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Temporal Anomalies of the Great Iron Bird
December 2nd, 2006, 11:45
With apologies for the following tirade of half formed thoughts and dodgy grammar…….. What is it about the end of multiplayer gaming sessions?
Those two-four hour stints in alternate realities, which at their best can be far more immersive than the single player experiences. But don’t you think it’s funny the way those bad boys end?
I think it’s really rather incongruous. Praps you start at ten and finish at two, so that’s four hours of fraught blasting. But then when the session splits up, it does so with a kind of pregnant finality! People mutter goodbyes and (in my case) struggle to remember their way through the interface to quit and the resulting void is like a cold water shower after all the intense action.
Did you ever get caught up in airport delays after a holiday and end up sitting for five hours chatting to a couple you’ve only just met? You seem to get to know everything about these people in the condensed pocket of airport time which you are forced to share. (Airport time after all is slightly out of phase with real time elsewhere.)
Finally the flights sort themselves out and you join different queues at opposite ends of the departure lounge and perhaps catch a fleeting glimpse of your former transit companions as harassed trolley dollies hurriedly usher you through the gate toward whichever great iron bird you are destined to board.
Then the strange nature of the meeting hits you! For the last couple of hours it almost felt like you’d known these strangers for years!! You swapped anecdotes and maybe even had a meal together while you were trapped. But then in seconds your travel arrangements revert to some kind of normality and the people revert to strangers as cases are collected and boarding passes recovered from overstuffed carry on luggage.
It’s a bizarre phenomenon perhaps peculiar to traveling and accentuated I’m sure by the fact that our movements these days are aided and abetted by the jet engine. (Though I’m sure that similar must have happened in the days of sail.)
Anyway…. The point is (yes I’m getting to it.) that the feeling of unreality, as though the events of the last few hours didn’t really exist, is similar in a way to the abrupt way that gaming sessions dissolve.
Brain screaming from 60 – nothing in seemingly no time at all with your ears still ringing from the last frag grenade hurled across the screen and fingers still twitching at virtual triggers as your whirling mind tries to deal with the sudden void and return to reality….. or at least as close as you can come to it when it’s 2am and you can’t quite remember why you are wearing Gorilla slippers and a straw Fedora.
Badger
Those two-four hour stints in alternate realities, which at their best can be far more immersive than the single player experiences. But don’t you think it’s funny the way those bad boys end?
I think it’s really rather incongruous. Praps you start at ten and finish at two, so that’s four hours of fraught blasting. But then when the session splits up, it does so with a kind of pregnant finality! People mutter goodbyes and (in my case) struggle to remember their way through the interface to quit and the resulting void is like a cold water shower after all the intense action.
Did you ever get caught up in airport delays after a holiday and end up sitting for five hours chatting to a couple you’ve only just met? You seem to get to know everything about these people in the condensed pocket of airport time which you are forced to share. (Airport time after all is slightly out of phase with real time elsewhere.)
Finally the flights sort themselves out and you join different queues at opposite ends of the departure lounge and perhaps catch a fleeting glimpse of your former transit companions as harassed trolley dollies hurriedly usher you through the gate toward whichever great iron bird you are destined to board.
Then the strange nature of the meeting hits you! For the last couple of hours it almost felt like you’d known these strangers for years!! You swapped anecdotes and maybe even had a meal together while you were trapped. But then in seconds your travel arrangements revert to some kind of normality and the people revert to strangers as cases are collected and boarding passes recovered from overstuffed carry on luggage.
It’s a bizarre phenomenon perhaps peculiar to traveling and accentuated I’m sure by the fact that our movements these days are aided and abetted by the jet engine. (Though I’m sure that similar must have happened in the days of sail.)
Anyway…. The point is (yes I’m getting to it.) that the feeling of unreality, as though the events of the last few hours didn’t really exist, is similar in a way to the abrupt way that gaming sessions dissolve.
Brain screaming from 60 – nothing in seemingly no time at all with your ears still ringing from the last frag grenade hurled across the screen and fingers still twitching at virtual triggers as your whirling mind tries to deal with the sudden void and return to reality….. or at least as close as you can come to it when it’s 2am and you can’t quite remember why you are wearing Gorilla slippers and a straw Fedora.
Badger
Last edited by Badger; December 2nd, 2006 at 11:52.
Great tidbit of wisdom
December 2nd, 2006, 17:44
I have to say I know that feeling well friend Badger. Your analogy with the airport is dead on. Funny how the mind works in those situations.
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Bart and Corwin should just admit that when it gets down to it, I will have the final say.
Bart and Corwin should just admit that when it gets down to it, I will have the final say.
December 3rd, 2006, 01:35
Why not combine the images and sit on a plane for 4 hours playing an interior LAN game!!
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If God said it, then that settles it!!
Editor@RPGWatch
If God said it, then that settles it!!
Editor@RPGWatch
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