Project Natal: Rebirth

I recently watched a video on Youtube.com called E3 2009: Project Natal xbox 360 announcement. It is a sort of promotional video for Microsoft's latest technological advancement in the video gaming world. This new gaming technology is still very new, it was announced at the beginning of June 2009, which makes it that much more interesting. Immediately after I watched the videos, there are a few but I find the aforementioned video and E3 2009: Project Natal Milo demo to be especially interesting, I thought about the early conceptions of VR and how this changes, or even brings back to life, VR.

I would argue that VR, as it was originally conceptualized, has shown a glimmer of potentiality and then all but disappeared. With Project Natal, however, there is new hope for VR. This new technology is able to recognize faces, voices, emotions (or at least the facial expressions of emotions), and body movement in a way that video gaming equipment has never before been able to. While it may not be able to re-arrange particles to create a VR world as complete as the holodeck on Star Trek, that is one in which there is physical interaction with the virtual simulation, Project Natal can still offer a higher level of interactivity than any video game apparatus ever. This new development could potentially become an entire room, much like the holodeck, in which the VR is shown on all surfaces where your physical person not only becomes the controller, as is the claim in the promotional videos for Project Natal, but is the main character. All the games would be first person experiences where your actual movements, reactions, and facial expressions control the virtual world that surrounds you. As Jason Sperb writes in his article Scarring the New Flesh: Time Passing in the Simulacrum of Videodrome:“The act of representation becomes inseparable from the act of being.” The person who plays in this apparatus is both themselves and their representation in the game. VR has risen from the dead, and again seems to be approaching possibility.

Consider this new VR(ish) potential with Sperb's description of 'the new flesh': “existence in a pure state of simulation and repetition.” I would argue that this new technology brings us closer to achieving “the new flesh” as Sperb sees it, falling short only in that this “pure state of simulation” does not yet involve total physical interaction. As with any video game, however, this one will also allow for endless repetition. I would also argue that the player of this new gaming system is subject to Deleuze's 'scar' metaphor which Sperb explains as “time presently having past,” in two ways. First, every time they play the game, excluding their first attempt, they have experience with the game that will change their game play, their present has a past in that game. Secondly, there is certainly a dependance upon physical capability for this type of gaming. This dependence will mean that even if they play the same game, their capability at one time will be different 25 or 30 years from now, if not sooner due to physical injury. I know that this time period would definitely render anything in the gaming industry all but obsolete, but suppose that this was the exception, we found that one guy who really loved Project Natal and never upgraded from the time he bought it at 30 to the time he played it after the onset of his arthritis at 51. Because he himself is his own physical representation, his present self in the game has a past outside of the game. His avatar will be scarred by the effects of time that are not necessarily relevant in the game. As Sperb says, “There are profound implications with juxtaposing the metaphors of Deleuze's 'scar' (time presently having past) with the mantra of 'the new flesh' (existence in a pure state of simulation ad repetition)” and I believe that these implications are present in Project Natal. Much like the case of Videodrome as seen by Sperb in his article, Project Natal will suffer from a scarring of the new flesh, but this will take the passing of time. This new advancement may lead to other gaming experiences that will not be simultaneously scarred, but it will undoubtedly fall victim to time.