Sci-Fi Ideas: Savoring the "New Toy Smell"

We all know the sensation -- that satisfying smell when you crack open a game for the first time, the lingering scent of a new car, opening a bag of Legos for the first time. It's that sickly sweet smell that permeates the air after opening a package, giving us the satisfying, sensual reward of spending our hard-earned money. We often use it as an argument against digital distribution of games and music. Consumers love it so much that they will actually purchase fragrances to make things smell as though they were new, which is made even more ironic given the nature of these fumes. So what's the deal with that "new toy" smell?

Naturally, part of this smell comes from our own projected expectations -- something about opening the mint copy of a game you've searched years for is different than opening a new copy of Microsoft Office for Windows 7. Still, there is a tangible element of the smell created by the off-gassing of plastics, including chemicals like formaldehyde, phthalates, esters, and industry-made fragrances -- for example, the famous "new car smell" is actually a product of the glue they use to hold parts of the cabin together. Multiple studies have shown that these chemical cocktails are detrimental to your general health, but that doesn't stop us from enjoying the scent of Sharpies or heavily scented candles. These chemicals mixed with our expectations produce a unique unboxing for any given car, game, disc, or toy.

My thought: what if box-opening eventually becomes something similar to wine-tasting? If you look at it in the broad sense, there are plenty of parallels. To me, it seems to all stem from the concept outlined in this XKCD strip. Even if it doesn't pan out in the real world, it's definitely an interesting sci-fi premise to explore.

Prognosis: Stay Alive (2006 film)

 
To say the least, Stay Alive is quite a... curious film.

For those of you who haven’t seen the movie, it’s a fairly formulaic horror flick with the now memetic tagline “If you die in the game, you die for real.” Essentially, a group of teens and twenty-somethings play a survival-horror multiplayer game together. As each character dies in the game, they die in an almost identical fashion in the next hour. It’s a neat idea with no big surprises here. What’s so disappointing about this movie is that it should have been pretty good. The premise was original, the late-movie twists were good, and there was lots of fairly creative direction. When you watch the film you can see that most of the pieces of a quality film are there. All things considered, this should have been a B- movie. Sadly, the final cut feels sadly more like a struggling D+ by the time you get to the credits.

So where did Stay Alive go wrong?

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"Avengers" Tangentials: the Hulk

I'm really excited for the new Avengers movie coming out this summer. Honestly, with all the buildup and foreshadowing they've had in the past several Marvel movies, I really can't help it. We get to see significant interaction between superheroes for the first time, the convergence of several very different plotlines, the first action role of Nick Fury, and generally a lot of exciting things.

While this is the case, it does bring several of my thoughts on the genre and the general state of science fiction to the forefront of my mind. It reminds me of how superheroes have contributed to the recent surge of nerd popularity, my general dislike for the Hulk, my impressions of Joss Whedon relative to the rest of the science fiction community, and how this massively successful genre has helped reshape how blockbusters are written, directed, and produced. I'll use the next few Mondays to use The Avengers to expand on these thoughts, starting this week with my thoughts on the Hulk.