Most any psychologist will tell you that men are more often visually stimulated and women are more likely to be stimulated by tactile experiences. This could explain why comic books and science fiction have generally been less appealing to women, as they are often very visually based. I find it interesting then, that we seem to be moving away from tactile experiences as a society. In fact, our society is becoming so bombarded with visual stimuli that all of the other senses are shortchanged.

Take music.
There's no question that CDs are more convenient that the old vinyl record albums were. They're smaller. You can play them in your car. There's much less worry of damage from handling and wear. But with vinyl albums we got much larger covers with more vital art. There was also something very tangible about putting the needle on the vinyl, knowing that each play of the album spent a little of its life expectancy, which made the experience that much sweeter. Now it looks like the future is in downloading music, which of course carries convenience to an even higher level, but futher decreases your involvement. Personally I miss the experience of hunting through a stack of record albums in a physical store while music blares in the background (and comic shop employees prance around like rock stars). That was a very tactile experience and it was to me a big part of music collecting. I find "pointing and clicking" to be a very poor substitute.

There was a television program in the mid 70's called Space: 1999. Now, this show was legendary for its' pompous, incomprehensible plots and wooden acting. But boy did it have cool special effects! When I watch old episodes of this show now (on super convenient DVD, of course), I am struck by how impressive the miniature effects still look today. To my eyes, those effects are much more convincing than the current spew of CGI laden films (and TV). While the CGI can be very pretty and is certainly cheaper, it just looks more like virtual reality to me. Now virtual reality is something that certainly excites a lot of people that I know. However, to me it is mostly just a curiosity and certainly not very tactile.

Call me silly, but when I want to read, I really prefer to hold a book in my hands. I have to admit a small fetish about the smell of moldy paper. I love the way the books feel in my hands and that is a big part of the experience. Although I do have to spend a fair amount of time in front of a computer screen, I have never fully adjusted to it. Perhaps it is all about adjustment and what we are accustomed to.

A girl came into the store a couple of weeks ago and loudly proclaimed "Wow! What's that stink in here?" I looked around - there wasn't any bathing challenged gamers in the store. There wasn't any food or anything else that should have been offensive. I knew that I was showered and squeaky clean. Then I realized that what she was smelling was something that I was so completely used to that it didn't register on me: the smell of moldy paper (of which we have a lot). She just wasn't used to being around books. If fact, she probably wasn't used to much smells at all. We scrub and wash ourselves free of any odors and disinfect our houses in an effort to make the world as devoid of smells as possible (and then add a fragrance of our choosing). Now I am not suggesting that you go without deodorant in an effort to become more olfactive (although you most certainly would). You might, however, take a moment to reflect on just what you do smell around you and how it defines your world. Smells are something that we don't notice when they are gone, but they can certainly carry powerful association when they return.

Before I became one of the privileged few comic shop owners, I worked for several years in the recording industry. To this day I can always identify a recording made in the 70's. It was in the 70's that 24 track studios became the norm. In that era, recording engineers tried to isolate every sound and record it a "dry" as possible. This meant recording each instrument with as close to zero acoustical reverberation as possible. Then they would electronically add in the reverberation in the mix down process. The result is that recordings from this period sound vaguely artificial. In the 80's everyone started to realize that the sound of drums bouncing off of concrete walls made a much more satisfying sound and since that time musicians have utilized more natural acoustics in recording. The lesson to be learn here kids, is that sometimes things really work much better if we quit trying to control them so tightly.

When you get right down to it, it is often the extraneous aspects that make any hobby so rewarding. Whether it is the feel of sunshine on the face of a golfer, the smell of cut grass to a fan at a baseball game or the "stink" of moldy paper to one of us comic book geeks, we all are responding to sensory input on a subtle level. Take those aspects away and our hobby, like so many things in our increasingly antiseptic times, can become sterile and unaffecting. Virtual reality can look really pretty, but it is quite unsatisfying when you try to reach out and touch it.