The Occasional Solipsist

Came across a crazy article about MMORPGS today. For those who don't know, MMORPG stands for Massively Mutliplayer Online Role Playing Game.

I haven't yet wanted to try one for a few reasons, chief among them time. Maybe I've been waiting for the right game, but that would have definitely been FFXII, so that excuse dosen't hold up.

Truth is they kinda scare the hell out of me.

I have read horror story after horror story about jobs lost, marriages that have fallen apart, and families destroyed over these games. And I know that if I started to get involved in one, I have exactly the right mix of love of RPGs, addictive personality and cynicism towards real people to get totally lost in one of these metaverses.

The article makes some shocking comparisons to these immersive online experiences and the virtual reality world of the Matrix. And claims that either we're destined for that future or we're almost there already.

Here's a taste:

Total immersion, the kind that could really fool you, won't happen tomorrow. But as time goes on it is absolutely inevitable that the graphics will become life quality, that visual displays light years beyond monitors or cumbersome headsets will hit the market. The keyboard and mouse will be long gone, everything done by thought and voice. It is the logical end of everything game developers and console makers are trying to do today and they will not stop until they have it.

And that, my friends, will be a watershed moment in human history. The point where we can trick the senses into thinking a piece of software is real, thinking a real supermodel is in our bed or a dragon is in our front yard or our dead mother has come back to give us advice, that's when everything changes. The metaverse will still be less important in many fundamental ways. Goods won't be produced there, food won't be grown there, babies won't be born there. But in the minds of a whole lot o' people, visits to the physical world will be just brief interruptions to the "real" world as they live it, the world where all of their friends and hobbies and ambitions are.

Full article is here.

Labels: gaming