Towards a Theory of Place in Digital Worlds 16
Following last month's State of Play Conference, Gamespot has a good discussion of some issues brought up at the conference, as well as some analysis by Cory Ondrejka of Linden Labs. From the Article: "There is no spoon ... is a tempting shorthand, made all the more powerful by its association with the Matrix. It is also clearly wrong. There is a spoon, just not one that you can eat with. Digital worlds are very real places." Relatedly, Cory Doctorow has up today a short story on Salon.com (registration required) that takes place inside a MMOG.
Doctorow (Score:1)
Oh, and there is _NO_ spoon.
I dunno... (Score:5, Interesting)
nn
Re:I dunno... (Score:1)
-Diomedes
Re:I dunno... (Score:1)
Re:I dunno... (Score:3, Funny)
Applying some slashdot logic here:
So if I'm playing Halo2 and ignoring my girlfiend, and she goes away, does that mean she's not real?
Oh wait, I'm posting on slashdot. I think I answered my own question.
Cool! (Score:1)
Screw that! I'm waiting for Cory and Cory to do a remake of The Lost Boys [imdb.com]!
"Dude, you're like totally a vampire!" Ahhh, the '80's...
attractive nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
*Every* imagined place is real, in a sense -- someone thought of and defined them, crystalized their ideas in a way that both the creator and an observer can apprehend. Further, the observer might be so taken with an artificial world that he wants to extend its boundaries with the same sort of concretization: that's one reason D&D is popular. Waterworld is real, to this extent. (And I don't mean the world's largest artificial island, created for the filming; I mean the fictional Waterworld of the movie.) However, they are not therefore real in some *other* sense.
Parallel: Huckleberry Finn is real -- a real character invented by S.L. Clemens writing as Mark Twain. Now, American students have come up with a huge body of text celebrating and analyzing -- and rarely casting a bad light on -- the character of H. Finn(thanks a lot, English teachers of the world, lazy nogoodniks!), but that does not make the (real) character into something else. Are there drawings of Huck, "further adventures" penned by writers since Twain, made for TV movies? Sure -- because the human imagination doesn't like to respect all the boundaries of reality, and there's nothing that says the *imagination* has to respect them; that's the great thing about it.
(Aside: What does it mean for something to be "very real," anyhow? I don't demand a terribly rigorous reality in general -- I really enjoy dreaming, for instance -- but words "very" and "real" just don't seem to go together.)
The linked text has quite a few words, arranged in readable sentences, but I can't find much meaning in them. The semantic difference between there not being a spoon and there being an spoon that exists only in a shared fiction (and which can't hold, say, actual cottage cheese) is not one that excites me. It sounds like the interesting-but-pointless distinction you can distract certain people into deep pondering with, about whether our brain-jars are stored in a backroom at Wal-Mart, or are in individual little brain-jar huts on a pleasant island in the tropics.
I would write more, but just at the moment I hear a knocking, knocking, knocking on my chamber door, and it's either the pizza guy or my arch-nemesis Professor Moriarty.
timothy
Re:attractive nonsense (Score:3, Insightful)
So yeah, if something's abstract then it's still real, because, like all real things, it exists. The fact that it's not made of atoms really doesn't change this.
What about News sites deticated to online worlds? (Score:3, Interesting)
Note that this would be different from someone who plays the game and then does a write-up of their experiences (1st person). A site like this would have other people, reporters (3rd person), that observe the events and then write about them. This type of alternate-universe news coverage may be a little ways off, but I'm sure we'll see it someday.
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You mean like this? (Score:4, Interesting)
Sure, it's a game feature run by the creators, but the intent is there... right now, its being used as a means to move the plot along, to keep players informed of what new enemy groups are forming and what may be coming down the pipe in expansions, all done from the perspective of being inside the game.
sigh (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is it that when someone uses the word clearly in this context, it often means just the opposite?
As much as some want to deny it, that which is virtual is not real, by very definition. It is a symbol.
The symbol is NOT the actuality. The map is NOT the city.
I am not claiming that symbols must lack value. However, value in regards to symbolic objects is almost completely arbitrary.
Confusion arises when money is involved, as money itself is symbolic by its very nature.
m-
Re:sigh (Score:3, Insightful)
Why is it that when someone uses the word clearly in this context, it often means just the opposite?
Because the person knows they're making a highly questionable, opinionated statement. Specifying how "clear" it is to him will hopefully make you distrust and disregard your own opinion in favor of theirs. He tries to convey to the listener that his confidence is greater than the listener's on this subject, and thus he must be right. It's a classic, however juvenile, debate
Re:sigh (Score:2)
So the life we experience is virtual when compared to the really real reality we'
The command-line as a "virtual place"... (Score:5, Funny)
I compiled up and played with a "MUSH" server once - I thought having a multi-player text adventure engine that you could program on-the-fly was nifty...
It was interesting to notice that I frequently found myself typing "ls" instead of "look" when I wanted to see the contents of a "room" that I was in. I hadn't previously realized the similarities between the CLI and a text adventure...
Where do I submit a patch to change all of the instances of "(filename): file not found" to "I see no (filename) here [catb.org]" in the standard command-line tools?