virtual reality
Frontline: Digital Nation
Sick today… in between naps i happened to catch this episode of Frontline that very closely mirrors my hopes and concerns over the effect that the digital age is having on us. Like many of us, i find myself straddling both sides of the issues i choose to be passionate about. While I worry about how the multitasking generation’s minds are being affected for the worse, i have also helped companies push their 21st-century learning agendas… While condemning the internet for completely overhauling my memory and the ways i process information, I celebrate it’s existence every day with my complete admitted addiction to being plugged in. Are we doing ourselves a disservice? or merely evolving?
It covers everything from the education system to video games to virtual operations in the military. If you are in the mood for something ominous, hopeful and thought-provoking this evening, i highly recommend giving this one a shot.
(6 parts… total running time 1h 26m 13s)
Botnet = Skynet?
So this morning i get to work and open my email to find yet another message from my deceased friend… or so the bot would like me to believe. Last summer my friend passed away and his facebook page was left online as a memorial to him. Yet in a sad and strangely foreboding way, his profile was hacked and this bot has been sending spam to everyone on his friend list. This time the bot scanned his profile and used the name of a friend or relative in the text of the message, in an ironic attempt to be more convincing…
Subject: Hi
“Abigail mentioned you might be interested in this BINSSERVICESSITE .INFO”
The first time this happened i was pretty disgusted and i made a big stink about it. This time i happened to be listening to a podcast about bots when it happened, and it struck me in a more profound way…
Today it dawned on me that an artificial intelligence has assimilated my friend like some kind of techno-doppelganger and is using his image/identity to fulfill it’s own agenda. If Skynet (in the terminator-sense) was really coming, why wouldn’t it use the face/identity of our friends/family like the aliens from Contact? Or could this be more like the biblical end-of-times in which the dead appear to rise from the grave as we get ever-closer to the next cosmic singularity-event?
I think if my friend were still here, he would be amused and fascinated at the ramifications… if not greatly annoyed.
That podcast:
Daniel Suarez (aka author Leinad Zeraus)
Daemon: Bot-mediated Reality
http://download.fora.tv/rss/Long_Now_Podcasts/podcast-2008-08-08-suarez.mp3
Friday, August 08, 2008 4:00 PM
Happily Ever After
I never knew anything about the game Eve until I read this article…
http://www.raphkoster.com/2009/02/11/the-eve-upset/
…and for a while I was really confused as to what I was reading. I knew it was a game that was being talked about, but it sounded like a case of real-life espionage. Again, I find it fascinating how our video games mirror our lives…
“Lots of folks lose their livelihoods when an empire falls, and players invested in BoB are likely upset that years of work were lost. But EVE is not a game about the height of the Roman Empire. It’s a game about the sacking of Rome by barbarians, so that they can become the next short-lived top dog. BoB existed to be torn down, and anyone who dreams of permanent glory in a game like that should understand that their destiny is to be taken down by the next upstart, in a dog-eat-dog world.”
“the game, as a game, does want BoB to fall, because from a purely mechanical point of view, what is fun about EVE is the struggle, not the victory condition. The victory condition is boring.”
This is fascinating. I have often mused over how funny it is that people get so impatient with the struggle of life… people can’t seem to wait to get to “happily ever after.” But there is no such thing as happily ever after. That’s why there has never been a movie about being happy, foreverafter… the boredom would be annihilating. The fun comes from watching characters struggle to overcome obstacles… resolve conflicts… learn lessons. So the real “happily ever after” in life can only be found in the joy of watching your story unfold.
There have been several times in my life where i felt like i reached “happily ever after.” My dreams had come true… nothing could be more perfect… time to roll credits. The next day, however, i still had a job to go to. I still had traffic to contend with… office politics to overcome… unexpected drama from friends and family… The human condition is meant to be turbulent.
Maybe this is why there is always unrest in the world. Maybe if the wealth was evenly distributed, humans would lose their personal character-arcs and become depressed. Perhaps a certain level of struggle is necessary to keep this life meaningful.
The End is Near
Ew… wait… Does the world really NEED a game like this? People already give DJs shit about pushing buttons and turning knobs and not really being a musician… Then they give me double-shit for being a laptop DJ… So now i get to play a game where i’m pushing buttons and turning knobs to pretend to be someone who pushes buttons and turns knobs?
I hope when you choose your character in the beginning you can choose between vinyl, cd, and laptop… so i can play a game where i push buttons and turn knobs to control a simulation of a computer that is recreating the nuances of using vinyl to play other people’s music.
Maybe you can hack the game to actually send midi signal and then i can use fake numark mixer to control the little dude on the screen who triggers events in ableton which is playing for real people at a party.
“Scratch will feature original recordings from the catalogs of many top urban artists and will allow players to re-imagine songs on the fly and add their own creativity. This feature sets it apart from other music rhythm games and makes it a dream come true for both casual music fans and serious DJs/producers.”
HAW!!!
The Future of the Internet?
There’s been a lot of these 3-D chat ads lately… especially here on tribe…
When I first got into 3D graphics i went to this conference where Adobe had a booth set up and they were demoing Adobe Atmosphere… kind of a 3-D environment thing for websites… and I thought to myself… “wow this is going to be the future… someday there will be some new 3D code to replace html and xml and flash and all that stuff… and a person’s personal website will be a 3D environment that you can walk through… You can tell people ‘hey come check out this video over at my place… my WEBplace’…” At the time I was thinking there might be big money in learning 3D modelling so that when this new world emerges I could rake in the cash by making custom high-quality avatars for rich nerds….
Now it looks like that might actually be a possible reality here very soon… i rarely click on these ads on tribe, but this one caught my attention… Looks like a combination of myspace and an MMORPG (massive multiplayer online role playing game)
I hope this doesn’t come off like I’m helping them advertise… but the whole concept fascinates me to death… I have many many theories about 2012 and the evolving internet is central to nearly all of them…
Video games were the beginning of virtual reality… especially the the new school ones where you can explore… not just be confined to a storyline.
Are we on our way? If so, is our virutal world going to be a mirror image of the world we have now? Is the world we have now a mirror image of a previous world that we destoryed? And where the fuck is Neo when I need him?
![](http://www.seventhswami.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/twit.png")
WP Cumulus Flash tag cloud by Roy Tanck and Luke Morton requires Flash Player 9 or better.
