Second Hand Experiences for the First Time
I experienced something during my two week stay in New York City that was utterly bizarre.
A misspent youth of watching movies and playing videogames had created for me a sense of familiartity to cultural icons, which in turn created a weird cognitive dissonance while I walked around NYC and visited places for the first time that, through repeated media exposure, I felt I had already experienced many times before.
Case in point, I walked into the grandiose bay-windowed hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art containing the Temple of Dendur and heard “TANGO DOWN!” in my brain. Until that moment I had been experiencing the Met on my own terms for the first time and then, quite suddenly, I walked a path I’d been down many frustrating times before in a videogame: Rainbow 6: Rogue Spear. It was somewhat uncanny to wander around and remember shooting up this entire hall with a semi-automatic machine gun and watching the many windows shatter with teenage glee.
Somewhat amusingly, the opposite of this effect happened on the flight home to Brisbane - I hadn’t made it to the Guggenheim while I was in NYC but when I watched The International (Quantum of Solace’s smarter big brother) I experienced that weird notion of seeing somewhere for the first time via the media while having the overall familiarity with the surrounding area (Upper East Side, Central Park).
I also had a certain someone gibbering in my ear for the first week about how effectively GTA4 had recreated areas of NYC, I responded with “if only they’d effectively recreated gameplay anywhere near as compelling as GTA3″. It was however funny to wander along the promenade at Brooklyn then realise I’d driven through it, ploughing through pedestrians and hot dog stands before flipping the car over the barrier into the dockland areas below.
Yes, I was in New York City with a New Yorker and we both related to the world around us through the media that had exposed us to it - even though he fucking lives there! That’s geekery, ladies and gentlemen.
<< How Do I Blog?