Chapters: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5
Early in my brief hunting career in Azeroth I had one of those “World of Tomorrow” moments, which is to say a thing happened that reminded me of something I’d read in a science fiction book. I was loitering around in an inn, doing I recall not what, when some other player characters came blowing through, in apparent rapid pursuit of some gripping mission... and passed right through me.
If these avatars were real people in a real street, Hiro wouldn’t be able to reach the entrance. It’s way too crowded. But the computer system that operates the Street has better things to do than to monitor every one of the millions of people there, trying to prevent them from running into each other. It doesn’t bother trying to solve this incredibly difficult problem. On the Street, avatars just walk right through each other.
Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
It took me a while to figure it out (although not the, uh, year and a quarter since I wrote the last installment in this now truly laughably attenuated series of articles about playing a videogame for a week like two years ago) but I eventually realized that what had really struck me at that moment wasn’t a fairly mundane usability hack that a speculative writer happened to foresee a couple decades prior. What that moment had done was to finally impress on my mind that those were other real people and they were really there. We could see each other. We could interact, form a relationship of some description.
It’s a little philosophy 101 to suggest that human “reality” is at least in part the result of the consensus among all our disparate and sometimes contradictory points of view (floating in their diverse stews of personal internal metaphysics). Philosophical, perhaps, but pragmatic as well: things like money don’t make any sense at all without consensus, but there’s little argument that money is a primary factor in things that are not just shaping human society but quite actively changing massive physical realities on a planetary scale. (And perhaps it is quite understandable that Neal Stephenson went on to write 4 massive books in which the puzzle of money and currency are dominant plot elements, and is said to be currently writing a thriller involving money laundering through the baroque practice of gold farming in the online gaming world).
Perhaps the lesson is that the technological barrier that had to be overcome for virtual reality to really become something akin to what it was in the story books had very little to do with input/output peripherals - image resolution, binocular vision, sensor-studded gloves and the like - and a whole lot to do with the communications technology that allowed geographically separated people to share the same experience in as close to real time as made any difference. A premise that the aficionados of text-based MUDs of not all that yore might have nodded long before most people were aware there was such a thing as being “online.”
(9 Nights in Azeroth, a series of 5 short essays on playing World of Warcraft for a little over a week 2 years ago, WILL be completed before the world ends in 2012. If the world ends before that all bets are off, who could have seen that coming?)
