I must admit, there was a time when I would play computer/video games late into the night. I was a wee-lad back then, so impressionable and curious about the whole plethora of things of this universe. And the allure of the virtual worlds to such mind was just too sweet to resist. I gave a lot of thought to my then-current condition during the phase of my life. Why would I be captivated by certain types of virtual reality? Is there something shared in common between the hundreds of different worlds constructed using a number of different mediums-writing, visual, and aural-that composes the fundamental idea of what an enjoyable world should be? Would the impression of such an ‘idea’ of the mysteriously attractive world be common to all human beings? Or only human beings of certain memories and experiences? I would spend many days just thinking about the nature of all possible virtual worlds imaginable by human mind and their possible implications while my hands played the mechanical play of controlling my representation within the display.
Deus Ex was a computer game created by the now-defunct ION storm that came out during the aforementioned impressionable period of my life. This game isn’t aesthetically pleasing by any stretch of imagination. It’s gritty, ugly, in a very superficial and unintended kind of way. It is based in imaginary near-future where nanotechnology and artificial intelligence are just coming into full gear among the financial and political turmoils of a new human age. Conspiracy theories based on some real-world conspiracy fads play an important role in the setting and the plot, and there are lot of techno-jargon thrown around in one of the numerous conversations within the game world which might add to its depth. Any way you look at it, Deus Ex is not a work of art, and it was never meant to be. Deus Ex as a game was designed to be immersive. Immersive as in realistic within the confines of the plot and available technological means to execute that plot. Whatever the Deus Ex was meant to be, it did its job and it did its job fantastically. Deus Ex took itself just serious enough to be immersive.
I played and finished Deus Ex numerous times since the day it came out. The game had the semblance of a virtual world, just enough to be a better game, not enough to be a real virtual world, which was actually a good thing. I’d figure out a number of different ways to achieve the objective of the specific stages and the game as a whole, each of those paths gradually beginning to encompass different processes that the designer of the game probably never intended in the first place-a first form of truly emergent game play on digital medium. I can still remember a number of quotes and conversations from the game by heart, not through any diligent study, but simply through repeated exposure stemming from the interest in the world itself. And to be perfectly honest, while I was aware of nanotechnology and its growing prominence before playing the game (I was a little precocious for my age), I began to truly comprehend what such technology could mean to the world and the people in the far future by seeing it applied within the virtual world built and maintained by fictional premises. It would not be far from to truth to say that my interest in ‘industries’ of biology and other fields of science (with my current ‘official’ pursuit being plasma physics, which is an entirely different field altogether) began with my introduction to this game… I place much emphasis on the term ‘industry’ because it was through the application of the idea of technology within a virtual (no matter how absurd it might be compared to the real) world that I began to grasp the requirements of science and its true impacts in the modern human civilization of rapid prototyping and mass production. Yes, I’ve come to learn that science effects the human world as a whole, just as the hand of economy reaches into the deepest pockets of the remotest corners of the globe, and such permutation of ideas and information might have a reasonable pattern of causality behind it, forming a system of sorts. All this at the first year of high school, all this because I’ve seen it applied in a limited virtual world whose goal was to entertain, perhaps mindlessly.
People talk of the web 2.0, the web based virtual reality (like the second life) all the time, perhaps without grasping what it truly means. To me, the change on the web and its technical and semantic updates are merely superficial effects of the real change that is taking place right now. The real change we are about to face at this moment, is the change to the nature of the human network. I find that I’m using the term human network more often these days. The human network had been present since the very first moment of human civilization (perhaps even before, going back to the start of the human species) and has the same mathematical and sociological properties of networks that more or less remains the same on some compartmentalized level. The changes we are seeing in the emergence of the web 2.0 ideas and virtual realities merely reflect the technological advances applied to the same ever present human network that had been in place for as long as anyone can remember. At the core of the web 2.0 is the idea of user interactivity. What happens when there is a freedom of interactivity between millions and billions of people? The medium providing the room for interactions itself begins to take on closer resemblance to the concept we call ‘the world.’ Forget reality. What is a ‘world?’ What satisfies the definition of a ‘world?’ The core of a ‘world’ as it stands happen to be a place where people can interact with the very components of the world itself and with each other. In that sense, if our reality somehow forbid certain type of interaction between us and the ‘world’, it would cease to be real. The world as seen from information perspective, is a massive space/concept/thing for interactivity, and interaction between the ‘things’ within the world builds and evolves the form of the world itself.
The web 2.0 in that sense, is the beginning of a virtual world that builds upon human interactivity rather than superficial (though still quite important) reliance on resembling the physical characteristics of the real. And the real change being brought on by the advent of the web 2.0 thought to the general population is the enlargement of the perspectives of the real world brought on by interactions with other human nodes within the virtual world. I am not suggesting that people are somehow becoming more conscious. Just as I have demonstrated with my old experience with the computer game Deus Ex where seeing certain kind of ideas applied to a virtual world left an impression of impact of such ideas on a rapidly prototyping, global world, the population of this world is becoming increasingly aware of the true global consequences of their and others actions and thought. It is the awareness that in this highly networked world, science, industry, economics and politics all walk hand-in-hand as ‘ideas’ and its currencies, a single change in one sector of one corner of the world giving birth to certain other events on the opposite corner of the globe in entirely different field of ideas. It is the beginning of the understanding of the malleability of the human world and its thought.
I’ve started with remembering my experience with an old computer game, and came to the talks of virtual reality, the human network and the changes of the world. I hope I didn’t confuse you too much. This is what I call ‘taking a walk’, where I begin with one thought and its conclusions and apply them to different yet related thoughts to arrive at interesting ideas. In case you are wondering about the game itself, it seem that they are giving it away for free now. Go grab it and spend some time with it. It’s still fun after all these years.
Consider Bookhling 