You Too Can Have Ten Heads and Twenty Arms
If you’re a flaming nerd like I am, you might enjoy this Wired article on perception. Sunny Bains talks about technology that helps us to perceive more than the average human, like which direction is North. While I’m usually interested in technology that helps us to understand the not-so-real world, something toward the end of this article caught my eye.
For six weird weeks in the fall of 2004, Udo Wächter had an unerring sense of direction. Every morning after he got out of the shower, Wächter, a sysadmin at the University of Osnabrück in Germany, put on a wide beige belt lined with 13 vibrating pads — the same weight-and-gear modules that make a cell phone judder. On the outside of the belt were a power supply and a sensor that detected Earth’s magnetic field. Whichever buzzer was pointing north would go off. Constantly.
Apparently he loved it. He felt more confident, began realizing new ways that he could improve his life, even had dreams that incorporated the buzzing. Fast forward to the end of the experiment, where he had to relinquish the device. He was enormously upset, lost, and reported “phantom buzzing,” on a par with the phantom limb pain experienced by amputees. The device, when worn long enough, had remapped the brain, giving it a “6th sense.” Other users of the belt reported feeling dizzy, disoriented, and a sensation that the world had become less predictable.
For the last three weeks I’ve been working on a book chapter on how we experience different kinds of media. Is it possible that games are a kind of buzzing compass? When we learn to live and play inside of worlds - especially those that contain other real people, and objects which are worth real money, does our ability to see into this world become a kind of eye? In games we might even have different kinds of extra senses. In World of Warcraft (and many games), there’s a built-in compass and map feature. I would still get lost, but hey. In Alien vs. Predator, each race gets at least a couple of different ways that they can visually perceive the world - like infrared, pheromone sensation or night vision. In Dungeon Keeper you’ve got the power to do all kinds of unsavory, super-natural things.
Sunny’s article talks about using preexisting human senses, like sight, hearing and touch, in order to give us specific new senses (like a belt-compass that operates on touch). New technology can grant new senses in the world, and also in the World… of Warcraft. We don’t usually turn off our eyes, so might it be possible that we just don’t want to turn off our MMO-sense? Honestly, there are so many individual and universal factors going into what we call, “MMO Addiction,” that even if this did have some kind of contribution to excess, you’d have to be controlling for these other factors. That said, it’s interesting. =P
Neils Clark :: Apr.03.2007 :: Media Experience ::
