PlayStation - An Icon Of Our Culture

A week before stores in Japan put the PlayStation II on sale, Sony quietly unwrapped eight of the new consoles at its showroom in Tokyo's Ginza district. Hundreds of game freaks turned up, even though Sony hadn't advertised the event. How did they come to know? For weeks, fans hungry to try out the PSII had been showing up at Sony headquarters, hoping for a sneak preview. So on Feb 26, when they finally found what they were looking for, they quickly called friends on their mobile phones. Within an hour, the place was packed with fans eager to test drive the device that's been billed as the Porsche of game machines.

All over Tokyo this month, giant billboards have been announcing the arrival of a device its makers think will change the world. PlayStation 2, the Sony game machine that promises nothing less than to revolutionize the way we entertain ourselves, has generated so much attention that thousands of consumers lined up outside a convention center last month to get a sneak peek. One Sony website crashed only seconds after it started to take pre-orders. And though the company had promised to ship 1 million of the black boxes on March 4, the day they went on sale, people jammed into Akihabara, Tokyo's humming electronics district, before the stores even opened. The machines were sold out within minutes of the launch.

What is exactly this PSII that has caused this craze all over the world? Isn't this just any electronic game a kid plays?

The original PlayStation was released in 1994. Back then, it was no sure bet that video games would become the business they are today (video-game sales last year totalled $13 billion in Japan and the U.S. alone). But PlayStation became a stunning success. Sony has sold 72 million of the machines; one in four U.S. households has one. In just five years, Sony has become the dominant player, controlling two-thirds of the game-machine market worldwide.

This PlayStation is what we reckon as an icon of our culture today. It is not merely a game console for kids but it represents the digital technological age of our world today. It is part of the virtual space created by the Internet. It also gives new definition and meanings to the idea of the Home and the City. It is a symbol of modernity in today's urban city. Everyone, ranging from a three year old kid to their sixty year old grandparents knows what the PS is. And the society is expecting the infiltration of such a machine into every homes all over the world, just like the TV set found today in almost every single modern home.

What Does the PlayStation Represents?

Sony has spent $1.2 billion just on chip development for the PS2. This sleek black box, lighter than a laptop computer and smaller than a CD player, will become an important Internet platform and, and the centerpiece of Sony's strategy in the information age. The PlayStation is not just a machine that can merely play games and spin DVDs. But it is also souped up with extras: a microprocessor as powerful as a supercomputer and ports for hooking up cable TV, keyboard, mouse, digital-video camera and modem card. The possibilities for this piece of machine in the future are huge.

" PS2 will become a basic platform for the Net," intones Ken Kutaragi, the hyperbolic Sony executive who dreamed up the idea of the PlayStation.

It can be clearly seen from the making of the PlayStation that it is meant to represent the digital and technological age of the 21st century. There were ideas to connect the rest of the world by a little black box, increasing efficiency and speed in communicating and networking. It is the envisioning of a utopia like the Internet where space-time is no longer a barrier to man-to-man contact.

The Idea of Intelligent Housing

Here's the world Kutaragi envisions: from your mobile phone, you send an e-mail telling the machine to turn up the air-conditioning at home. "Welcome home," it purrs when you open the front door; it then puts your video e-mail on the TV monitor. You command the PS2 to download the movie you want and play it 30 minutes later. Mid-film, you stop to cue up a video game featuring the movie's main characters. Then you e-mail a virtual friend you met online who also likes this game; you face off against each other.

Now look again into Japan's vision of a plugged-in home.

"Imagine an intelligent microwave oven reviewing a recipe for the evening meal, checking with the refrigerator for the ingredients and then flashing an electronic order to the local supermarket to deliver the missing items. Or a toilet seat that doubles as a testing station sending a user's weight, urine sugar level and other data instantaneously to the home electronic medical kit which monitors the health of an entire family and gives tips on how to stay trim."

These may sound like fantasies to some, but they are not far from realisation when all household equipment will be able to talk to each other through digital networks that include computers, audio-visual equipment and other devices in the not-too-distant future. Japan's consumer electronics manufacturers are now devoting their top research and development talent to realising the vision of fully-networked homes in the 21st century. While manufacturers are convinced that digitally- networked homes will be an inescapable trend in the 21st century, no one can yet realistically predict just when the first fully-digitalised and networked home will materialise.

The PlayStation is one of the various technological advancements which partakes in the idea of future intelligent housing that the Japanese are currently developing. It represents the ideal future living condition whereby all technology in the house can be intelligently controlled at the touch of one's fingertips.

Back home in Singapore, this idea of intelligent housing is also not far from being realised. Known as the "Home Information Infrastructure", this system had already been in use by some condominiums whereby simply a telephone call home can pre-programmed, the air-conditioning system and the rice cooker . Hence upon reaching home, everything will be ready and one can immediately bask in the comforts of the home.

In the urban cities of the 21st century, there will be an increasing pressure for space, speed and efficiency. Many people now live in apartments. With the advent of the Information Age, technologies such as the Internet, enables people to live as individuals without the need to interact physically, but instead through the virtual world of the Net. This allows them to live in compartmentalised cells, as smaller spaces are required for living, with home appliances and equipment getting more compact and comes with multi-tasking abilities to support the cell for living in. All these are made only possible in this Technology Age of ours. And also due to our technological advancements, another realm is created and that is the virtual space.

Revolutionised Idea On Domesticity And Dwelling

" For the first time the living space became distinguished from the space of work", wrote Benjamin Walter in the early 1800s.

In those times, domesticity was seen as an invention of the modern age. It was regarded as a product of the confluence of the capitalist economics, breakthroughs in technology, and the Enlightenment notions of individuality. Its qualities of privacy, individuality and comfort are features defining the modern age. But now in the 21st century, the scenario is changed with the onset of the information technology age. With every means of communication and information at the reach of one's fingers, the work- space and the home are no longer separate entities. There is a blurring of these two spaces as people could work from home conveniently. And with the help of technology, efficiency and speed of work can be increased tenfold. This gives rise to the notion of "Home Offices" which is rather popular nowadays.

When Martin Heidegger wrote about his idea of the fourfold: the Mortal, the Earth, the Divinities and the Heaven in his book "Building, Dwelling, Thinking" during the 1950s, he used these four elements to explain his idea of the dwelling. He gave the analogy of a bridge spanning across two banks to demonstrate his idea of the dwelling. It is their relationship with each other that gives them the meaning of what they are. If not for each other, the bridge would not have been a bridge; the banks would not have been the banks. The bridge described here represents the dwelling, but before a building can claim to be a dwelling, it must encompass these four ideas of the Mortal, the Earth, the Divinities and the Heaven. In his book, the Mortal means man; the Earth means the environment; the Divinities means culture and religion; the Heaven means the cosmos. The man resides in and is supported by environment. The environment is governed by the culture and religion of the society which is in turn ordered by the cosmological beliefs. This was the idea formed by Heidegger in the 1950s. But in today's society, these four elements might not be as appropriate as before. This is because our ideology has changed. If the four elements were to be retained for their meanings, the words would be changed in accordance to today's context.

The Virtual Space

The old video games used to be two-dimensional. The figures are distributed in this grid of isometric perspective. They are relatively flat and compressed along this traditional grid. They figures slip and slide along the thin glass walls of the game façade. As a result, players are confronted by this curtain wall of the cyberspace.

" I had a strong dream that the next level of entertainment would be 3-D and home-based," says Kutaragi.

When Kutarahi said this, he wanted to break into the virtual reality world, where gaming can be brought to be as alive and real as possible. Through the use of the three-dimension, this virtual world is brought closer to our world. People will then be able to experience new sensations. They can be transported into a make-believe world and momentarily allowed to forget about this very present and physical world which we all live in.

Currently the virtual world is still screen-bound. The cyberspace is separated from our world by the monitor screen or the television screen. But there were already plans that in the future there will be no more screens. Everyone will receive laser images projected directly onto their retinas, a petit cinema capable of receiving and transmitting data across someone else's spectral eyes. This will then come a time when the boundaries between cyberspace and our world will be blurred. Will there then be no distinction between these two realms?

The virtual space is essentially a void, absence of all physical objects and beings but is composed and realised when our minds, thoughts and ideas enter and form this realm. This virtual space on the Net is currently populated with "people" from all over the world, forming a "virtual square", where ideas, information and interests are exchanged. There are "information highways" that speed up this exchange. This virtual space, in other words has formed the four-dimension to be cognised. It is a new dimension which transcends above time and space.

Impact On Our Society

The Sato sisters don't look like your stereotypical game fanatics. For one thing, they're girls. Madoka, 18, and Mai, 13, dropped by the Ginza building after taking in an art exhibition. At home, the Sato sisters and their three younger siblings have to scramble for playing time on their one PlayStation console, which is usually switched on from 10 a.m. until 11 p.m. Mai had already gotten a glimpse of PS2 at a show Sony put on the week before. Now she is hooked. "It feels so good," said Madoka. On the PlayStation machine at home, she prefers fighting games, like Namco's Tekken. A PS2 version of Tekken was on hand, and Madoka perceived a definite improvement. "When I won, it felt as if I actually won the fight," she said.

The digital technological realm used to be a field that tends to exclude women's participation. But times have changed. The cyberspace has been designed in such a way that all differences between nationalities, racial groups and gender do not exist in this world. People are transported into this non-physical world whereby everyone bears the same "face". They are all equal. There is no exclusion of players in this realm.

"It will become a machine that transcends the differences of nation, race and sex."

People may find themselves enjoying the pleasures from this virtual world whereby everything seems perfect. There is no morals or laws enforced to restrict your behaviour in this realm. For example, when you kill someone in a game, you get the pleasure of power and victory, without having to worry about the moral ethic of killing someone. Everything in this cyberspace is make-believed. But one worries the entrapment of one's soul in this virtual world. Would the distinction between the real and the unreal be confused? Would a person choose to "reside" in this perfect space and refuses to come to terms with the real physical world.

The society has changed. Technology has enabled us to live in our own little domain without stepping out of this cocoon and allowing us to maintain contact with the rest of the world. People no longer need the physical presence of beings to feel assured and secured. People now rely on images of Things and Beings. But one will wonder in the long term, will this declining physical interaction of man rob us of our sanity, after all man is by nature a community animal.

Final Words

The PlayStation represents the technological age of our society today. It encompasses the science and technology which comes into play. It partakes in the many visions of the Home, the City and the Society the future might have. It changes and revolutionised many ideas and definitions of the present It is an icon for the Present, the Future and the Everyday.

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