dessalles

Bought Tiger Woods PGA Tour to play on the Wii I’ve got at the office; and while my golf experience pretty much starts and ends with Wii Sports, I have to say I’m thoroughly enjoying the added realism.

Besides the golf-is-actually-really-easy-as-a-videogame aspect, my favorite game element is the haptic feedback offered through the controller. On important shots (strokes? turns?), your avatar’s heartbeat can be felt through the vibration in the controller. It’s startlingly effective and I’m tempted to strap on a HR monitor to see what physiological impact the simulated stress/nervousness has. What’s unique about using the controller’s vibration to simulate heartbeat as supposed to, say, a collision or gun shot is that this form of sensory feedback is very much emotional. It’s not just communicating gameplay information. This is feedback that’s triggering memory recall - tense/exciting moments from my past.

I suppose it’s the same effect Smell-O-Vision aspired to. From the Wikipedia entry on olfaction:

The entorhinal cortex projects to the amygdala and is involved in emotional and autonomic responses to odor. It also projects to the hippocampus and is involved in motivation and memory. Odor information is easily stored in long-term memory and has strong connections to emotional memory. This is possibly due to the olfactory system’s close anatomical ties to the limbic system and hippocampus, areas of the brain that have long been known to be involved in emotion and place memory, respectively.

And while vibration feedback is typically used in videogames to pull players into the game world, this feature isn’t about environmental immersion. Instead, it’s about pushing the game context/scenario out into the minds of the players, which I imagine is much more effective.