The IGN site is where Nathan Weishaar and Ethan Lowry have ruled, at least until this morning, when the PSP hit store shelves. Both 19, part-time workers at EB Games and roommates at MidAmerica Nazarene University in Kansas, they got their PSPs Feb. 4, for $300 each on eBay. "We heard about it a lot. . . . We couldn't wait," Weishaar says by phone.
Last night he was sitting in front of his laptop, answering instant messages from friends and posting messages on IGN about his PSP.
Nathan Weishaar, a college student in Olathe, Kan., and the Sony PSP that he got last month on eBay, well in advance of its official launch today.
(Craig Sands For The Washington Post)
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Video: The Washington Post's Jose Antonio Vargas reviews the new PlayStation Portable handheld video game device.
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A Real-Life Pause Button: Electronics stores across the nation opened at midnight so jonesing hordes of gamers could score Sony Corp.'s latest mind parasite, prompting the question: Are we being played?
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Lowry was nearby playing Need for Speed Underground Rivals with his PSP. Their room, Weishaar says, has two Xboxes, one PlayStation 2 and one GameCube.
"Every time we pull it out, people just stare," Weishaar says. "We just had a tornado drill like two hours ago, and we took the PSPs with us. We started playing and soon 15 or so dudes were just watching us."
Bart Simon, a professor at Concordia University in Montreal, last year founded GameCODE, a research project focusing on the cultural analysis of video games. Of the PSP, which is also being launched in Canada today, he says: "What portable gaming does is take video games to the public in the same way that the cell phone took communication out of the homes and into the street, and you can bet that with something like PSP, you'll see more and more people -- and not just young people -- playing games out in the open. It's not a good thing. It's not a bad thing. It's a whole new social thing."
Vicky J. Rideout, vice president of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, isn't sure what it all means. The foundation released a survey this month, noting that U.S. children ages 8 to 18 get 8 1/2 hours of media exposure a day.
"It's not just teenagers or twenty-somethings who'll use PSPs, it's 10-year-olds," Rideout says. "I'm not going to tell you that this new piece of technology is necessarily a bad thing, but I do think it's a legitimate question as to whether constant stimulation, especially for young kids, is a good thing. I think we need to pay attention to whether it's stimulating or stifling creativity and their ability to focus."
Gillis isn't worried about that right now. Chances are, depending on the time of the day, he's either standing in line or playing Metal Gear Acid on his new PSP.
