"The biggest revolution in gaming in decades" is a $180 AI-powered fart box that makes your room smell of blood, gunfire, explosions, and – seriously – "clean air"

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:

Storm and forest smells actually sound pleasant, but I'd prefer them as candles, not fart box ammunition. I also respect the effort to