Earlier this week, as I settled into bed after a long day of work and a couple of hours away from the internet, I opened Twitter to see the horrible news that PlayStation had laid off 900 people globally, about eight percent of its workfo𒉰rce. Immediately after, I saw , made a few hours after the announcement, about a product called GameScent that uses AI to release scents according to what’s happening in the games you’re playing.
He hasn’t commented on the layoffs at the time of writing, and who are we kidding? He prob🃏ably won’t.
Even if this tweet hadn’t been made under these appalling circumstances, I probably wouldn’t have been able to stop thinking about this product. According to the press release sent to us by the company, GameScent will have a “diverse Scent Palette” including such smells as gun fire, explosions, racing, storm, forest, and “clean air”, which apparently will neutralise any scents in the room. Additional scents such as ocean, sports arena, fresh cut grass, and blood will be available for purchase in the future.🧔 Keighley’s tweet also says you can buy scents of napalm and “human exertion”.
The technology intends to༒ enhance player immersion by captuꦬring audio in real-time, processing those audio cues with AI, and releasing scents that correspond with on-screen action. Playing Helldivers 2? Close your eyes and you’ll be able to smell death, sweat, and organic matter burning around you! Playing The Last of Us Part 2? You can smell the forest air mixed with the smell of blood as you stab a person in the neck. Playing Forza Motorsport? Make your house smell like burning rubber!
I know for a fact that this is not a product I ever want to have. Just a couple of weeks ago, as I was going through a particularly disgusting looking part of act two in Baldur’s Gate 3 (you know, the bit with the doors made of flesh), I thought to myself that wow, I sure am glad I can’t smell video games! The company’s statement has its president saying, “Studies have shown that the sense of smell imprints in long-term memory more strongly than anything else”, and that’s not a positive to me. Why would I want to be able to make video game violence more realistic? Who asked for this?
Of course, that’s not even considering that the technology is going entirely off of audio cues and interpreting them through AI, which is going to give you a drastically different experience from if the technology was built into the consoles – AI is far from perfect, and never performs as well as hoped. My gue🌺ss is that the actual experience of using the tech is going to be intermittent and inconsistent, since the device won’t be able to parse appropriate scents for each moment as well as𓄧 a person could. That in itself will be immersion-breaking in moments where you expect or hope to smell something that the game doesn’t pick up on.
Either way… gross. Reception seems to have been mixed online, though I’m sure that as wi🥀th any new technology, people who can afford it will buy it for the novelty and then quickly get sick of it. It’s🅠 $179.99 for the device and six scents, and extra for scent refills, if you’re interested. But ew.
GameScent
The GameScent is a device that quite literally lets you smell your video games. Emitting scents that replicate the action on-screen, the GameScent will kick in when there's an explosion, if you're on a race track, and sailing through a storm, among other things.