Texture
It was after my second shot that I leaned back to look up into the rafters of the barcade where I was commiserating with my boss. It was a converted metal shop. The noisy industrial machinery that accepted raw materials through the rolling garage doors, was replaced with noisy leisure machinery offering clacky tactile control schemes for quarters. Distracted by my phone, I begin responding to a text message. The haptic buzz fires with every letter I type, and I can't help but be jealous of the mechanical switches of the nearby arcade machines. As our technology becomes more functional, more of its function becomes abstracted into the software. Instead of feeling the resistance of a key give way as a corresponding arm accelerates a striker toward an inky ribbon, I get a cheap, tinny, artificial whirr. Gone are the days when the very operation of a thing gives any indication of how it works. Instead, we have an arcane slab of black glass, with only the most superficial imitations o