The End of Actual Reality? 
by Andrew Kerr
August 2005
On March 16, 2005, philosophical robot warriors debated the existence of God, "CSI" investigators sifted through evidence at a violent crime scene, and a bomb believed to have originated from a flying saucer transformed a planet into a ring of rubble.
Welcome to "Living Game Worlds," a mind-blowing (and planet-destroying) symposium held at the ornate Biltmore hotel, wherein the future of video gaming and entertainment in general was explored via provocative presentations and startling demos. The symposium was conducted as part of Georgia Tech's Founders Day festivities.
The next level
The guest of honor, Will Wright, is the Chief Designer and Co-founder of Maxis. He is best known as the force behind the Sims, an online roll-playing game which in August 2005 boasted over 35,000 player/subscribers. In SimCity, Wright gave users the opportunity to build and manage a city. With the Sims, users were granted the power to design and manipulate human characters that interact with other users (also in the guise of characters) over the Internet [there is also a non-interactive stand-alone version of this game]).
Under the Biltmore's Rococo ceiling and the auspices of ancient Greek gods, Mr. Wright "demo'ed" a spectacular new Maxis game called "Spore" that synthesizes the best elements of these and other games with a winningly simple storyline. In short, the user designs a creature, then designs increasingly more complicated iterations of that creature through a series of evolutionary steps. Eventually the creature has the intelligence and capability to explore other parts of its world--and even other worlds. It's magnificent.
Games wherein large numbers of players explore a virtual universe in the guise of fictional creations and interact with other players who are also in the guise of fictional creations are called Massively Multi-Player Online Roll-Playing Games, or MMORPGs. Popular first in Asia, they took off in the United States with the advent of the fantasy game EverQuest, which today boasts hundreds of thousands of subscribers (to play these games one generally "subscribes" on a monthly basis). Today there are several games to choose from, including the Dark Age of Camelot, City of Heroes, World War II Online; and a Matrix game related to the popular film trilogy. Recently, Marvel comics has struck a deal for the creation of a universe populated by its own popular characters.
In the virtual world, as in the real one, you need money in order to conduct financial transactions. In some games, virtual money is earned in the virtual world for virtual services virtually rendered. But some other games allow you to tap into your real-world bank account to make purchases--and receive real money in turn. This has resulted in some interesting collisions between the real and the virtual worlds. Christopher Klaus, a former Georgia Tech student (and dropout) who is now the wealthy founder of Klaus Entertainment, reported that in December 2004 a virtual island was sold over an online auction for $26,500--real U.S. dollars. This was for the game Project Entropia, which is played by hundreds of thousands of players around the world. The purchaser of the island, who calls himself "Deathifier," will be able to tax homeowners and rent property out to other gamers. (Incidentally, would you trust a landlord named "Deathifier"?)
On 14 December 2004 BBC news online reported that economists believe the actual dollar trade in virtual goods is equivalent to the GDP of Namibia. In late March 2005 a middle-aged Chinese man stabbed another to death over the Internet auction sale of a virtual sword—a string of electrons! And nefarious hackers have invented a virus that steals MMORPG passwords from players. The hackers use these passwords to enter the cyberworld under the stolen identity of a real player, then strip that player of his or her virtual goods, later to be put up for auction at eBay-type sites.
One statistic bandied about during the day stated that 30% of gamers in virtual worlds say that the virtual world is, to them, their "real" one, and that they are only "occasional visitors" to what most of us would call the "real" world.
This might seem absurd, but consider: If you find yourself a cheap place to live, earn real income from renting or selling virtual property, and set up your bank account so that your bills and rent are automatically paid, you could conceivably spend almost all your time in the virtual world, surfacing only to attend to, err, bodily needs.
How everything is about to change for everybody, including you
Perhaps you imagine that these changes will have no impact on your life. You are not interested in video games, are suspicious of technology in general—a "Luddite." It does not matter. You will be an active participant in this future, just as you probably began surfing the Internet and sending email in the last ten years; and shopped on Amazon, got a cell phone, and illegally downloaded music in the last five.
Ultimately--and inevitably--says Mr. Klaus, all media will be instantly delivered via the Internet (or whatever we today call the Internet). People everywhere are already using BitTorrent, a tool that allows one to efficiently download large files (read: movies and TV shows in high quality digital formats). Those who post television programs to BitTorrent always delete the commercials (it saves on file size), which makes advertisers and the networks that depend upon them particularly unhappy. As lawless Napster led the way to legal iTunes, BitTorrent is a likely portent of the legitimate future of video delivery.
On-demand viewing of programming will forever change the way television networks offer their fare. Of what relevance will the Nielson television ratings be if people download "24" at their own convenience? Faster computer cables and ever-growing computer memory chips, says Mr. Klaus, means that downloading whole movies will become a quicker process, and that whole libraries of film will be stored on hard drives. What will you do with the freed-up shelf-space currently occupied by your DVD collection?
Dale Herigstad, the shock-white-haired Executive Creative Director of Schematic Entertainment, showed some demos of enhanced television shows. You have seen Mr. Herigstad's work already (his company designed several Winter Olympic logos for CBS in the 1990's, and Schematic was also the force behind some of the startling visions of the future seen in the movie Minority Report).
Mr. Herigstad showed a clip from the science-fiction fantasy television series "Battlestar Galactica" wherein leading character Starbuck engages in a firefight in space. A window containing the original television program shrinks, and a sort of video game rendering (created by Schematic) of how Starbuck sees the dogfight from her cockpit becomes the main focus. As Starbuck shouts commands and takes evasive action from heat-seeking missiles, the viewer is in the cockpit right along with her, experiencing the heart-pounding action of the scene in a way that multiple camera angles and cuts cannot so realistically convey. When the fight concludes with a massive explosion, the original TV program window jumps back to its original size, filling the screen with a blinding flash of light. We are catapulted back into the TV show's drama.
For those who would rather shop than watch explosions, TV shows will become fully integrated into the shopping experience. Mr. Herigstad used "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" as his example. In his demo, the show's hosts stroll into a boutique in Los Angeles. Information about the boutique (location, driving directions) pops up alongside the TV window, and then specific highlighted items for sale appear as they are pointed out by the hosts of the television show. You as shopper/viewer can click the items that you desire to purchase yourself. (This could become a new way for advertisers to get their money's worth in the commercial-free BitTorrent world.)
Perhaps you will view the TV show on a cell phone. You can store such information on your cell phone as well. While watching a cooking show, you might download the featured recipe onto your cell, take your cell into the kitchen, call the recipe back up, and cook alongside your phone.
After the panel discussions ended, Georgia Tech students displayed a variety of interesting projects they are working on, including interactive history web sites, films starring imported Sims characters, and a sort of Pac Man type game wherein anyone can control the action on the screen from any cell phone.
Too much of a weird thing?
Are we as a society ready for such change? The classic separation between the haves and have-nots seems to be (as it always seems to be) ever-widening. Now, when people speak of living in "different worlds" they are speaking almost literally. The imagination reels.
All I know is, at least for the time being, I'll still need to hold down a real job if I'm to be able to pay "Deathifier" my monthly rent.