Stand by for mind control!

We've posted several times about how we believe MMO's are generally in a state of cult-following status. There are a core of MMO gamers who really enjoy the medium, but these people are not representative of society as a whole.

We've also posted how we think this is not likely to change very much until either a game designer is able to create a new MMO that has more mass-market appeal, or someone invents a Holo-Deck. Until the medium can become something as easily accessible as a book or a movie, with enough transportive elements that allow a person to experience a fictitious world in a more rewarding way, we think it's doomed to sub-culture status. (That's fancy talk for saying that books and movies let us do stuff that is kind-of real but not really.)

But wait. Though the holo-deck is not here, it is getting a little closer. Remember the early 90's and all the promise about how virtual reality was going to change the world? No? Well it was there, even if it faded as soon as the internets came into everyone's home.

But some virual reality type stuff keeps popping up, even if it isn't so complete as the Matrix. Take this new bit of technology for gamers: the brain controlled headset. Using a bunch of techmology, this headset will allow gamers to control their games using just their vertabrains. Or at least that's what we can tell form the depths of our middle-school science education.

No, it isn't virtul reality, but it's kind of getting there. We think it's largely inevitable that holo-deck type environments will be around sometime in the future. The ability to interact with a fictitious world not only in just a mental capacity (books, movies, games) or a visual capacity (movies, games) or an interactive capacity (games) but in a physical and interactive capacity is probably the way of the future. We can see a time when stories will be loaded into completely immersive, matrix like environment where people are free to interact and be a part of the story, while still maintaining the safety of fiction.

But until then, we'll keep an eye out for the next Raiders of the Lost Arc, Legend of Zelda, or The Sun Also Rises.

There is no spoon.

We came across this movie traler recently. It was posted on YouTube only a few days ago, but it already has 40,000+ hits. It's a documentary about MMO gamers, and how their games have changed their lives.

The trailer and promotional material give the impression that the movie looks at the MMO phenomenon, and apparently makes some disturbing observations. Any gamer since The Legend of Zelda knows how intense and time-consuming a video game can be. The fact that MMO's are now simulating entire worlds, nay, virtual realities, make them that much more immersive. If films, art or literature are escapist in that they allow the consumer to experience a fictitious reality only accessed by using the product, MMO's are combining multiple elements from numerous transportive media into a single, glossy package. Game addiction? We've always thought it was not only possible, but actual. We've known a lot of gamers (and not just MMO gamers) who's lives have been consumed by their favorite pass-time.

MMO's, in the end, may just be the newest, shiniest, noisy things that appeal to our simian nature. Transportive entertainment that allows our brains to inhabit a place that only exists in our brains.

But how is that different than anything else?

Welcome to the desert of The Real.

Whether it's the World of Warcraft, Second Life, Entropia Universe or any other virtual world MMORPG, we're continually fascinated by the implications of these virtual worlds upon our lives. And apparently, we aren't the only ones.

Take a look at this article by Nick Bostrom, a philosophy professor at Oxford. It is worth reading, but if you don't have time, we'll give you the juiciest part of his 'simulation argument', i.e., the conclusion. Professor Bostrom states that if his simulation argument is correct, at least one of the following conclusions is true:

(1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage;
(2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof);
(3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.

Did you catch that? There is a 33.33% chance that you, me, Napoleon Bonaparte, Billy Jo Robideaux and everyone else who has ever existed is nothing more than a simulation in some computer somewhere that is being run by some advanced species. I mean, I liked 'The Matrix' as a film, and I thank Renee Descartes for all he's done, but I've never really wanted to live it.

So why are we bringing this up?

We've always been fascinated about the world of online games. For example, when you are buying a WoW epic sword of kicka**, what exactly are you buying? A code on a computer somewhere? Some pixels? The right to rent those pixels or that code?

Though it's probably the last of these, it still seems strange that monetary transactions for virtual goods takes place. But a thing only has value if people believe it does, right? If people stopped believing tomorrow that money has value, it would just be paper.

So getting back to the simulation argument, if everything is a simulation, then it makes perfect sense that simulated goods ala the WoW sword has value. After all, WoW itself would be a simulation inside a simulations, and the player avatars would just be simulations played by other simulations...

Oh man, we're getting a headache again.