Saturday night, I went to the Braves-Nationals game, probably my final game at RFK. Next year, a new stadium opens on the waterfront, paid for by the tax dollars of the citizens of Washington DC, because I guess they have money to throw around in the hope that it will lead to business development.<\/p>\n
I will be glad to see the end of RFK. It’s a terrible park. Hideous architecture. Lousy overpriced concessions. The video monitors and out of town scoreboards are too small to follow. The concourses are very narrow, so it can be a real pain getting around when it’s crowded. Sure, a night in any ballpark beats a night not at a game, but every time I go to RFK, I love Camden even more.<\/p>\n
But as I sat in my seat for the final inning (7-5 Nats win, by the way.), I realized that the sight lines were great. Here I was in section 511 and I could see the entire field. The players didn’t look like ants, either. Considering the vintage of the stadium, I’m pretty pleased that I never missed anything that happened on the field.<\/p>\n
So the ostensible reason to go to the game – to see the game – was met more than satisfactorily. It was the other stuff (food, drink, visuals, etc.) that I hated, and it’s not strictly baseball stuff. It’s enough for me to consider my RFK experiences unpleasant, though.<\/p>\n
There are a lot of things in video games that are like ballpark concessions. Though not necessarily part of the “game”, they contribute to the entire experience. As a game strictly understood, Bioshock is a shooter like many shooters that have come before. But the music, art and theme lift it above the run of the mill variation on pistol\/shotgun\/beehive arm. It’s come to the point where you can’t make a game without sound or illustrative imagery any more than you can open a stadium without hot dogs. It’s expected.<\/p>\n
And, as I age, I learn to appreciate how the art design of a game (“graphics” if you insist) are so integral to the entire experience. I’ve written before about how the “graphics\/gameplay” dichotomy is a ludicrous simplification of the art of game design, and I think that real life has more to say to us about how good experiences are wrapped up in things not necessarily inherent in the core experience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Saturday night, I went to the Braves-Nationals game, probably my final game at RFK. Next year, a new stadium opens on the waterfront, paid for by the tax dollars of the citizens of Washington DC, because I guess they have money to throw around in the hope that it will lead to business development. I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-ch","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/761"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=761"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/761\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}