Tag: immersion

1906: Tune Out, Jump In

There’s something to be said for “unplugging” to various degrees now and again. Some people take this to an extreme and go out into nature without any electronic devices chirruping in their pocket; others might take a more modest approach. But it’s a good thing to do now and again, particularly when it comes to the always-on nature of the modern Internet.

I wrote a few days ago about how I’m coming to resent my phone and the compulsions it gives me to pick it up and check it even if nothing interesting is happening on the Internet. Between Reddit and Twitter — I’ve successfully purged almost all trace of Facebook from my life — I find myself drawn to look at what people have been saying, even if it’s been literally minutes since I last did so. There’s rarely anything interesting going on, to be perfectly honest, and even on days like today, where there was a temporary brouhaha over one of Polygon’s staff members having conveniently acquired the domain name for an upcoming new Lego game the day before it was announced (hmm…) it’s questionable as to how much “value” all that sort of thing is actually adding to my life. (Though I guess you could say the same about anything.)

Since my Xbox 360 controller bit the dust last night, meaning I can’t play Final Fantasy XIV this evening — I’ve been playing with controller for far too long to ever be able to switch to keyboard and mouse, even temporarily — I decided to curl up with my Vita and spend some time with a game I’ve had on the go for quite a while but still not got around to finishing: Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus. I also decided that I was going to sit and play it with headphones on rather than playing through the Vita’s admittedly not-all-that-bad-but-still-nothing-compared-to-something-good internal speakers. I also decided that I was going to concentrate on it and not even think about grabbing my phone during loading breaks.

It will doubtless not surprise you to note that the experience was considerably enhanced by the combination of these factors. The use of headphones meant I could enjoy the game’s excellent soundtrack and voice acting to the full without disturbing anyone — and also without anyone or anything disturbing me. In turn, this “cutting myself off” from the outside world through headphones made it a lot easier to not give a shit about anything my phone was doing. And by not fiddling with my phone during any sort of downtime like loading breaks or whatever, the whole thing was considerably more immersive.

I’ve long been a fan of playing games on headphones, ever since I first discovered Wolfenstein 3D and Doom had true stereo sound. It’s cool to play on a big speaker system, sure, but sometimes nothing at all compares to being able to completely shut yourself off from everything going on around you and lose yourself in something entertaining and immersive. It doesn’t have to be a game, either; it could be a podcast, an audiobook, a favourite album — the important thing is making sure that you’re free of external stimuli, and can simply concentrate fully on the thing you’re trying to give your attention to.

So now, having broken my concentration to come and extoll the virtues of this practice for you all, I think you all know what I’m going to head back upstairs and do right now.

No, not that, you filthy pervert. (Insert predictable comment about Senran Kagura here.) I’m off to go and see how the Gessen Girls’ Academy story of Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus ends. I may be some time!

#oneaday Day 952: 伝説のブログ

I’ve been pretty much immersing myself in Japanese culture recently thanks to the various games I’ve been playing. Between Yakuza 3, School Days HQ and the Persona 4 anime that I’ve just started watching in preparation for Persona 4 Arena’s delayed European release, it’s been super-Eastern around here, to the extent that it actually felt a bit strange to boot up Guild Wars 2 earlier and hear people speaking English.

I would like to learn Japanese. I have been saying this for years, but worrying about it being difficult has stopped me on several occasions. I have, however, now found a decent iOS app (Human Japanese) that walks you through both the spoken and written forms of the language, so I will use that to give myself a good introduction and then see where I need to go after that. I am trying to devote a few sessions per week — ideally each day, but that’s not always practical — to studying. So far I have learned how to write the hiragana for the vowels, which is more hiragana than I have ever learned. I would type some to prove it, but I have no idea how to type Japanese characters on a computer as yet (except by copy and pasting from Google Translate, which is how I got the title for this post), so we’ll cross that bridge at a later time.

What I’ve found, however, is that through immersing myself in Japanese media, I’ve actually picked up a surprising number of words and phrases. Okay, I can’t spell them, write them in Japanese script or, in many cases, even say them properly, but I recognise plenty of words and phrases. Words like “densetsu” (legend), which I first came across when I heard the Japanese name of Secret of Mana — Seiken Densetsu, literally Legend of the Holy Sword. For quite a while I didn’t know that “densetsu” meant “legend” but I picked it up somehow, meaning that when someone in School Days HQ mentioned a “legendary break room” in the subtitles, I deduced that the part of the Japanese sentence that meant that bit was densetsu no kyuukeishitsu. (I know Romanji sucks, but it’s all I’ve got right now, yo!) I knew that the “no” after “densetsu” meant that “legend” was being used to describe another word (essentially the equivalent of tweaking a noun to become an adjective in English) so therefore I figured that kyuukeishitsu means “break room”. And sure enough, it does. Hurrah for apparently having the right kind of mind to work out language.

There’s a few other phrases I’ve picked up from Japanese media, too, some of which might even be useful. I can say hello in various ways (konnichiwa, osu! (tatakae! Oueeeeeendaaaaaaaa– wait, no)), good morning (ohayou!), sorry (gomen nasai), yes (hai), no (iie, pronounced confusingly similar to someone saying “yeah” hesitantly), goodbye (sayonara — if you’ve never studied any Japanese before I was as surprised as you are that it’s an actual word in another language rather than a made-up one) and express gratitude before a meal (itadakimasu, apparently bellowed by everyone before diving into one’s bento if School Days HQ is anything to go by). Oh, and strawberry (ichigo). And laughing like a shy schoolgirl (ufufufufu!).

Now all I need to be able to do is 1) incorporate these snippets and phrases into actual Japanese conversation and 2) be able to figure out how to write them in scary squiggly script. Both of those things will probably involve a lot of practice, so if I start talking about the densetsu no bento next time I’m having lunch with you, gomen nasai.