The tea that tastes like WoW

I recently wrote about how smells can instantly trigger memories, and wondered if the same was also true for tastes. The two senses are after all closely related, large parts of what we perceive as taste comes from the nose.

I enjoy playing games, and while games like Ingress and Pokemon Go makes me go outside every day, it is more comfortable to sit inside and play World of Warcraft on a freezing October day like today. (Don't worry, i DID hack a portal today.) I have played WoW on/off since the beginning of the game, and often keep a cup of hot tea next to the computer while I play. Especially in the Burning Crusade area, I consumed large amounts of Chinese smoked tea.

Until this day, the taste of this tea makes me instantly think of WoW, especially a zone in Outland. The connection is so strong that when Warlords of Draenor came out, playing in the remade zone made me crave the same tea again.

When I sat down to play the game today, my SO made a cup of smoked tea for me and placed it next to my computer. It made the experience perfect. I believe that the familiar tea made me immerse myself even stronger in the game.

"The summer we played Pokemon"

This summer, I came over a blog post on a Norwegian news website. It was written by an adult man (I'm roughly 40 years old, and he was older than me, but I hesitate to use the word "elderly")  and complaining about how popular augmented reality games had become. This post, which I can't remember the URL to, came out when the popular game Pokemon Go had been out for a couple of weeks.

There was one sentence in this post that stuck in my mind. "I don't want to remember this summer as the summer we played Pokemon". I have thought about this, and can't find anything wrong at all with the idea. How is "the summer we played Pokemon" different from "the summer we played frisbee golf"? When I have spent summers with my family on my parents' rural property, there has always been some outdoors game or activity that has been this year's major hit. One year frisbee, one year badminton, one year football...

To put this into perspective, the summer of 2015 was the summer we played Ingress. 2015 was not a good year for us. We needed an excuse to get out and focus on something else than the Big Bad Thing that was going on. Ingress was invaluable.

Ingress has a function that tracks the number of unique location visits. The summer of 2015, we made it our mission to increase that stat as much as possible. We went exploring in towns and cities close to where my SO grew up, visiting parts that even he had never seen before. With our phones in our hands, we learned so much about this area's culture and history. We also went on a fielding op with other people. How many games bring people together, physically, like this? When we need to stand on a real, physical location in order to do our thing in the game, we are bound to sooner or later meet other players. We are still in contact with those people, even now that we live in another country.

Pokemon Go appeals to a younger audience than Ingress, in average. Most Ingress players I have met average around 40 years old. Pokemon, on the other hand, has attracted large groups of teenagers on bikes. Many players have been even younger, even if the game has an age limit of 13. My point is: It makes people go outside. It makes people walk. In fact, in Pokemon Go, walking several km is the only way to hatch eggs.

I travelled in time through a smell

I walked into the shop and got my things. The radio was playing a well known song from the 80s. I know this song very well. A local radio station used to play it several times a day through the early 90s, when I was a teenager and often getting some privacy in my bedroom listening to the radio. It made me smile because of the memories.

I queued up behind an older woman. The smell of her perfume instantly hit my subconscious. It was the same one as my grandmother used in the 90s. The combination of sound and smell was so powerful that I could vividly remember not only the look and layout of my bedroom, but the mood it had at night.

In our brain, the area that is responsible for the sense of smell is directly connected to parts that control emotions and memories. Scientists have proven this connection.  Only the sense of smell has this direct connection, the other senses have to be processed through the consciousness first, if I read these articles right. Since much of what we perceive as taste really comes from the nose, it is easy to think that eating certain foods can also bring back powerful memories.

I was originally in that shop to get a bag of coffee, but I walked out with coffee and a chocolate bar. The same brand as I used to get in the small town I grew up in. The memory faded quickly as my mind focused on playing Ingress, and I can't even recall exactly what that perfume smelled like now.