Marx at the Arcade by Jamie Woodcock;

Author:Jamie Woodcock;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)
Published: 2019-06-11T16:00:00+00:00

I recently experienced The Void’s Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire, a virtual reality (VR) game, in a shopping center in London. This was an encounter radically different from my earliest memories with those old MS-DOS games and their tiny computer monitors. First off, the experience cost almost as much as a videogame for a console. Upon arrival at the venue, we checked our bags and the bored-looking teenager behind the desk asked us—in a flat tone—if we were “ready for our mission.” We were then asked to watch a live-action introduction to the game, delivered by one of the film’s actors. The scenario has you, a rebel fighter, going undercover as a stormtrooper to infiltrate a base and discover the contents of a mysterious box. The weight of the portable VR gear that you strap into works in this context—only a little bit cumbersome, the gear gives the sense of wearing armor. When the game begins, you walk through a door into a real-life setting—actual walls and doors that the game is mapped onto.

My first instinct was to hold up my hands, and the hands of a stormtrooper appeared. My partner also held her hands up, and we stood in awe. The sense of scale was astonishing as we stepped through into another room and now stood on a moving platform above a virtual planet with lava below us. Heat was generated in our real-world room, adding to the immersion in a way I only thought about later. The combination of VR and real-world details offered a genuinely impressive sense of interactivity. The game itself combined shooting, puzzle solving, and simply taking in the surroundings. In this moment of cinematic immersion, I kept thinking back to what the child version of me would make of the experience. It was then over, far too quickly, and we were ejected back into the loud, fluorescent, and air-conditioned surroundings of the shopping center. Clearly, there have been big changes since those days of MS-DOS and floppy disks.

In order to make sense of these changes, it is useful to explore and critique some contemporary videogames. It would be impossible to cover the full spectrum of games available since that would involve approximately eighty-three games.1 But before diving into some of those games, we should reflect on why it even matters to analyze and critique videogames in the first place, or culture in general, for that matter.

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