Video games in general have been a consistent presence in my life for as far back as I can remember. My father brought home an Atari 2600 in around 1980, and some of my earliest recollections involve padding into the TV room in footie pajamas and watching the Space Invaders screen for as long as I could get away with it. That early exposure meant that I couldn't see the notion of moving an avatar around on a screen using a joystick as anything but commonplace, though now I realize just what a big deal in-home systems like the Atari must have seemed to people who grew up thinking of "computers" as giant tube-filled rooms!
The first personal computer to inhabit the family home (an IBM PCjr) arrived when I was in kindergarten. The PCjr was very limited (in fact, it was purposely designed by IBM not to be upgradeable -- a decision that eventually doomed the PCjr to obscurity) but it came with several basic games and tools. I spent many an hour just banging out random text on the built-in simple word processor, and was utterly fascinated by Keyboard Adventure Puzzle.
As I've grown up, in particular I've tended to enjoy the sort of game that embeds the player's avatar in an immersive virtual environment. I've always had a strong "exploring" instinct, and was always trying to run off in the woods or crawl around in the attics and basements of houses I found myself in -- and certain types of games provide a similar sort of thrill.
From text adventures like Beyond Zork, to simple graphical adventures like King's Quest III, to the Mario and Zelda staples on the original Nintendo Entertainment System, to various modern games like Neverwinter Nights, I've experienced and enjoyed a tremendous range of exploratory-type games.
But -- I have to confess I find myself a bit flabbergasted when I come across people who apparently want to spend all their time in a virtual world, or who see that sort of thing as a good outcome for humanity. Furthermore that sort of attitude seems to go along with a sense that, well humans don't see everything there is to see anyway, so a workable simulated world would not even need to be "perfect".
When I play a video game that involves spelunking through virtual caves, traversing virtual valleys, and clambering up virtual mountains, I invariably have fun doing this. I can very easily "project" my sense of self into the game while I'm playing, and have found a lot of really impressive depth in some games.
However, the manner in which I appreciate this sort of thing is very much with the awareness that I am exploring someone's art.
Art is a fine thing, and a wonderful thing -- but it's not the same thing as actual reality. Art can say useful and beautiful things about reality -- but it can't substitute for it, any more than one person's perspective can substitute for the sum-total of all perspectives in the universe. As much as I like looking at art and having fun exploring people's creations, I would think it awful to be cut off from any direct experience of the things the art was meant to represent.
I don't see the ultimate fate of humanity as being some sort of digitized cyber-angel existence in which we all zip merrily around chips in the form of "information patterns" -- frankly I don't like to presume anything about the "ultimate fate of humanity", as there's nowhere near enough information to reasonably do so.
But in any case, I do know that I wouldn't want that kind of existence, not if I had the choice of continuing to have access to direct experience of undesigned wild reality that nobody took and filtered for me first.
A big part of what I find wonderful about existence has to do with being able to look at things in my own way, without anyone telling me what I am supposed to be seeing, or what is "important" about the environment I inhabit.
That is one huge thing I see missing in exhortations of the delights of VR -- the acknowledgment that no matter how well-rendered, it is still going to be a case of someone else designing everything you experience (I mean, I suppose you could come up with your own VR based on your own perceptual quirks, but that would still be a self-limiting experience if you stopped getting any information from the outside world beyond a certain point).
When such a situation is entered into voluntarily, as when I might enter an art exhibition or a well-made video game, I can take tremendous joy in exploring what someone else's creativity has produced. I can marvel at the technical aptitude of the artists, programmers, and others who worked to craft the things I'm exploring. But then I still want very much to be able to leave, close the door behind me, go outside, and look up at the actual, honest-to-goodness stars.
(Also see: Rudy Rucker's commentary along these lines.)
10 comments:
The old science fiction writers and futurists presented some dubious ideas about life in the 21st Century; but at least they assumed that we'd get off our butts and accomplish some new and difficult things in the physical world, like colonizing the moon, building underwater cities, building capable androids, etc. I don't think most of them anticipated that technologically sophisticated people would relinquish those sorts of projects and pretend instead that they have "second lives" online, like in the way parodied in that famous South Park episode about World of Warcraft.
I just don't understand the appeal of that. These days I even try to avoid the lower-bandwith distractions. I've never watched a single episode of the current transhumanist fad Battlestar Galactica, for example, and I haven't seen a movie in a theater since 2000, science fiction or superhero-themed or otherwise.
I do admit to catching an episode of the original Star Trek from time to time. But they seem so ridiculous these days. I laughed out loud when I watched "The Gamesters of Triskelion," where William Shatner makes out with an actress in a green wig who later reportedly showed up in porn films.
> Video games in general have been a
> consistent presence in my life for
> as far back as I can remember. . .
Here we have a profound generational divide. I could **almost** claim perfect purity here -- could **almost** say, with complete accuracy that, as with cell phones, I've **never** played a video game. But that wouldn't be **quite** true, because some friends I've known for the past eight years have little (on the verge of high school, now, so not so little) boys
and I was, once or twice, roped into playing some kind of multiuser thing (Nintendo, I think) with them.
The first computer I ever saw in the flesh -- it was on some kind of field trip to the University of Delaware organized by the math club when I was in 8th grade (in '65 or '66) -- was an original Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-8:
http://library.thinkquest.org/18268/
Good%20gifs/1965-PDP8.gif
The first machine I ever got to interact with on my own was an ASR-33 Teletype terminal connected to an acoustic coupler in a room with several such terminals at my high school in Delaware in the spring of 1969.
http://www.jodypaul.com/gr/ASR33.jpg
Those terminals, and access to the machine they talked to, were there on account of a one-shot Federal grant, and the teletypes were (if I'm not mistaken) connected to a Philco/Ford Aerospace timesharing system near Philadelphia running (based on reminiscences I've since found on the Web) a Burroughs B5500 TSMCP system. At any rate, the language processor called itself "Conversational Fortran IV". That system was luxuriously responsive, and when as a result of my being allowed to play around on it I ended up taking a one-semester computer course that fall, I fell for a double bait-and-switch: 1) BASIC had been substituted for Fortran and 2) the powerful Burroughs mainframe had been downgraded to a grossly underpowered IBM 1130 minicomputer at the University of Delaware serving **several** high schools. It wasn't pretty.
I had no further contact with computers for nearly a decade after that, until I got to New York and NYU (where students, in 1979, were still expected to put programs on punch cards, stand in line to submit them to an IBM RJE (Remote Job Entry) terminal connected to a 370 mainframe somewhere uptown, and retrieve a printout several hours later. I had seen Pong at the University of Delaware in 1971 (but never actually spent any quarters on it)
http://www.pk3.de/widgets/pong11/
pong_arcade_front.png
and ditto for PacMan embedded in cafe tables in New York in 1978 (what a stick-in-the-mud I am! ;-> )
http://www.staramusement.com/
images/mspacwd1.gif
Didn't have a PC of my own until nearly a decade after I became a programmer (a Mac Classic, in 1990); didn't have a Windows PC until the fall of 1997 (a 300 MHz Pentium II, which I still use). I now have 6 PCs (ranging from the old PII to two dual-core boxes, with an Athlon and and AMD64 in between). (The Mac Classic is still sitting on a closet shelf; a snapshot of that system as of 1997 is, for old times' sake, available on the PC as a virtual disk for the Mini vMac emulator -- used in conjunction with the Mac Plus, not the Mac Classic, ROM image, though.) I don't play video games on any of them, though. ;->
Mark Plus -- what happened to your blog?
> I laughed out loud when I watched
> "The Gamesters of Triskelion," where
> William Shatner makes out with an
> actress in a green wig who later
> reportedly showed up in porn films.
Angelique Pettyjohn. God help me, I pulled that name right off the top of my head -- no help from Google! :-0
Mark Plus said: The old science fiction writers and futurists presented some dubious ideas about life in the 21st Century; but at least they assumed that we'd get off our butts and accomplish some new and difficult things in the physical world, like colonizing the moon, building underwater cities, building capable androids, etc.
Heck yes! I grew up on that sort of thing and used to fantasize a lot about someday living in a space colony (where, of course, we could all fly due to the low gravity, and we wore jumpsuits fitted with various miniature gadgets, and the doors all looked like camera apertures). Actually one of the first things that piqued my interest in longevity was thinking about space travel, especially when I'd learned enough actual science to figure warp drive was probably not on the agenda...
I don't think most of them anticipated that technologically sophisticated people would relinquish those sorts of projects and pretend instead that they have "second lives" online, like in the way parodied in that famous South Park episode about World of Warcraft.
I doubt that as well. I like going online and have enjoyed some online games (lots of fun exploring!) but I don't consider that sort of activity "another life", second or otherwise. Rather, I see online activities as a part of life. After all, it's not like the computers and such needed to program and run the games and virtual worlds *themselves* are "virtual" -- everything eventually comes back to some physical object, as you can't run code on nothingness.
The thing I *do* see as "real" in terms of games and virtual worlds is the way they represent a channel for communication, at least when people's computers are somehow networked. As much as I would not permanently want to "live in a virtual world", I don't believe for a minute that people can't form real friendships online, or that the interactions people have in Internet or even game settings are categorically "impoverished". They're just another type of interaction, through a particular sort of channel.
It becomes unhealthy, I think, only when people start thinking in terms of the virtual world being "better" than the real world, as if somehow the virtual world is even capable of existing WITHOUT the real world. That way lies...well, a lot of pseudoscience and probably open doors to crackpothood.
JimF: You know, sometimes I'm slightly envious of folks who got their intro to computers on gigantic, slow systems and punchcards. It just seems like going through that, you get a really strong concrete sense of how the newer, smaller, slicker-looking machines work. (that is, not on pixie dust!). That is some seriously cool history-of-computers stuff.
That's a problem with uploading that I never thought about-- my issue is that I do T'ai Chi and such and I find that a lot about being embodied is really interesting and I have no faith that the VR designers will get it right.
On the other hand, I think you could have a VR environment that evolved from rules and wasn't so specifically someone's invention. I don't know if that's enough difference to matter to you.
I hope you don't view this as hijacking your blog, Anne, but I'd like to get this out.
Michael Anissimov on another forum chided me about my "cultural conservatism" regarding "virtual worlds," compared with my preference for space colonization and other futuristic projects in the physical world.
Well, let me answer this charge in a roundabout way. About a decade ago the A&E cable network ran a series called "The Unexplained." One of the episodes dealt with "human transformations," and profiled two individuals. One of them, a plain-looking Ohio farm girl named Cindy Jackson, found the sort of life her social background threatened to lock her into as an adult thoroughly unappealing, so vowed when she grew up to try to look like her Barbie doll, and to try to live in the way she imaged a real-life Barbie would live. When she came of age, she therefore moved to London (and why wouldn't Barbie live in London?) to study art and perform as a rock musician; then when she inherited some money, she started to undergo a series of cosmetic procedures to approximate the way she thought Barbie would look. Her improved appearance and self-confidence also enabled her to move in more elite London circles (like a courtesan, I gathered), and eventually she founded a successful cosmetic surgery consulting company. (I don't know how her finances look now, given the UK's participation in the worldwide economic collapse.)
That took up the first half of the episode. The second half profiled, as Wikipedia puts it, "a Chicago man whose fascination with the Star Trek universe prompted him to transform his own life by leaving his marriage and family and taking a 'higher calling,' to become the leader of the International Federation of Trekkers."
Uh, right.
After watching that episode a decade ago, I realized that both of these individuals had some emotional problems they probably could have dealt with in better ways. But I came away from it respecting Cindy Jackson a whole hell of a lot more than the Trekker. The Trekker guy chose Gene Roddenberry's franchised "virtual world" as a distraction from an otherwise unfulfilling life, which doesn't solve anything because all this Star Trek nonsense doesn't exist.
By contrast Cindy, who wanted to look and live like her childhood Barbie doll, ironically chose a difficult but feasible path in the real world: London exists, cosmetic surgery exists, glamorous social networks exist, etc. She could have taken the easy route of dwelling in the "virtual worlds" of romance novels, soap operas and chick flicks, like a lot of frumpy women who feel excluded from ever looking attractive and having relationships with high status men. Instead she worked to instantiate her dreams in her real life.
I can relate better to people who want to do the Cindy Jackson thing than I do to people who call computer games "the wave of the future." To me she looks like a role model for a "real" transhumanist.
Nancy Lebovitz said:
On the other hand, I think you could have a VR environment that evolved from rules and wasn't so specifically someone's invention. I don't know if that's enough difference to matter to you.
I have thought about this and, if I had a choice between spending 50 years in a VR environment designed by humans (as in, designed in a static way where everything was pre-specified) or in a VR environment that perhaps started from some kind of seed or complex rule-set and was then allowed to "evolve" on its own, I would definitely choose the latter.
But I still don't see that as being "equivalent" to actual reality from a qualitative standpoint -- after all, it still exists WITHIN actual reality, and as far as I can tell, it isn't possible for a system to simulate something more complex than itself within itself. And there isn't really anything I would "trust" other than actual reality to not edit out things I might consider important or worthwhile.
Again I don't have a problem with "visiting" (and appreciating, and exploring) virtual environments, and I think they can be great opportunities to have fun and stretch the imagination and communicate in novel ways, but I just really bristle at the "oh, humans have such low-resolution perception anyway, it doesn't matter if we don't include X, Y, and Z in this virtual world, we can just forget about that stuff".
Of course I don't have any concern that this kind of decision is going to be a clear and present dillemma for me or anyone else in the foreseeable future. However, it's very interesting to think about both from the perspective of someone who really wants to write some science fiction at some point and who is also apprehensive about certain trends in the overall culture I live in toward "pre-packaging" experiences.
IMO, discussions about virtual reality and the implications of being "embedded" in it somehow are actually quite relevant to, say, questions of what it means for people to be saturated by advertising, increasingly homogeneous surroundings, etc. (it's sort of bewildering how similar, say, the inside of a mall looks regardless of whether you're on the East Coast or West Coast of the USA).
Mark Plus: No worries about "hijacking", your comment was relevant enough for me.
I've heard of Cindy Jackson and I respect her choices -- I definitely think people should be able to configure their bodies however they like, and that it's really not anyone else's business to tell them what they "should" look like, etc.
However, I also respect people who get the majority of their fun from games and virtual worlds and pondering fantasy fiction. Star Trek Guy leaving his marriage to pursue a "higher calling" related to his favorite fandom does strike me as a bit extreme, but no moreso than some people ending up leaving their spouses as a result of, say, playing too much golf.
In both cases, the thing I do worry about is the imposition of either certain configurations or certain ideas about what kinds of lives are "good enough" on others (or on whole populations, if such a thing were feasible).
This is why, despite probably erring on the "technophile" side of things a fair bit of the time, and despite being an inveterate gadget geek, etc., I don't believe for a minute that what people call "progress" can possibly come about solely through the creation of more and better gadgets and techniques.
E.g., I don't have any problem with people getting plastic surgery if they want it. Why should I? It's their body, not mine, and I endeavor to extend to others the same respect for bodily autonomy that I would like to be extended (whether that means the freedom to modify something or the freedom not to modify something).
But I do have a problem with some of the social pressures young women and girls are subjected to (not just by men, mind you, but by each other, and by faddishness and cliques and marketing agendas) to look certain ways. Surgery is not without risk -- it's not like you can just pop off breasts like they were made of Lego and replace them with a differently sized/shaped set.
I think this needs to be addressed from a social standpoint for sure, but I would never suggest "hey let's ban plastic surgery".
And just so things *stay* vaguely on topic here -- back to the point you mentioned about "cultural conservatism".
IMO, not wanting to live in a virtual world indefinitely -- and I am definitely not someone who would choose that unless the alternative was "be killed now" -- is not at all about "conservatism", at least not for me and I suspect not for you, either. In my case it's very much about not wanting to have every aspect of my experience limited to what someone else thinks I "should" be seeing.
It's also about knowing that, no matter how elaborate or beautiful a virtual world might be, there's still all kinds of stuff going on *outside* when you're *inside*. I would not want to be cut off from the outside, much less under the auspices of someone insisting to me, "Oh, it will be just as good or better than the real world, trust me, you'll never know the difference!"
IMO that's no better than someone telling me that I'm being "culturally conservative" for not wanting to live at Disneyland and only ever shop at Wal-Mart. It's not about being "against technology", it's about not wanting to be told what is important in reality, and hence being able to continue exploring and discovering that sort of thing for myself.
“Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.”
-Albert Einstein
VR, or video games in general, are a lot like books. Sure different people experience them in different ways, but along a set of story lines dreamt up by someone else. That's not necessarily undesirable, but it can be restrictive.
The more independent one becomes in their thinking, the less likely it is that they will be comforted by social norms. However, they are the only ones who ever changed anything. Look at people like Galileo, etc.. It comes down to what you're looking for. It's probably healthiest to find a happy medium.
“The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.”
-Aldous Huxley
Actually, your biological senses are extremely "virtual" - take a look at the thousands of optical illusions there are that point out how much of the universe is automatically filtered out for you at a "bio-hardware" level. Your eyes are equivalent to a 300-500 megapixel camera at an iso of around 800:
http://www.clarkvision.com/imagedetail/eye-resolution.html
As long as my senses are "human equivalent" or beyond, and the filtering algorithms are similar, I think I could be quite happy with "virtual reality" senses.
My first computer was an IBM 360 programmed with punch cards. It was amazing to me, but I would have much preferred to have the simplest microprocessor that I could have had in my home, than to only have access to the mainframe for a few hours or so once a week.
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