Changing Rooms

“Well, first things first: the TV has got to move. You can’t have it at an angle like that, it’s gonna have to be in-line with the walls.”

“Okay. Sure. Uhh… how will we watch TV?”

“Hmm… well, where can we comfortably see it from the sofa that would still have it facing directly down the room?”

You’ve got to hand it to games. We’ve grown so used to their charms that we sometimes go to quite amazing lengths to accommodate our hobby. For one thing, I no longer have any idea how much I spend on games. Between the drip-feed of ‘Oh great, it’s only 800 points’ Arcade titles on Xbox Live, to the ‘No it didn’t really cost me anything, I traded stuff in’ of retail games, the amount of real-world coin that goes to fund my habit has become quite nicely blurred. Fudged even. And I like it like that. Saves all that worrying about me spending too much.

“What if we moved the sofa?”

“Then it wouldn’t be in front of the fire and we wouldn’t get the direct heat.”

And then there’s the time! Ask me how much I play videogames and I might say, “Ohh, three times a week for an hour or two.” But ask me how long I’ve played Oblivion; “70 hours.” GTA IV? “60 hours.” Street Fighter? “An unbelievable, mega-squillion hours!” No, I may not have time to do that chore that’s been hovering for the past week. I might not be able to squeeze in an extra exercise session or run along the beach. But that gamerscore does keep creeping up. And it’s not like those games play themselves, so the time comes from somewhere.

“If we put it by the window, we can play standing in the middle of the room.”

“But then, if the fire’s lit, we’ll be cooked.”

It’s like I said; gamers like me will go quite some way to accommodate their gaming. Money, time, even our passion go into getting the most from our shiny boxes and the shimmering screen. But trying to provide actual accommodation for my gaming, that is something of a first. It seems to the other resources I pour into gaming, I must now add ‘space’. It’s not that Microsoft’s Kinect device is any great size, you understand, just that its demands for a large play area are, well… large. “Six to eight feet is good,” it says, “but eight to ten feet is better.” And that’s before we look at how many players we’re trying to squeeze in side-by-side, or just what happens when I dive to make that miracle catch. There’s something ironic; in a peripheral the size of a demi-baguette needing as much space as two guitars and a full Rock Band drum-kit.

“If we put it over there, that would solve all our problems.”

“Only if you’re planning on running electrical cable all around the room.”

In the end, I don’t really mind. Like the time, and the money, it’s a cost I’m not really counting. Because I love playing. Because it helps me relax. Because I get lost in the stories and found in the score lines. Because of the way it draws friends closer and turns making enemies into a joy. And because Kinect really does play like a dream. Or even like a slice of the future.

“Yeah, there’s only one thing for it. The sofa’s gonna have to move.”