A New Experience

Playing Devil May Cry 3 was an interesting experience in that I had never played an interactive game with a Rumble Pack which altered my gaming experience in a very dfferent way. I had played games on the Nintendo where pysical involvement was very much a part of the experience but those games functioned as a result of my activity outside in terms of the physical actions I performed on the running pad or shooting gun but this PS2 game did not rely on my physical activity to provide the experience, rather I ended up relying on it's physical activity in terms of the rumble pack to provide the reality experience to me. The exact timed reactions of the controller made me feel like I was doing a lot more but also that a lot more was happening around me as the controller reacted to the situations around me. I was placed in a world which was physically engulfing me and in which I really had no control of the environmental experience. How much I actually played within the game felt like a very small part of the experience which is quite different from my experience with Resistance where one deosn't feel the power of experience as much due to the lack of the Rumble pack. I found this similar to when I am reading texts and the way either I take ownership of the text while reading or whether the text take ownership of me. What I mean is the level one is willing to surrender to a particular textual reading is dependent on the interest and interactiveness to the reader. I am not that interested witin games so I am less willing to surrender to the experience but I do enjoy thrills so the rumbler ack was a successful mediator between my resistance to the experience and the game's attempt to engage me. I found this out while playing the game and then reading a text on Mahatma Gandhi which automoatically commands my attention due to interest. Thus, I accredited not the text but my level of willing surrender which if great enough can create an alernate reality which exists for the time that one is a part of it. Today was the first day I was able to compare gaming to reading, one step closer to viewing these games as texual studies in th eliteral sense.