And I thought I had left the gaming scene

Guess again!

(Don't worry, there's an Xbox 360 hiding down there. The Mac Pro sits there and looks pretty ^^)

Playing Forza 4 with the wheel is so much more pleasant than playing with the controller, despite not having vibration. There is simulated force feedback with a spring on bungee cord (fixed spring constant, unfortunately) inside. I'm also a little sad that the paddle shifters don't reach down to my ring fingers with my hands at the 9 o'clock and 3 o'clock positions, nor are they fixed to the steering column.

There definitely is merit to having a driving simulator when one has the potential to track in a nice car in real life: traveling to various tracks around the world with said car is quite impractical. Also impractical is owning the fleet of cars available in the game.

Gaming

Looking back, I used to be a relatively big gamer. Especially for a girl.

Now, I'm not. Not at all. (Although I can wallop a good handful of people on my hall at Super Smash Bros. Melee)

Ten years ago, things were mostly `mechanical,' or physical, to be general. Rubik's cubes, block letters, stuffed animals. The thought of a multifunctional handheld device that contained an alternate universe was unfathomable. Perhaps my fascination with this new concept is the reason I played Pokémon for upwards of eight hours a week on my teal GameBoy Color (which I somewhat regret selling to GameStop). In sixth grade I would devote some time each week to practicing Super Smash Brothers Melee when family friends came over. I did get `better' at these games; I could beat a good number of people who challenged me.

Today's world is more or less the opposite. Activities are mostly virtual, from organizational tasks, to learning, and even to simulation of mechanical objects. `Mechanical' things mostly have been relegated to the past. The thought of building a microprocessor out of transistors seems anachronistic today; it is `trivialized' to writing some number lines of simulation code in JSim. Sure, prototyping in software is much faster and more cost efficient, but one does not gain the tactile experience of merely touching a transistor, never mind stripping wires, hooking everything up to a breadboard, or even soldering.

Perhaps the digital dominance has pushed me to pursue `mechanical' activities more than before.