1. door

At the Holo-Dek gaming center in Hampton, there is a room with a 13-foot screen, a screen that fills one entire wall. It's lit by a powerful projector, which is in turn controlled by an Alienware computer, a machine built just for gaming.

You can use it--the screen, the room, the computer--for other things. You can watch 13-foot-wide television shows, or put on 13-foot-wide PowerPoint presentations, or even, as our guide Jeff Sullivan demonstrates, check your 13-foot-wide e-mail.

But that's not what it's for.

When Sullivan powers up the game Far Cry, the room floods with light and the wall seems to fall away, replaced by palm trees and tropical blue sea and the sandy beach of a desert atoll. Tiny, frothy waves lap at the carpet from the bottom of the screen, rendered in exquisite detail, smooth and fluid and lifelike.

When projected at this size, the game unfolds at human scale. An opposing soldier appears about six feet tall, and railings and fences come up about waist-high.

It's as if the wall has fallen away and left a doorway in its place.

But to where, exactly? I don't recognize this island.

2. buy the numbers

Video games sales in 2003 exceeded $7 billion, according to the Entertainment Software Association-double the amount sold in 1996. There were 239 million games sold, $5.8 billion in console games and $1.2 billion in PC games.

In comparison, movies grossed $9.5 billion at the box office in 2003, according to the Motion Picture Association of America. Although that number does not include DVD sales or other revenue, it's still instructive in seeing just how quickly the video game business has grown up. For that matter, a high-profile game often costs as much as $10 million to develop, which is comparable to the production budget of many movies.

The personal computer has become a common household appliance, and, at the end of 2003, more than 70 million Sony Playstation 2 video game consoles had been sold worldwide, and roughly 10 million Microsoft Xboxes and 10 million Nintendo GameCubes.

And millions of those gamers have migrated online, whether to duel with friends and strangers across the web or to collaborate in online universes like Star Wars Galaxies, or Everquest, or the Sims.

There are a lot of people out there playing games.

3. building it bigger

It's telling that the video game industry is so often compared to the movie industry, since that's exactly the direction that Mike Fortier and Kit McKittrick, co-founders of Holo-Dek Gaming Inc., want to take it.

"Basically, this is a video gaming theater... like a movie theater for gaming. Everybody gets a state of the art PC and at least a six-foot screen," says Fortier.

A set of gaming stations with 73-inch screens.
photo by Josh Pierce

It is an impressive set-up, even if it is tucked away in a middle-aged office park just off Route 1 in Hampton. The screens are large and bright and elegant, and the rooms are open and spacious-it feels much more like a theater than an arcade.

There are 16 f the 73-inch screens, three 100-inch screens, and the big 13-footer. All can be connected to PCs or Xboxes, and players can play singly, or against each other, or online.

Open for only three weeks, the dimly-lit rooms are peppered with teenage and 20-something gamers playing Half-Life 2, or Halo 2, or Far Cry. Yet despite the massive carnage and techicolor sci-fi action exploding on the walls all around, Holo-Dek is quiet, since the gamers are playing with headphones on. The space feels civilized, clean, and relaxed.

And, without getting up from their station, gamers order food and drinks on-screen, which are then delivered to them.

"This idea came from my son," says Fortier. "I had one of these projectors for work, and he was bringing it down in the cellar and setting it up, and every weekend we'd have ten kids in the cellar, and I'd feed them pizza...

"Then Kit came to me and asked me if I could build some simulators for him for a theme restaurant... and while we were doing some of the investigation and he was explaining the market to me, I saw some of this and I thought, 'There's a business opportunity sitting in my cellar.'"

Fortier is a Seacoast native who peppers his speech with entreprenurial terms like "value proposition," and with good reason. The Hampton Holo-Dek is just a pilot for something much larger.

In a large work area out back, he shows us their other gaming innovations. The first is a huge curved 180-degree screen lit by three projectors.

"Normally in a PC game what you get is the one straight-on view. What we've actually done is expanded that to 180 degrees, so you're seeing much more than you would normally see... so if you're playing, for example, Unreal Tournament, you're now seeing that person before he walks into your normal view, so it actually gives you an unfair advantage," note Fortier.

Next to that towers the sphere-a 20-foot-diameter globe screen with a robot at its center. When finished, the interior will be wholly lit with the game of your choice, 360 immersive degrees of tropical island or race track or deep space, and the robotic seat at the center will simulate acceleration, or the oscillation of driving over gravel, or the continuous spin-out of a car that has lost traction.

The gaming sphere, and a track system for hanging gaming stations en masse.
photo by Josh Pierce

It's easy to miss the last device in the workshop, but that would be a mistake. It's a track system for hanging those 73-inch screens in bulk. The overhead track could be hung in some big room, dangling rows and rows of projectors and projection screens making up each gaming station.

"We could just come in and take over a warehouse," explains Fortier.

If the prototype gives them the answers they're hoping for, their model installation would have four spheres, 12 of the 180-degree theaters, 300 gaming stations with hanging 73-inch screens, and a full restaurant.

And they imagine hundreds of these, all across the country, with the first one planned for Baltimore, Md., sometime in 2005.

Take a minute to think about that-300 73-inch rectangles floating in rows in a dim warehouse, all lit with the light of games. They are all linked together, and then linked to others around the country, and all around the gaming world.

It's a huge idea, and it feels like the future.

4. fun

There are many reasons to love video games.

They take us to exotic locales, like movies in which we are able to participate.

"A lot of the time, it's just about seeing the world (of the game)," says Kris Doane, owner of The Tower in Exeter, a more traditional video gaming center with 11 networked computers. "A good game, even a first-person-shooter, has a storyline and content in it that makes it like a movie, and it's a movie that you get to be an active part of."

Video games allow us a range of motion and experience that frees us from our physical bodies-our agility and speed is limited only by the quickness of our minds and the coordination of our hands on the buttons. We can run without getting tired, we can die without feeling pain, and we can fly using the same buttons we use to walk. Time can be compressed, or stretched out, or stopped.

"In a first-person shooter, you don't have to get the paintball guns and run around in the woods for five hours to get the same exhilaration you get after 10 minutes logged on to a game," notes Doane.

Holo-Dek's prototype 180-degree game theater.
photo by Dave Karlotski

And in any good video game, effort yields results. "A game that doesn't reward a player for playing the game doesn't exist," says Doane. "You might be getting nowhere at work, but if you go home and play that game for two hours, at the end of it you've got that new sword, or the high score on the server, or something."

"Even in a room full of connected computers, every player is generally self-involved," notes Hector Diaz , owner of the Jumpgate science fiction stores and an avid non-electronic board- and role playing-game player. Hector worries about some of the shortcomings of video game culture.

"I prefer games where I can see the expressions on the faces of my friends as something happens that causes them to spit up their drinks, fall down laughing or hit me with a painful pun. I think most parents have experienced their kids becoming monosyllabic drones attached to a Playstation or a Gameboy. A non-electronic game forces interaction between living and breathing people, and the best games offer something for all the senses."

But video games are becoming more and more social. One of Doane's favorite memories from gaming is a complicated story about the bleedback from virtual reality into straight reality, and then back again, during his time playing the massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) Anarchy Online.

"Some of the players in the game started using SHOUTcast to run (an Internet) radio station, and they'd run it in character. So what they'd do is they'd go to one of the bars in the game and announce to the people in the game, 'Hey, we're about to have a radio party, so turn down the volume in the game and turn up WinAmp or Windows Media Player, and put in this address.'

"So the guys who were DJing would be in the game, in character and playing music at the same time. So people would make requests in the game, and they'd get played on the radio.

"In reality, I'd never become a DJ, but in that game I had a weekly talk show."

Why does that sound like so much fun? Why does taking an imaginary world and warping it further seem like such a good time?

5. it's a D&D world

"Virtual reality" is a term that lost its sexy sheen a while ago-possibly after the abysmal 1992 movie The Lawnmower Man soiled it with stink- but the idea hasn't gone anywhere.

It's simply been subsumed into the larger concept of video gaming, nearly all of which are virtual simulations of one kind or another-either of actual terrain, or of the mechanics of armies, cities and societies.

And if all of these games can claim one common ancestor, it would have to be Dungeons and Dragons, a game designed to model reality with just pencil, paper and dice.

So many conventions in modern videogaming descend straight from D&D: numerical methods for measuring life, character strength, for determining the outcome of battles or the accuracy of weapons, for assessing damage and modeling commerce in a fantasy setting. Almost every game, from Doom to Pokemon to Everquest, uses some variation of these devices.

It was in 1972 that the role playing game industry was born out of a 50-page manuscript of rules from Gary Gygax's portable Royal typewriter, explains Diaz.

"D&D was originally developed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson as a variation of historical miniatures simulations. Instead of using stats for military units, they started applying stats to specific miniatures. This allowed for simulated confrontations between individual 'soldiers' rather than units.

"For a fun change of pace, Gary and Dave created a fantasy scenario for their individual combat simulation rules, thus introducing mythical creatures and the game stats for them. That was the basis for the original Dungeons and Dragons."

Chris Dellario is a Nottingham resident who does game programming for Whatif Productions. He traces the origin of those military miniatures simulations to the training of Prussian military officers in the late 19th century.

"It was called 'Kriegspiel' or 'war play,' and it involved simulating troop and artillery movements on the battlefield," Dellario says. "In 1913, H.G. Wells popularized this professional activity for civilian hobbyists by publishing "Little Wars," a rule book for playing a simplified version of Kriegspiel in the home. Wells's work gave birth to the hobby of wargaming, and that in turn led Gygax and Arneson to create Dungeons and Dragons."

We think we can take it back even further. Much of what our minds do is mimicry and simulation-we each carry, in our mind, a model of our world.

So as near as we can tell, a couple of hundred thousand years ago we started telling stories, and etching lines on rocks. Drawings and carvings mimicked our visual experiences-simulated what we had seen-and eventually evolved to portray depth. Movies created the illusion of motion, while books captured and preserved intricate internal mental states and modeled reality using the languages that we had developed to understand it.

D&D applied numerical modeling to these fledgling worlds, and computers standardized them and propogated them across the Internet.

We're tunneling out of reality by building a new one, and it's a project we've been working on for a very long time.

6. mimsy were the borogoves

In the 1943 short story, "Mimsy were the Borogoves," author Lewis Padgett wrote about a group of young children who received a set of strange toys from the far future. The toys were inscrutable to adults, since they did not obey normal rules. The toys behaved in nonsense ways, like an "Alice in Wonderland" poem, following neither the conventions of cause and effect, nor the rules of known geometry, so the adults dismissed them.

But the children enjoyed the toys nonetheless. And as they played with the toys, the children began to behave strangely. Eventually, through play, they came to understand the rules that governed the toys-the deeper rules of the universe, that only the toys' creators understood-and in so doing, moved far beyond their parents' teaching, into the future.

With each passing day, we better understand the rules that govern the physical world. But what are the rules that have governed our imaginations for the past few 100,000 years? What if we are only just now building the tools that may allow us to plumb that mystery?

We stand on the shore of a new world, and its lands are made of light.