Technology, as storied author Ursula K. Le Guin noted in a prescient 2005 post, is not limited to high-tech hardware but also encompasses the likes of paper, furniture, medicine, and much more. I would go further and argue that some outwardly high-tech hardware should not be classified as technology, and I will now point any naysayers to the GameScent Automated Gaming Scent Atomizer, a $180 AI-powered box that will fart out smells designed to match whatever game you're currently playing.
This startlingly real, buyable, completely serious product cropped up in the past few months, with GameScent's Twitter hawking "the gaming revolution" since November 2023. The revolutionary fart box is now available on the likes of Amazon (for the low price of $150 thanks to a discount) and Best Buy, with sales banners proclaiming it to be "the biggest revolution in gaming in decades." That would put it above several generations of consoles, countless PC hardware upgrades, modern engines like Unreal 5, and too many other innovations to list – a bold claim for a box of AI farts.
I will say, the name is good. It conveys exactly what you need to know: the GameScent gives off game scents. One early blog post on 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:
- Gunfire (included)
- Explosion (included)
- Forest (included)
- Storm (included)
- Racing cars (included)
- Clean air (included)
- Blood (coming soon)
- Ocean (coming soon)
- Sports arena (coming soon)
- Fresh cut grass (coming soon)
- Big city (an "additional scent")
- Napalm (an "additional scent")
- Human exertion (quite worryingly, an "additional scent")
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't need a 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.
"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.
