Swish and flick.

It's been a while since I've touched a video game controller. While I'm proud to say that growing up female never hindered me from holding my own in Super Smash Bros. tournaments with rooms full of boys -- always boys -- more invested in the outcome than I was, these days most of my interactions with video games involve waiting for The Boy to finish playing Skyrim and talk to me. (He always eventually does, so no worries there.) I respect video game culture, I appreciate the incredible skill and artistry that goes into game design, I have friends who play video games, etc. but it's just not my scene right now. That said, it takes something really impressive to make me sit up in my warm bed on a cold winter morning to watch half an hour's worth of video trailers: something like Sony's new Wonderbook: Book of Spells, inspired by Harry Potter and based on Miranda Goshawk's Book of Spells, the predecessor to the Standard Book of Spells, Grade 1 that's listed as required reading for any first-year Hogwarts student.

From a screencap of the Wonderbook game.

If that previous sentence seems to have taken a sharp left from the territory of real-world technology into fictional spellcasting -- well, that may have been the game designers' point. The Wonderbook technology is, according to the Sony + London Studios team, the first instance of "augmented reality" in game design, in which a physical book and handheld motion controller directly correspond to their virtual equivalents -- a richly illustrated magical textbook and, naturally, a wand -- to create an experience that's a little bit reality and more than a little bit fantasy.

London Studio Director Dave Lanyard refers to the experience of turning physical Wonderbook pages and having the action reflected by your character on screen as like looking in a "magic mirror," where the mirror is your TV screen, which sounds about the most apt metaphor for video game play in general. As a person who still maintains that the dawn of Wii-style motion sensor technology (however uncool the Wii itself mostly turned out to be) was one of the most exciting advancements in video games for as long as I've been a consumer of them, this kind of integration of tangible movement and virtual consequences is about a hair's-breadth away from actual magic to me.

The game illustrations are, predictably, unspeakably gorgeous. They've used the same saturated but sort of antique color palette as Pottermore (which I've written about previously), and there are flying dragons and flaming sparks and water spraying out from your wand after casting Aguamenti and I can't even, watch the video instead:

The developers' diary video of how the creatures were animated is particularly enthralling:

Frog-rabbits! The sound of the dragon's wings flapping is the sound of a fireball! Creatures and their "fantastical natures!" You guys, this is the kind of thing that makes me sad to have grown up at the same that I wonder if I really have at all.

The sad news -- for me, at least -- is that I don't own a PS3, nor do I have any immediate plans to expend my meager student savings on one. As much as I find new technology fascinating and even exciting enough to wake me up in the morning, I'm on more of an ink-and-paper budget. I wasn't paid to write about this new, crazy awesome thing I got an email about, but if I were, I'd probably buy, like, a new sweater with the money. If anyone were ever going to convince me otherwise, though, it would probably only take thismuch more magic to do the trick.

Wait, what, the game includes new original content by J. K. Rowling unavailable anywhere else?! Shit. I need a PS3.

P.S. Despite growing up in a household with a younger brother who always got the video games he wanted for Christmas and thereby provided me with access to a number of consoles for the borrowing, the only game I've ever bought for myself was Harry Potter Quidditch World Cup for GameCube. No one is surprised. (I was the best at it.)