"The biggest revolution in gaming in decades" is a $180 AI-powered fart box that makes your room smell of blood, gunfire, explosions, and – seriously – "clean air"
Feb. 27, 2024Finally, gamer scents deployed to match what you’re currently playing
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I will say, the name is good. It conveys exactly what you need to know: the GameScent gives off game scents. One earlyblog poston the official website compares it to the early days of Smell-O-Vision, a technology which similarly used target-release odors to “enhance” the viewing experience, and a technology which was notably born and swiftly murdered in the 1950s after people realized that a fart box enhances cinema the way motor oil enhances a sandwich.
But perhaps this was only because video games are the only truly fitting frontier for atmospheric smells. The GameScent promises a wealth of scents that are refilled almost like printer ink cartridges, deployed using AI-powered “instant audio-to-scent translation” seemingly connected via HDMI, which come in aromas like:
Storm and forest smells actually sound pleasant, but I’d prefer them as candles, not fart box ammunition. I also respect the effort to introduce gamers to the smell of grass, but the very presence of a “clean air” scent feels like a telling admission to me. This seems like the kind of thing that would come up in R&D or practical testing, the point at which the sniffers at GameScent realized, approximately 70 years too late, that people may not want blood and explosions, even gamer approximations of them, to linger in their game room. And this is all ignoring the fact that I wouldn’tneeda blast of paid-for clean air if I hadn’t spent $180 putting a fart box next to my TV.
I was going to end this article here, but then I saw that there are already six user reviews for this thing on Amazon, all giving it an impressive five stars. Perhaps the era of Smell-O-Vision has come at last? Or perhaps these endorsements are not as glowing as they seem.
“This is the cool [sic],” writes one user, adding that “my wife loves the clean air, so the house doesn’t smell like a warzone.” My freakin' guy, have you considered not making your house smell like a warzone in the first place? Did it smell like one before you acquired this device? Many questions remain.
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“This is simply amazing,” says another user. “Played Elden Ring and watched a movie and the scents were right on the money. Must have for gamers and movie watchers.” Okay, now I’m kind of curious. What does Elden Ring smell like, and by extension, how would this person know that the scents were accurate? It’d be a lot of storms and forests and blood, I assume. But what smell would, say, the poison swamps give off? What about the Kindred of Rot, or Wormface? You know what, don’t answer that.
Elden Ring’s DLC has another poison swamp, because of course it does, and now I want a GameScent owner to give us a side-by-side comparison.
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