Rendered at 60 FPS

The view outside of the home's window is static, changing superficially with the passage of daylight and weather. The same brown fence, the same loop of traffic (only minor variations occur, the specific details being lost in the bulge of traffic's enormousness), the same sky, mountain, angle. Yet outside of the home's real window is a real world, the separation of glass protecting the subject from the object and vice versa. Exiting the home allows the subject to interact with the brown fence, slightly disrupt or somehow become involved with the traffic, breathe in the air that comprises the sky, hike the mountain, change the angle. Returning inside, the real becomes confined and framed by the rectangle, a sheen of glossy unreality in the form of the window causes a breakage, a separation--a small one, but a separation nonetheless.

The screen acts as a window to other worlds, a rectangle in the forefront with an illusion of depth. The stillness is illusory, for each second passes with up to 60 frames of the same picture flicked onto the screen. Movement is likewise an illusion.

This is not gaming's illusion, for it is the nature of the glowing rectangle. The screen is a compilation of still images that is flashed across the surface so rapidly that the appearance of movement is created. Screenshots, therefore, are not simply a sampling of what a game looks like, they are literally cells of the game's corpus, the visible DNA of what is played.

Two illusions seem to make a right, for the illusion of the screen mingled with the illusion of interaction is what causes the game to become worthwhile. The glass wrapped-world behind the window is not fake, its motions are real and continuous, yet they are devoid of meaningful manipulation. The plastic wrapped-game world within the screen is not real, its motions are fake and fragmented, yet they gaps in between allow for manipulation.

If there is a real and a hyperreal, we must have a hyporeal as well. The real, then, is within the home and the selfsame angle, while the hyporeal is the traffic and the birds and the sky. The hyperreal is encapsulated within the screen's rectangle, an attempt to fuse the hyporeal with the real--a simulacrum of Frankensteinian proportions. The monolith that is created is the game, it is what is both static and fluid--a digital squaring of the circle.

The access to the success of the game is only monetary to the hyporeal, what is 'real' outside of the purview of the gamer, what is outside the window. The access to the success of the game is only transitory when it flits through the hyperreal of the game, what is inside the screen. The access to the success of the game is only significant and lasting when it bridges into the real, when it affects the gamer, when it causes the thought, the passion, the response, the craving, the solace, the understanding that comes when the mind is rightly and truly engaged with what it is observing.

That is why games matter.