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Monday, February 03, 2014

Pushback Against Techno-Hype Is Becoming Virtually Instantaneous

About the bleeding edge techno-whizbangery depicted in the image above, Kotaku's Jason Schreier hyperventilates in 2014:
With the Virtualizer, a motion-tracking device that isn't commercially available just yet, an Oculus Rift, and a Wii remote, this guy is basically inhabiting Skyrim. It's... incredible. Also incredibly dorky, but still -- you're lying if you've never wondered when gaming will get to this point.
Lying, is it? Far from wondering "when gaming will get to this point" I for one am still left wondering when technoblatherers will stop pretending the endless recycling of the same old crap is some stunning novelty and bounty. I'm used to this sort of thing, of course, but it pleases me enormously how commonplace it is becoming for this sort of breathlessly amnesiac techno-promotional advertorial commentary to receive almost instantaneous pushback. One "astronaughte" provided within fifteen minutes of Schreier's original post the sensibly buzzkilling confession, "I didn't want to play my games like that then, and still don't today." Of course, pretty much everybody who gave these churningly vertiginous, ironically claustrophobic, ridiculously expensive, drearily unsupported gaming platforms a try way back when, or in their endless iterations between then and now, agrees... which is why none of this crap caught on then, nor will now, nor any time soon with any likelihood. Appended to "astronaughte"'s sober assessment of this retro-futural leap into the well-known, was this nice image of more or less the same set-up from a quarter century ago back when Kotaku's reporter was possibly still percolating in his Borg maturation chamber:
And of course there is so so so much more where (when) that came from:

And, of course:

3 comments:

Esebian said...

It's diluted by the deluge of drooling gimmegimmegimme, though...

Dale Carrico said...

All too true -- on a side note, thanks for putting that ABBA tune in my head this morning...

jimf said...

> thanks for putting that ABBA tune in my head this morning...

Won't somebody help me chase these shadows away?

;->