I never really thought of the games I play such as Unreal and Guild Wars (he mentioned Wolfenstein rofl...how old is that?) As virtual reality but according to Heim’s definition I have to agree. You really feel like you’re in the game. Of course it’s not crazy believing like you forget who you are and you feel like you are Duke Nuke’em and feel the need to go gun crazy, but you do have a level of immersion. Unreal is great because it’s a first person shoot em’up, but they’ve gotten so good with creating the environments that you feel like you’re part of the action. A group of friends and I often have weekends where we’ll get together and network our computers together and play (we call it geeking out). Other times, we meet my roomate’s 75-year old father online and play against him. You kinda of forget everything around you and its like you’re physically meeting in the virtual space. (I wonder if they’ll ever get around to having those fiber optic gloves for stuff like that...of course that would hurt especially with Doom’s BFG ;)
Back in the 90's when Virtual Reality was fresh and new all the arcades were getting these clunky VR machines. They were like little stages that you would stand on, and there was a helmet and a gun and you would get immersed in the VR world. I never actual played it, but now I wish I had. It was like $5 or something rediculous like that. I was too cool for that, I would play the game across the way which was a mach spaceship and you’d fly around and the whole vehicle would move (which is also a form of VR). But it isn’t everywhere as Heim predicted it would be.
By now you would think every school would have a VR machine that would allow the students a trip to the moon, or everyone would be able to experience a shuttle launch, but most of the VR is still in scientist and video game land. Is it because computers just aren’t capable of it yet? Are we getting there? Interesting concept. Imagine the legal wars with video game companies when kids are acting out Grand Theft Auto instead of playing it on their screen, or when the real immersion technology kicks in. Perhaps that’s why they haven’t gotten too far ahead with it. Who knows...still it was a fun (but long) essay.
Look...it’s virtual Demonic sue...
posted by Soo @ 5:26 PM
2 Comments:
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Virtual Demonic Sue is awesome.
So you seem to be describing a kind of immersion which places you in connection to other real people (exactly the kind of cyberspace you were talking about from the wiki page-- what a coincidence). And of course the point made by the wiki folks was that that particular kind of reality splits your consciousness, (your real world experiences are all translated through the metaphor of the interface into quite different actions online). That was the phenomenology stuff. What that entry doesn't mention is that phenomenology is no longer considered a valid system. Its essentialist, universal approach has largely been abandoned by postmodern philosophy -- though some of its methods remain useful (at least that is my non-specialist take on the situation).
I guess what I would argue, is that ALL of our experience is translated through a sensory interface -- we experience a jostling of air molecules against our ear drums but we "hear" it as meanings that are sometimes so deeply associated with the sounds that produce them we don't really even hear the "words" -- just the meaning. So maybe cyberspace is JUST LIKE material space in that way. The interface is different, but the process is one that humans have been socialized in from the beginning of humanness. This might explain why we are so easily drawn-into the internet's "illusions" of being there. Does that sound convincing?
Have I won the award for the longest comments yet?
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