| Aug. 24th, 2007 @ 04:00 am Sensory Overload and Space Giraffe |
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mood:  relaxed
Earlier today, KP/SirQuirkyK, whatever you want to call him, asked me about Space Giraffe from a sensory overload point of view. And I've been thinking about what he asked me, because... As far as I can tell, he should be right.
Space Giraffe is a game where all senses have to be taking in more or less everything (Ok. By 'all' I mainly mean 'sight and hearing', not much smell involved in videogames. At least, not yet.) that's going on at once, which throws several hundred things to keep an eye/ear on, places it in a psychodelic environment and provides a highly rhymic background music.
And yet, somehow, this is easier for me to process than, say, a busy cafe or a train station.
Why is this? I'm not entirely certain, it could be the way the things don't need interpriting in the same way as the real world does due to them being completely abstract. Alternatively, it could be the fact that everything is coming from a single source (the television set) so I can play while focusing on a single stimuli. My instincts is that it basically operates on the same principle to a stim toy, though, in terms of providing stimulation without overloading senses, although I'm not entirely sure what that principle actually is when it comes to 'this causes sensory overload, this helps reduce sensory overload while providing sensory input. I think it's something todo with a sensory input source that you can focus on to the exclusion of all else, but I'm not 100% certain of that. Whatever the reason, however, I'm glad my senses work the way they do since the game is absolutely marvelous.
...Though I really want to make it so that I can get onto the first level with feedback monsters (they're so pretty when they get shot~) with three lives so that I can start on it while getting a starting bonus. Ah well, something to work on (Which seriously needs work, while the first time I got through that level I started on it so that I was on 3 lives at the start (and 1 at the end), this time I was on... 8 or 9 at the start and... 1 at the end.
...And I still say I'm worse than my positions on the leaderboards would indicate. I mean, for the love of... Not only to spiralling levels sometimes confuse my sense of direction, but I managed to misread a level and thought I was somewhere I wasn't in my last game. Not in terms of 'thinking something else was me', more 'thinking I was somewhere that nothing was' No clue how I survived the five seconds it took me to figure out that no, I was somewhere else, but... |