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.

Reality and Duality

The familiarity one gains after the initial experience with Resistance is really a Pandora's box. Investigating one issue or concern within a level leads to many other questions you didn't even know existed. Last week I asked myself what was the challenge, the task, or the goal of the game? Today I realize that the game simulates a type of duality with aliens as the enemy, substituting the Nazis, and maintains a sense of the reality as well in terms of the dynamics of the war. I was so engulfed within the requirements of the game that I realized that all I new was to kill the aliens regardless of where I am or what level I'm trying to get to. At this point, I wondered, "What role do the other soldiers play in killing the enemy? Do they actually kill or are they simply for decoration or simulation?" As I was so involved in the experience of Resistance that I had to step back for a moment and realized how a real soldier in a real war, perhaps those in Iraq, deal with the confrontations with enemies compared to the game. It was then that I became a part of the "reality" of the game and realized that my duty was to kill and I was more concerned with my duty than the other soldiers because in a real war, every individual that is on the other side of the line is an enemy and neglecting any of them for a split second could be the cause of my own death in a battlefield or in Resistance. It was that moment that I realized the reality of the experience and how the creators go about personalizing the experience by singling out the player from the rest of the soldiers so that we may not rely on the others for support while there is shooting, as in a real life situation, the game requires our full attention and presence at the time. Though, after a couple of failed attempts at a level, we know where the aliens are coming from, the fight is renewed each time and requires the same level of intensity and alertness. In that sense the duality of Resistance between the game world and the reality of the war experience is successful and I feel the transition from shooting Nazis to aliens is an easy transition for the player and the creator as it is an easier concept to grasp in that there are less obstacles in forming the game into a reality since it doesn't move too far from a war that actually existed, at least conceptually. It is almost as if the game exists in two worlds, that which exists outside the screen and that which exists within the screen resulting in a reality within a duality.