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R E C E N T L Y Let's Get This Straight Lawyers, guns, money? Let's Get This Straight Night of the living day traders Aliens blew up my garbage dump! - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE - - - - - - - - - -
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TO CATCH A THIEF | PAGE 1, 2
What's more, Thief also manages to expand the creative potential of that elusive concept known as virtual reality. That idea -- creating fully immersive, ultra-realistic simulations -- has existed for years. But in practice, it's never been much more than a cumbersome novelty. Indeed, hobbled by the prospect of bulky headgear and force-feedback equipment, the VR torch has been largely passed to first-person shooter games. Those games lure us inside their worlds with a promise of never-ending carnage; but they've never demonstrated why, once we're immersed in a VR environment and the killing begins, we should stick around to notice the world's physical particulars. Thief suggests a primal motive: to avoid a horribly violent death. In most 3-D worlds, your sole orientation is visual -- almost always, space is described strictly in terms of perspective. In Thief, the dimensions are also aural and tactile. Sound can travel from anyplace in the environment and reach your ears. You can actually hear noises resonating off several surfaces, allowing you to guess their direction, distance and character. Material objects convey their quality with sound: metallic surfaces clang, wood thuds, stone cracks. Even light has perceivable gradations: A jewel icon at the base of your screen changes hue according to your relative illumination. In a sunlit courtyard, it gleams white; when you move into deep shadow, it becomes obsidian. But these features aren't mere "special effects," cool fillips irrelevant to gameplay. When you're a thief, short of armor and weaponry, such cues are essential. You must maintain constant awareness of the environment, its shapes and textures, as if, literally, your life depended on them. Stumble onto noisy metal grates, forget to listen for approaching footsteps, ignore the proximity of shadow (once in darkness, Garrett is virtually invisible) and guards will quickly spot you, pounce and kill. Thief makes good on the promise of the old virtual-reality tradition in the same way that genre movies often prove more meaningful than filmmakers' more self-consciously artistic efforts. Where, for instance, Andrei Tarkovsky's "Solaris" is a flat-footed meditation on the unknowability of an alien intelligence, Ridley Scott's "Alien" plays on a similar theme, but with spoogey, Hollywood gore -- and gives it the power of nightmare. Much the same way, Thief manages to play out the creative possibilities of virtual reality, not through artistic ambition but from the simpler desire to create a great 3-D action game. Until now, architects of virtual worlds have largely assumed that better object rendering and motion fluidity guarantee a greater sense of verisimilitude. Thief's creators have employed such technologies, too -- and then found a way to imbue them with real urgency. Investing its empirical grid with direct consequence, they raise the emotional stakes of being inside the game. With perception shaped by meaning, your persona is shaped, too. You learn to see, hear and think like a thief. It's hard to say the same about other 3-D games and VR applications -- unless being a hair-trigger sociopath or a roving pixie qualify as having a personality. But if there is any final criteria for successful virtual reality, it must be that, just like real life, its environment molds the kind of person you must be within its confines. Poised in the upper recess of a vaulted chamber, where a decadent aristocrat's prize sword hangs in mid-air, surrounded on all sides by surly guards, you have no option but ruthless cunning and insanely bold stealth. As you leap out to a blackened cable and rappel toward your prize, you must become Garrett -- or die.
Wagner James Au has also chatted with Michelle Yeoh and discussed the moral philosophy of Tupac Shakur for Salon. |
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