positions or with environmentally adapting over the shoulder cameras; some even allow players to orbit the camera around clockwise and counterclockwise with use of the triggers. But, I’m not here to outline the games that work and the games that don’t for the PSP, and I’m not saying that games can only hope to offer loose controls at best in the absence of a dual analog set up; there are plenty of great games out there that perform beautifully without them. What I simply mean to bring attention to is the lost potential of the PSP. In its current incarnation, the PSP is like a souped up game boy, but, if only it contained a second analog stick on the right, it would be more like a dumbed down Playstation or Xbox, and I’d much rather have one of those.

As for Sony’s PS3, the issue I see with the dual analog thumbsticks (they’ve remained the same since the original Playstation) is simply their positioning. It seems as if where they exist right now does not place the thumbs in a realm where we have the greatest range of motion or level of fine motor control. If you hold your hands out in front of you as if you were gripping a controller and position your thumbs so they extend out away from your hand at about ninety degrees and begin to move them around, you might notice a certain rigidity – a kind of jerkiness. If you don’t understand what I’m referring to, you may notice it better if you bring your thumbs back to where they rest naturally, at about a forty five degree angle from the hand. If you move your thumbs around then, you may notice how much more fluid their motion is and how much more control we seem to have over them. This is due to a combination of muscle memory (our hands and thumbs are much more accustomed to this kind of movement) and hand anatomy – our thumbs naturally rest there for a reason.

Besides forcing our thumbs outside of their natural habitat, the analogs have one other inherent problem: the fact that their positioning allows for the occasional interference between thumbs. Thumbsticks aren’t intended to be manipulated with our fingertips – proper placement of the analogs lies between the tips of our thumbs and the joint, right on the fleshy pads of the digits that have distinguished us from apes and that have enabled us to wield and create such things as video game controllers, and, with any game that maps movement to the left thumbstick and aiming to the right, strafing right while looking left could cause a player’s thumb tips to bump into one another. Now, I certainly don’t think this is a personal problem, because I by no means have extra large hands. I’m of average hight, approximately 5’11″, and my hands have been considered dainty and feminine, but I ‘m positive I can still wield a BK Burger, should I desire such empty calories.

Sony’s playstation controller is simply an example of poor design. The designers must have been more concerned with creating something symmetrical and visually appealing than something well thought out and functional. Maybe Sony will learn a few things from Microsoft.

I am so sorry for taking as long as I did to get this entry out; not only did this entry change course fifty times, I have many other personal projects going on at the moment. So, anyway, here it is:

Color is something we take for granted these days; we go clothes shopping, and we can essentially find any color garment we’re looking for. We decide to paint our homes, and we’re given vast color libraries from which to choose from. But, things weren’t always this way; quests that had sent men and women halfway around the globe had been undertaken in search of color, and innumerable lives had been lost defending it. Of course, what I’m talking about are the rare and natural ingredients that had served as pigment to the various dyes of yore, but, regardless of how mindful we are to the suffering that went into creating color before today’s synthetic pigments, we’re all still aware that color undoubtably still plays an important role in our and every other culture on this planet.

For a time, it was thought certain colors possessed magical, metaphysical properties. The native americans would encrust their bodies with ochre colored paint, believing it had the ability to ward off evil spirits. But, in our modern societies, the ‘magical’ effects once attributed to color have simply been reduced to ‘psychological’ effects. The walls of asylums are coated in a pale blue in an attempt to keep the erratic neuronal signals of its patients to a minimum, and hospitals are often painted white or with very light, desaturated colors, giving the sense of stark cleanliness.

Color is everywhere; our eyes cannot escape it. No matter where we look — at our hands or into space — photons of various wavelengths are wiggling their way through our corneas and tapping our retinas (closing your eyes doesn’t help), and, often times, the colors we see in our man made habitat had much planning behind them. A lot of forethought and design go into the colors that plaster all the various products lining the shelves of every boutique and supermarket and the signage that covers nearly every surface we interact with. Most of the time, colors for things like these are used with hopes of catching our attention, like a flower whose brilliant petals attracts the insects so as to spread its pollen, but sometimes these items are designed with colors whose psychic effects (we think) parallel the kind of actions we take and moods we associate with regards to the item or service.

But, what about the colors used in art that’s intended to be savored, not the art that ends up on some packaged, disposable, single serving wrapper? What kind of thought goes into the use of color there? This isn’t an easily answered question; artists use color for a variety of reasons, and it depends on what they hope to achieve with their art. Not to mention, given our limited comprehension of the brain and the inescapable subjectivity of sense experience, the effect achieved with a given color can end up being completely different than what an artist or designer had intended; but that doesn’t stop people from trying. Game worlds are no exception; the digital spaces we explore are replete with colors of various hues, saturations, and values, though how often are the colors chosen to create something more than a believable and enchanting veneer?

As I write this, I begin to notice more and more that the aims I’d had for this entry about color isn’t so much deviating as it is expanding towards something more along the lines of metaphor and symbolism. I was concerned with trying to discover a reason behind the various colors we see in games; I wanted to know if they meant something or if they were just designed to be visually alluring. But, as I continue to think about the subject matter, I realize I want to know how metaphor is presented in games and how we can go about locating it.

Metaphor is something so powerful, yet so ephemeral. If our eyes aren’t cutting through the words of a novel with the utmost attentiveness or both our ears and eyes aren’t as open as we think while seated in a movie theatre, there’s a good chance we’ll miss any of the metaphor that’s present. Metaphor is what makes the high brow critics of art deliberate if a work is even worthy of being considered ‘art,’ but does the fact that few critics consider video games an art — ahem! Ebert — really mean they lack any metaphor and substance? Do they truly fail at commenting on our curious condition out here in space or in demonstrating a high level of skill in the purposeful crafting of a world and its inhabitants?

Most of us are aware of what metaphors are: a form of figurative language that portrays one object as being equal to an other in some way. Essentially, they compare two things without using ‘like’ or ‘as,’ and the comparison is often between two very different subjects. For example: her apple eyes. (Things can be contrasted, too. For example: time is not a thief.) But, there are many times when novelists don’t make these relationships so apparent. Instead of making an obvious connection through the words of a single sentence, a writer could construct a metaphor more slowly, more meticulously, and more subtly; some metaphors could even take half the book to finally materialize. Most of the time, these delicate mechanisms hinge on description, with the descriptive words — adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions — creating correlations between multiple characters, multiple objects, or both characters and objects. For example: within the words of a scene, an author may describe in detail the beautiful redwood finish of an old grandfather clock and, within the same scene, describe the ruddy complexion of a man. To a close reader, this would establish the first fine thread of a link between the two subjects, the man and the clock (a ruddy, old man would be an even more apparent connection). From now on, any information the author decides to reveal about the clock — its finish or its interior or its history — could suggest that it somehow parallels what’s going on with the inner workings of either the man’s physical body or mind or his own history.

Asking if we see things like this in games is a good question, but we need to keep in mind that games are a very different medium from novels, and, even though things like symbolism, metaphor, and subtext can be created in the same way for games and movies as they can for novels, noticing them requires skills we haven’t necessarily been trained to develop, whether naturally or through education. (Considering how games come in all different shapes and sizes, I think it best for me to clarify what kind of games I have in mind. Even though the simplest of two-dimensional game spaces can be rich enough to be considered art by the less pompous critics, the kind of game world I’m referring to is a fully navigable, three-dimensional, virtual space — the spaces that have had thousands of man hours go into constructing them — the universes with multi-million dollar budgets.)

For those of us trained to close read texts, we’re taught to look for things like repetitions, strands, and binaries, where the repetitions are — quite obviously — words that repeat, strands being groups of words all sharing certain qualities or characteristics, like natural, organic, and earthen, and binaries being words that oppose one another, like light and dark. These words act as the signposts that point us in the right direction; they allow us to more clearly see and understand the various and complex relationships being built by the author, whether intentional or not.

Let’s take a look at how games are currently designed and how they lend themselves (or don’t) to being studied with the methods we’re used to:

When we assume control of an avatar capable of moving through a 3D environment, we maneuver them as if we inhabited the space ourselves. Some of us who appreciate the work that goes into to the assembly of such digital locales might spend a little time admiring the textures or the complexity of the models and lighting, especially if it’s a new space we’ve never encountered before, but, more often than not, the focus of our attention is on something else, whether it be the guys who seem to have limitless amounts of ammo and who have nothing better to do than to fire it off in our direction, or the minimap in the corner of the screen that allows us to navigate via a two-dimensional representation of the world; or maybe it’s the unopened chests littering the floor, or the arrow that continually points in the direction we need to head, or the timer counting down to our demise. Whatever it is, there is usually a driving force that pushes us to progress and move through the world. Much like our lives outside of virtuality, we’re usually driven to get up and move by some objective; maybe we’re hungry, so we take a hike to the kitchen or drive to the local deli, and we wake up in the morning and head off to work, because we’re still biological organisms that need food and shelter. It’s the same in our simulated lives; take The Elder Scrolls for example, a game known for its non linear story lines and its open world design; even when we’ve journeyed far beyond the outskirts of the game’s civilizations, considerably removed from any major narrative, we’re usually jumping and bounding around with hopes of finding some long forgotten ruins replete with magical artifacts and relics, and, because they have smart designers over at Bethesda, they reward our aimless journeys by populating the world with exactly what we’re looking for — little hidden doors and sunken cities.

These goals and objectives certainly help to infuse reason and purpose into our existence in the game world, but if we want to approach games from a critical perspective, we need to learn to free ourselves from the narrative roller coaster many games are designed to be.

We don’t normally stop to scrutinize every environment we walk through in a day; we don’t walk into a friend’s living room and pause to examine the items strewn about on their coffee table, thinking about why those particular objects happen to be there at that very moment, and what their combination might mean or say about our friend or their home or about ourselves; we don’t look at the items as if an author had chosen to put those very objects there with reason — with intent; we simply assume the table was a more convenient resting place for the objects than the floor. (Perhaps, if we were afflicted with paranoia, we might think our friend had arranged the objects before our arrival so as to tell us something). But, it’s something like this we’ll need to start doing if we want to begin accepting games as an art and approaching them more seriously. What this draws a parallel with is something known as puritan hermeneutics. The religious puritans would look at their lives as if they were texts — close reading the story of themselves, if you would. They could be picnicking, cooled by the shade of a tree, and, should an apple fall and spill a bowl of milk, they would look at the event as if it were written in words. They would attribute some kind of meaning to the fallen apple, as if it were an omen — a message — a subtext. They believed God was speaking to them through even the most mundane interactions and happenings, and they felt if they were adept enough at reading the story of their lives, they’d be able to determine their fate — if they were to be saved or damned, essentially a subtext of their lives. Of course, this kind of practice isn’t as prevalent today, especially when a large portion of us have begun to accept that our world is the precipitate of countless cosmic chemical reactions with no proof that an intelligent hand exists anywhere in the equation. So, we may not go around reading our lives like the puritans, but we can certainly do so when we’re exploring our virtual worlds, because, with them, we can be sure there’s been an intelligent authorial force behind the arrangement of the world’s objects and denizens.

Okay, so what? We know if we want to approach games from a more critical point of view we need to train ourselves to exist within and move through the game world with different intent then how we’ve been doing so in our non-virtual world. We need to slow down, to set aside our objectives (if we can) and take a minute to examine the space and its arrangement. But there’s problem we’d run into: the necessity of the world. There’s a major difference between the incorporation of objects and environments in games compared to that of novels, and it’s due to the exigency of everything a world contains. Let me explain. Take a scene from a novel; the author deliberately chooses to describe a bookshelf, detailing its construction and a set of curious book ends parenthesizing an even more curious collection of volumes. The author goes on to describe the characters — where they’re seated and what they’re doing and saying. The rest of the space is nebulous. The carpeting is left out; the lighting is omitted; the wallpaper is ignored; it’s up to our imagination to fill in. Game developers don’t have this kind of luxury. (Although approaching a world’s design in such a way could lead to some very interesting and innovative gameplay experiences. It would be like moving from point of interest to point of interest, where each locale is as sparse and isolated as where Morpheus introduced Neo to the desert of the real). Game developers need to have all those details present if they have any desire to keep their players entranced within their illusory world, but doing so isn’t easy, let alone making all of it meaningful.

If author’s were to comment on every visible object and surface within a space, not only would every book need to be thousands and thousands of pages, but readers would probably get bored given how long it’d take the story to progress; they’d be on the fiftieth page still reading about how dark and stormy the night actually was. Understanding this, how are we to ever know what’s important? How could we ever possibly tell what aspects of a game space the designers had decided to spend time adding ‘figurative language’ to? Should game designers only bother imbuing metaphor into game elements that exist along the main narrative plot line and in environments the players need to enter to progress the story? There isn’t a clear answer, but let’s think about what can be done.

There are two kinds of metaphor which I like to consider global and local. Global metaphor is figuration that spans the entire work. It could be a specific character who comes to represent a demonic and devil-like entity, or it could be how the string of major events comments on something that’s happened or is happening in our world. Essentially, global metaphor would be anything that stays present and relevant throughout the majority of the work. Local metaphor is more of a demonstration of the writer’s skill in the craft, as the local metaphor only ever adds to the current scene and has no relevance to the story in its entirety. Such an example could be a scene where two friends are discussing their differences and mutually coming to the realization that  their friendship is coming to an end, while, in the background, a bus boy is closing up a restaurant — pulling away the place settings, and placing the chairs on the tables.

I feel as if games (some, at least) already try to include global metaphor, like the mall in Dead Rising, with its mindless zombies that ceaselessly pour out of every store and aisle, but, often times, it’s done through the names of characters or spaceships or missions or planets — things that exist along the main story arc. If developers want their work to be considered art as opposed to simply entertainment, then the incorporation of local metaphor is something nearly every game can benefit from.

But, this still doesn’t inform us where to look, and I don’t think there’s anything that could be done that doesn’t break the believability of the game world. Of course, developers could add a luster or a glow to objects that happen to be speaking figuratively, but that would a little narcissistic, and it might feel like an insult to the intelligence of the players. I think the only believable option would be to include metaphor and figuration wherever possible and hope it doesn’t go unnoticed. But, developers would most likely deem that pointless and in vain, unless, of course, they could arm us with the tools to explore their world from a scholarly standpoint.

Why aren’t there video game scholars, and why only now are game programs just beginning to creep their way into academic institutions? Is it simply because games are still an incunabulum of the digital medium? Probably, but I think there’s something else continuing to hold games back from being as studied a form as novels and movies, and I feel it’s due to the level of access users/players have to the world. In games, major events usually only happen once, unless you’ve died and are forced to replay a scene. Things are continually moving and changing, but when we are engaged with a novel, the world is static. Like a hand cranked universe, the world only comes to life when our eyes skate across the words on the page. With a book, it’s as if we have in our hands something like what modern physicists would consider a fifth-dimensional object; we’re presented with something where all the events in time are present simultaneously; we’re able to flip to any point in the story like time travelers and even freeze time should we decide to stop reading. Movies offer a similar level of control with the scene selection feature and the option to rewind, fast forward, and slow forward. Most games don’t have options like this, although Bungie did provide movie-like controls with their ‘Theatre’ feature in Halo 3. The feature allows players to record their gameplay and scrub through it, as well as enabling them to disconnect themselves from their first-person point of view and fly around and examine scenes from any angle. Of course, I can’t say for sure, but such functionality seems aimed at the machinima community, the people who use the Halo 3 engine to create their own stories and cinematic featurettes. It’s also designed for hardcore players who want to save clips of their virtual violence to show how ‘pro’ they are, as well as the players who just like to save hilarious instances that have happened to them during their gameplay. I doubt it was designed as a means of giving the students and professors of the new art form a higher level of command over the narrative.

Functionality like Halo 3′s Theatre certainly helps prepare people to engage games more academically, but it isn’t enough. With books, we have the options to underline, highlight, and take notes within the margins, and fold down the corners of pages or place a sticky note on them to demarcate an important part of the narrative or some key language used. To fully and adequately be able to engage games academically, they’re going to need some kind of interface that enables the players to save their thoughts and observations — to essentially allow us to ‘underline’ key moments and areas of a 3D space. How else are we to form meaningful opinions if we cant map where our minds have been? Such tools should become standardized, whether they be universal for all platforms or indigenous to the system. We should be able to construct and organize notes and superimpose them over people or places of the game world, just like augmented reality, except it would be augmented virtual reality; we should have an interface that outlines all of our markings and enables us to save snapshots of the virtual space; we should be allowed to enter ‘scholar mode’ and fly around a la Halo 3′s Theatre to examine the spaces from all angles, trying to infer what the environment’s shape and color may represent, and we should be able to travel instantaneously to the 3D location of a note we’ve made. Cut scenes should be saved and replay-able, and they should furnish us with the same level of camera control  during such scenes (but maybe only after we’ve seen it once so that the work of the cinematographer doesn’t get overlooked.) If games want to grow out of the classification of ‘toys’ and be taken seriously in the world of arrogant critics, then the players should be equipped with the ability to engage the world through more than the barrel of a rifle or the edge of a blade.

There isn’t a doubt in my mind that games will become the most beautiful art form imaginable, and I think we’ll all be around long enough to see it happen.

- the virtunaut

I’d also like to thank Wrixel.com for posting my introduction up on their website.

The pulsing woofers flooded the room with the sounds of gunshots, explosions, and empty shell casings clinking along floors of alien alloy, while the rhythmic, almost choreographic, flickering of the red, green, and blue pixels bathed the walls in vibrant light. A voice screeched through her headset: “Where the hell is the flag?”

The abrasive sounds of combat dwindled to where only the ambient hum of electrical currents and holographic displays were audible.

“I don’t know, but I’m in their base right now. They won’t capture it.” A muted explosion echoed through the computerized halls.

“Shit, they got me. Of course, they couldn’t kill me with anything besides the rocket launcher. I swear, that’s the only thing I’ve died to all game.”

“Whatever,” she said, “will you just tell me where they’re coming from?”

A third voice crackled in. “They’re comin’ in low, and I think – ” the supersonic burst of a high caliber rifle transmitted through the radio and drowned out the rest of his sentence. The bullet was well placed, shattering the enemy’s protective shielding and slicing across their shoulder, but they weren’t down.  A second shot was taken, although too late; the enemy had already taken cover behind a piece of the environment’s exotic architecture, and the bullet clattered to the ground after being rejected by the wall’s self-healing surface. “Damn. I hit one. He’s weak!”

There were twenty seconds remaining, and her team had the lead. Allowing the enemy team to score would have moved the game into overtime, and, given they were already down a man, it was something they couldn’t afford. Their fourth teammate had been having networking issues and was disconnected, leaving the team with only a ‘consciousless’ avatar ceaselessly walking into a wall. It was up to her.

Her presence caused the environment to shape and shift, writhe and deform, as if alive. Bounding her way through the machining mechanisms, she stopped after coming to the perimeter of a room whose both ceiling and floor swelled into what resembled the domed cavernous volume of an atrium. Hovering at the cavity’s airless center was a platform bearing the motionless enemy standard. It was here where the enemy flag carrier would need to reach in order to score, and it was here where she’d need to stop him.

Fifteen seconds. Preemptively, she tossed a plasma grenade searing across the chasm with near perfect precision; it landed in front of a door in the process of dematerializing to allow passage. She followed up with a burst from her rifle. The grenade exploded, and the swaths of superheated particles it released caused the shields to be stripped clean off of the surprised enemy soldier they surrounded. He fell back into the hall before the spray of bullets could connect. “Come on,” she thought, “those shots were so on.” But she didn’t have time to think, only react.

A second door dematerialized, and, this time, it was the flag runner who’d entered. With him came a rush of adrenaline; she immediately opened fire. Defenseless with the flag in his hands, he dropped it and returned fire, sending a hail of bullets to come crashing against her shields. The bullet impacts sent ripples of energy coursing along her shield’s surface, and any that hit in front of her face drastically reduced visibility. She kept on the move, jumping and rolling, side stepping and sliding. A moving target is always harder to hit.

She created distance between her and her new assailant by moving to the far end of the room, closer to where her initial grenade had landed, each step mounting her anxiety; the enemy she had hit with her grenade would undoubtably be returning soon and fully shielded, but she’d be ready; a plan of attack had already been formulated in her mind.

A hissing sound emanated from her left; just as she’d thought, the door was opening again, and she turned her attention to her most immediate threat. Leaping towards the wall and placing her toes into a small detail of its anatomy, she used it to push herself high above the door. The enemy stepped through the portal, and just as his vision began to trace the bullet paths of his teammate, the butt end of a rifle came smashing through his visor.

She landed with the sound of fragmenting glass, not only from the destroyed faceplate, but from her shields. They had finally broken, and a few searing bullets pierced through the outer crust of her armor and penetrated the flesh of her hip. The suit’s internal network of nanomachines immediately began knitting the damaged tissue, and as she stepped into the hall for cover, she noticed the downed enemy’s positron rifle spinning out of reach into the flag room.

Ten seconds. A few last bullets came whizzing through the open entryway. The break in the assault could have meant  one of three things: if the enemy were reloading or had picked up the flag in an attempt to capture it, she would have the opportunity to step back out, even unshielded, to make a counter attack; but, if their weapon were still trained on the doorway, she would be killed and the game would move into overtime. She had to step out; there was no other option. She did, and, as the odds had predicted, the enemy had grabbed the flag and was running to make the jump to the capture point. She dropped her weapon and sprinted into the room, seizing the positron rifle.

Five seconds. On contact, her suit immediately linked up with weapon and projected a realtime video feed of the scope’s view onto her heads-up-display. Securing the weapon against her shoulder, she swung its barrel towards the airborne enemy, orienting its reticule in the middle of his helmet. She could see his head turn ever so slightly towards her as she compressed the trigger. The weapon released a screaming blast of high energy particles that ripped through the enemy’s helmet. His visor darkened from its new blood-coated interior, and his lifeless body spun to the ground with the flag following shortly after. Time.

One of her teammates came running in. “Glad you could make it,” she said.

“Seriously? Of course, I finally get this,” he said, pointing to the rockets equipped on his shoulder, “and the game’s over.”

“How about, nice job?”

It wasn’t always the case where one could complain about getting blown up or shot fifty-two times, or whine about the lack of healing spells being cast on them. We couldn’t always play a part in the death of a dragon or the unearthing and discovery of alien artifacts, and, even though books and movies have allowed us to peer voyeuristically into worlds where things like this may have happened, we’ve never had the authority to affect the people or places that have comprised those worlds. But, now, with our continued progress and advancement in the generation of virtual spaces and universes, we’re finally empowered to become the characters we’ve been stuck watching for so long.

I am The Virtunaut, and I’m here to share with you my thoughts on video games and anything electronic, although, if this blog is around long enough, there’s a good chance I’ll also be writing about things spintronic. In terms of games, I don’t plan to be a reviewer; I don’t wish to simply tell you my impression of a game after playing it for a few hours. If you want a review, there are plenty of sites out there eager to tell you what they’ve thought about a game’s graphics, its controls, and whether it’s even worth your time or money. What you’re more likely to find here are my feelings on the various mechanics and elements of gameplay we find in today’s most popular medium. I’ll try my best to figure out why these mechanics are the way they are, and what I think could be done to make them better, whether it be better balanced, more intuitive, more fun, or just more interesting.

I won’t only be commenting on what’s already out there, and you can think of this blog almost as an open-source version of my head, as I will often share new gameplay ingredients I’ve been inspired to think of. It could be a mechanic, a weapon, something environmental – whatever; it’s too often the case that I’m urged to think about how even the most mundane experience, like watching someone circle around a hedge of bushes in search of a cat, could be converted into a new and innovative gameplay experience; I’m tired of keeping them sealed away in tiny little notebooks. (Just to be clear, when I refer to, ‘mechanics,’ I’m speaking of anything the player/user actually does or interacts with – it could also be something that directly affects the way they play or interact.)

So, with that said, I will end this introductory post and begin preparing the next. I will do my best to keep my main entries on some kind of schedule, but, given a multitude of other factors, that may not be as easy as I’d like. There will also be intermittent smatterings of other ideas about essentially anything cybernetic. I hope you enjoy what I write here. And, I’m serious about the cat and the hedge. Really.