On Project Natal

No embedding, but PLEASE believe me when I say that you have to watch this in order for this post to make sense.

Project Natal. (Milo is a whole other post, a much shorter one.)

I’ll give  you a moment to close your mouth, say “Holy shit,” and move back to being able to concentrate on what I’m writing.

…

And onward. It’s very difficult for me to leave aside from this discussion the issue of how computers are infiltrating our lives, because it makes me very uneasy, but I’ll try.

The real problems that I see are three: 1) the feature bloat problem, 2) the Microsoft problem, and 3) the alien bowling problem.

1) Wired wrote an article some time ago in which they coined a term I can’t remember, so I’ll call it feature bloat. It was about the fact that all devices now must do a number of different things in order to be saleable. iPhones are the most obvious example – I believe you can now download an app wherein you can convert your iPhone into an electron microscope – but most other devices have this issue as well. Cell phones also have shitty cameras. MP3 players are also shitty video players. Blackberrys are also shitty laptops. Etc. Alton Brown always criticizes this aspect of kitchen gear – blenders which are also coffee grinders, hand mixers with paddle attachments – by pointing out that when you take a good device and add another functionality, the device tends to do neither thing particularly well. Yeah, this entails buying a lot of specific hardware for your kitchen, but you’ll know that each item will do its job at the best possible level.

I feel the same way about the more pervasive devices we all have to carry around these days. I want a cell phone and a camera, not a combination of both that does each task poorly. One device makes calls, and the other takes pictures; adding them to each other does not necessarily increase value. Would you attach a shitty cell phone to a Nikon? No, that would be stupid.

The Natal seems interested in putting together all kinds of functionality into one device. Gaming, streaming movies, communicating with friends, and heaven knows what other kinds of creations involving scanning in oneself to a machine – all these things are possible with Natal. But…BF and I try to use the xBox 360 for a number of these things, and it only does its job half-well. It’s best when he’s gaming with a CD in the drive, because a) he can’t always join online games, because there are too many or too few people who want to play it at the same time he does, b) our streaming Netflix service sometimes just fails to work, stopping in the middle of whatever we’re watching, irrespective of the status of our internet connection, c) few of our friends and relatives have xBox Live accounts, so we can’t communicate with them over it. It’s the same problem as cell phones; they keep making bigger and better devices to sell, but calls still get dropped, and the service is totally unacceptable compared to a landline. Fix THAT before you get all fancy with the apps, IMHO.

2) When I stopped and thought about Bill Gates’ vision back in the early 1980’s, the notion that every person in the US should have a personal computer on his/her desk, it stunned me to realize the scale of that ambition at the time – and the fact that he made it reality. I cannot help but admire him for that. When computers were thought to be interesting toys or strictly for the government or enormous research labs, to imagine personalizing them for business and home, and then to succeed – what an accomplishment.

The dark side of this is that Bill Gates’ vision is now dominating our lives. Microsoft’s goal is apparently to be the provider of software services to the world. Since software is such a huge part of our daily lives that I am having a hard time writing this section of this post, Microsoft is more important to us than I would like any company to be. For them to create this project, which aims to alter and direct how we spend our leisure time, is worrisome to me. They have a vision of a better life lived via Microsoft, and I’m just not sure I want to fall in line.

3) I remember very distinctly when the PlayStation 2 came out. I had a bunch of geek friends, then as now, and one of them managed to lay his hands on one. I went over to his house, and a bunch of people were gathered around the machine playing a launch title. I don’t remember the name of the game, but it involved aliens bowling.

This was by no means the first time I’d seen a game played, of course (although I remember being blown away by the quality of the visuals), but the whole thing seemed so meaningless to me. It’s not like they were playing a skateboarding game, or a skydiving game, or some activity which is either very dangerous, unavailable to people in certain geographical areas, or which it takes a long time to master. No. They were bowling. Bowling is easy. Bowling is everywhere. Just take your friends and go to a real bowling alley, where you can have a genuine experience away from your television.

Natal looks like more of that alien bowling game to me. Creating a world within a game that is exactly like the world outside except that it’s in the game, a thorough simulacra of real life, strikes me as not only pointless, but extremely worrying. At some point, that simulacra will attain more value than is inherent in the real world, and that is where things really start to go wrong.

Was I awed by that video? Of course. It’s a leap towards a future so borderless that it takes one’s breath away. But, as I am a reactionary through and through, I can’t help but worry about what this leap forward in how we interact with a simulated environment means to us.