video games are creating modern social

The console games of today have control sticks which act like two little mice on a wheel, except the wheel is more like a mini computer. You can interact with whatever you can touch, which includes your fellow console players, game controllers, cable boxes, screens, walls, and any other device that you are not physically near.

The old console games, however, were still controlled by shifting, moving horizontal joysticks. As you shifted and moved, a screen displayed images on either side of your head to show what your bumping your controller at the bottom right and bottom left meant. You would then interact with objects in a way like touching them in an interactive virtual world.

There was no awareness of how actions were impacting themselves and all around you (like grinding your controller through the floor, which caused your game character to fall, hurting him, which created an alternate emotional manifestation in you, like anger or sadness. Or breaking or resetting a screen, which would lead to fixes of your actual game, and so on).

The modern-day controller, as you see in games like Halo, is controlled digitally, through simple codes or buttons. The result of that screen-based control is a sudden touch of interface that ends up feeling primitive. The action and interaction are embedded in a software layer that you can access, but not without effort. When you play these games, your fingers must be skilled enough to constantly use your own body, as a controller.

Console gaming doesn’t have these layers: you can release on all buttons and switches at the same time, so the player becomes part of the controller and the game itself. So for them to really succeed, you want all of this texturing, complemented by that classic texturing, to be accompanied by a post-process.