From Piranesi to Playstation

[Monte Davis]

Private-eye protagonist Maxine Tarnow is trying out a virtual-reality " "
"game." " "

 

Think of the Evacuation at the opening of GR, and of the later exploration
of the Raketenstadt. We've  been here before, although not with so much RAM:

 

*

 

When the program is loaded, there is no main page, no music score, only a
sound ambience, growing slowly louder, that Maxine recognizes from a
thousand train and bus stations and airports, and the smoothly cross-dawning
image of an interior whose detail, for a moment breathtakingly, is far in
advance of anything she's seen on the gaming platforms Ziggy and his friends
tend to use, flaring beyond the basic videogame brown of the time into the
full color spectrum of very early morning just before dawn, polygons finely
smoothed to all but continuous curves, the rendering, modeling, and shadows,
blending and blur, handled elegantly, even with ... could you call it
genius? Making Final Fantasy X, anyway, look like an Etch A Sketch. A framed
lucid dream, it approaches, and wraps Maxine, and strangely without panic
she submits. 

               .If it's a travel connection that Maxine's supposed to be
making, she keeps missing it. "Departure" keeps being indefinitely
postponed. She gathers that you're supposed to get on what looks like a
shuttle vehicle of some kind. At first she doesn't even know it's ready to
leave till it's gone. Later she can't even find her way to the right
platform. From the sumptuously provisioned bar upstairs, there's a striking
view of rolling stock antiquated and postmodern at the same time vastly
coming and going, far down the line over the curve of the world. "It's all
right," dialogue boxes assure her, "it's part of the experience, part of
getting constructively lost."

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