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Neal Stephenson Says Video Games Are the Metaverse
An anonymous reader writes "In an interview with Forbes Magazine, Neal Stephenson says the 'Metaverse' he created in his seminal novel Snow Crash missed the point — and that video games like World of Warcraft are the true future of cyberspace."
Forbes writer David Ewalt seems taken with Stephenson's new book, REAMDE, which I'm looking forward to getting my hands on.
This is why our society is headed towards looking like the morbidly obese blobs in "Wall-E"!
Don't go outside into the REAL WORLD to exercise and socialize, just sit on your butt playing video games and pretending the people in the games are your real friends. All the while you get bigger and more unhealthy... eating garbage food and have subluxations grow.
Don't get me wrong, there's nothing inherently bad about video games (we own an XBOX360 with Kinect) but expecting to go into these make believe worlds and flourish while the Real World You rots is absolutely disgusting. I'm 5'11", 160 lbs and haven't wavered for ~15 years.
Folks, enjoy casual gaming. Please make sure you get out for exercise, good nutrition and adjustments.
Think about this: at the end of your life, you won't look back over the course of your journey and think "Gee, I wish I played MORE video games."
Follow my journal for more health advice.
Take care,
Bob
Trolling is a art,
Because there is no link to TFA to R :(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ready_Player_One
Please God, tell me Neal Stephenson's new book isn't going to be about boring monks and pilgrims and shit!
I think his new book is out today, anyway.
I got my hands on an pre-release reader copy and I love it. It reminds me of 'Crytponomicon' in many respects.
Wow. It's been several months since a story was posted that completely forgot the link the the article.
Seriously, do you guys have a "Doh!" session everyday after work where you smack your palm into your forehead over and over to pay penance for your daily editing? If you do maybe it's time for a helmet .
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Sorry.. I can't take anyone seriously that still uses that word.
Please, if you like Snow Crash, read Daemon and Freedom(TM) by Daniel Suarez. I found them very enjoyable, and frightening realistic. I think you'll enjoy them, too.
I'll continue to fill my free time working on personal projects or having sex or playing with my kids. I honestly don't get why anyone would want to spend extended periods of time leveling up a wizard so they can ride a glowing horse and I really, really hope that isn't the extent of the future of cyberspace.
Needs more minecraft
-- if you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine
Heh how long before people start playing these games actively... say with a motion joystick like a wii remote, and a pair of AR glasses, so they are now wandering around fighting orcs on quests in real time.
Wonder how long it would be before someone gets in trouble, probably by not paying attention, or possibly by realistically brandishing something resembling a weapon in a public place?
From what I remember, the metaverse was way more VR. Like [shudder] Second Life, or Minecraft, where you actually have control over your surroundings.
From the article:
"Neal Stephenson is known for writing big books about big ideas. In Cryptonomicon, he tackled code breaking and data privacy; the three-volume Baroque Cycle explored the birth of modern economic systems."
I thought the Baroque Cycle was about the Enlightenment Era and the development of physics/calculus? I guess at 3000+ pages it was about a lot of stuff.
... really a "metaverse" since it takes enormous amounts of cash to build and maintain the things, if videogames are the metaverse then it's a metaverse everyone will be paying monthly fee's to support to enjoy.
The game industry is on a slow push enclosing some of their games as MMO's they'd like to eventually enclose all games behind walled gardens with DRM/MMO as copyprotection and then hit us all with monthly fee's. Time will tell if gamers will just take it up the bum like morons. But if league of legends, Heroes of newerth and other Free 2 play games are anything to go by the end of the single player game that you actually own may be on it's way out driven by clueless teens as demographics shift.
If you were born in the late 70's, are reading this article, and like fiction, consider reading Ready: Player One.
It's founded on the same premise -- video games become the metaverse. But what if that metaverse was written by Richard Garriott? And cost just one quarter to play? I read it, and just loved it. Even my 10 year old daughter loved it!
I think if you want to see what things could be like with a merge of reality and virtual (augmented) reality, you will enjoy this. Many connections can be made with current gaming and this novel.
http://www.amazon.com/MetaGame-Sam-Landstrom/dp/1935597167/ref=tmm_pap_title_0
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Chiro shill and all-around quack Dr. Bob was found dead in his Maine home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon..
video games like World of Warcraft are the true future of cyberspace
The artsy craftsy types have been tying to ram that idea down our throats for generations, always with a promise that with just slightly better technology we'll all virtually drive to and then virtually walk around in a 3-d rendered virtual bookstore to find our books using our eyes as our "grep" command and then wait in line in a virtual 3-d line for a virtual 3-d emo slacker teen cashier to ring us up on a virtual 3-d cash register, which we'll pay using digital cash rendered as virtual 3-d gold coins by manually moving those simulated virtual coins out of our virtual 3-d rendered pockets and handing them to the emo slacker teen cashier kid who virtually places the virtual coins in the virtual cash register, one at a time.
Um, no, tried all that, the future way to buy books is amazon.com. Nobody wants that artsy craftsy B.S. Nobody. Makes for a nice story, thats about it.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Second Life is kind of close to the Metaverse. You can run a server on your own equipment. But it also sucks. I mean, it's amazing for what it is, but you can't even build a proper-sized doorway and expect to navigate through it conveniently. What year is it? Let's have third life please.
In the mean time, while we're talking about Stephenson tech, can we get some decent wearable computers please? Where is my cheap eyetap? :(
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Starts off well. Degenerates into shoot-them-up-in-the-woods.
Exciting thriller sort of book. If I wasn't a geek, I might think it was a techno-thriller. Whatever the hell that means.
Loved the gaming bits, online currency bits, random geeky bits. Loved the characters, baddies and goodies together. Loved the insightful travelogue. If the entire terrorist sub-plot (or rather, second act) had been chopped out, I would have loved the whole thing.
I'll continue to fill my free time working on personal projects or having sex or playing with my kids.
Why don't you just take a seat right over there...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
"In an interview with Forbes Magazine, Neal Stephenson says the 'Metaverse' he created in his seminal novel Snow Crash missed the point — and that video games like World of Warcraft are the true future of cyberspace."
They are?
Aw. That's really sort of disappointing, given what we were promised.
Then again, the future IS only the future until it happens. Then it becomes the present, which is never as good as the future was. Maybe when it's the past we can look back on when it was so much better.
Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
The future of "cyberspace" is, well, what we've got right now. An open, extensible, infrastructure on which we can run whatever sorts of things we like. Different applications for different things. There will never be a unified interface for everything because, well, why would we want that?
The brilliance of the Internet and the reason it grew as it did is that there is no lock-in. All you are locked in to is the basic protocol, and all that does is transfer data. Everything past that is up to you. Different needs can have different applications, and those can change over time.
There is just no reason to want to try to force everything in to one model, and particularly not the model of 3D characters interacting.
A subject that I thought about a lot after first reading Snow Crash was the concept of "ownership" in the metaverse. If I remember correctly (it's been a few years) the main character was sort of rich because he was in on the metaverse early and owned a bunch of virtual "land". I recall trying to get my head around how ownership could even work in a peer-to-peer system where the bits and pieces of the metaverse are running on various computers and mobile devices around the world.
Companies like Linden Lab have taken a centralised approach, but this doesn't really equate with the ideas in the book. Now it seems clear that the answer is something like bitcoin, where a proof-of-work can be used to make copying impossible. If bitcoin could be used to organise a fully peer-to-peer cyberworld then perhaps there could be some mutual benefit there -- a way to organize land ownership, and a way to assign solid value to bitcoin.
I suppose in a way this is what namecoin is attempting to do by organizing a replacement for DNS around a similar concept.
Apparently this years most disruptive technology of the year is a virtual bar/avatar layer called Shaker slapped on top of facebook.
http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/14/and-the-winner-of-techcrunch-disrupt-is-shaker/
Because everyone knows that the real people around you are all losers and the best people are all elsewhere.
Sad, really sad.
Average Intelligence is a Scary Thing
Warcraft is not a good example.
User created stuff does not exist in Warcraft. It is little more than a dress up show you pop in and out of.
Worlds like Second Life or Minecraft where you can create structures and influence the world and others can experience it are more like true cycber space.
That subdomains such as WoW are the collection of uber-cyberdomains (i.e that interweb thingy) in which humans interact more than some others. The Scada domain? Not so much.
Not sure where facebook falls here. Subdomains evolve, I guess.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Yeah. It’s just inherently more interesting to enter into an art directed alternate world, where you can go on adventures and get into fights and engage with the world that way, than it is to enter a world where all you can do is kind of stand around and chat.
Zing! I guess he doesn't have a fist-full of Linden Dollars he's spent long hours earning.
The CB App. What's your 20?
Anyone else put off by the books cover art. It his name in huge white letters on a black background. It looks like an autobiography not a science fiction novel. The title of the book looks like a subtitle to his name.
1. Doing a disk dupe to binary file might yield a zip files that are corrupt, but if the zip header contains offsets where in the archive a file starts, you might have a use for just the files that you can recovey. You may still be able to unzip the rest. I assume that if this were "mission critical" data, you'd have backups, and that this is mostly a nostalgic recovery. Even if you can't recover all files, you'll have a use for the bits you *can* recover.
2. Do try the suggestion of using a different drive. The Superdisk recommended by another poster can be found- there's one going on eBay right now (pick up only- but people may be willing to help you get it posted).
3. If you live in a moist climate, your floppies may be unreadable due to mold. I've rescued many floppies by spinning them in an open, headless floppy drive and very gently removing the mold with a cotton bud dipped in medicinal alcohol. DON'T DO THIS unless there are visible dull/nonreflective spots on the surface of the floppy.
4. Make sure the drive heads are clean before attempting to read any diskettes.
5. It helps to actually still have a computer old enough that the BIOS can read floppy disks! If you do, it also may still be able to run CopyIIPC, allowing you to backup your floppies to empty ones (if you can find them!) before attempting further recovery.
6. The suggestion of a previous poster to try "all binary combinations" in a zip file may not be as hopeless as it sounds. When there's an error on part of a sector, the first part of the sector will read intact, the damage will be random and the rest will likely be a bit-shifted pattern of the original image (due to lost sync). Based on this, you should be able to make a pretty good estimate about the first and last part of the sector and you'll only need to correct the middle (assuming a sector only has 1 read error). I learned this when doing research for a home-brew copy protection mechanism based on the position of tiny holes drilled in floppy disks.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
And Jack Vance (languages of pao), for that matter. The theory is bunk, however popular, and however overwrought the leading contender might be, namely, Noam Chomsky's Universal Base Hypothese. SW is to UBH as alchemy is to the periodic table, so the cheerful sight of Stephenson refusing to take his own pompous bunk seriously is kind of fun.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
Of his own book.
We are of course living in the metaverse created by the 31337 memes soon released after the advent of the synthesis of programming and psychology.
Forcing functions and the like are prevalent and redirecting all our energies in crazy insane ways.
The major gist of that book is an UR language, that is able to reprogram people without even their knowledge. This is that UR language. Advertising is a window dressing to the real advent of psy-ops running through our brains.
Well, that may be TMI. I hope that at least the men in grey are polite!
Regards.
The true future is the integration of cyberspace and reality. When World of Warcraft sends you on a quest to the local Starbucks, and your latte receipt earns you 50 gold coins. Or when you and your friend can use your smart-phones to continue the game of Chess you started earlier on computers, while sitting in a theatre, waiting for the movie to start.
Another big step will be the whole "video games as sports/entertainment" concept. That one will take a while longer to fully develop, but given time, I have no doubt that people will be able to earn a stable income, based solely on their FPS skills. (or RTS, MMO, etc ... )
The web was what made the Metaverse age so rapidly. Take a MUD-like centralized world, which people were already familiar with, add on some graphics and you've got something that seems reasonably cool in 1993. But the web guys had already come up with a more promising foundation and were about to hit the mainstream over the head with it. Within a few years, the Metaverse's underpinnings seemed old-fashioned, but you could fix the problem (loosely in your imagination, at least) by stressing the "Protocol" in "Global Multimedia Protocol Group" and re-imagining it as distributed, not just a bunch of clients talking to The One Great Server.
If Stephenson really thinks (dude, really?!) WoW is the future of cyberspace, then he's rejecting distributed VR, and settling for the graphical MUD. And I have to say "settling" because the first thing that leaps to my mind about WoW is that it's a world where everyone is Blizzard's bitch. The idea is so boring from the get-go (in a technological futurist sense; I'm not criticizing the game itself or saying it's not fun, because I haven't played it (but I saw the South Park episode, does that count?)) that I would think Science Fiction people would all want to distance themselves from it (unless they wanted to use it as a kind of dystopian example of failed dreams).
Having there just be one Metaverse (as Snow Crash seems to imply) is totally unrealistic, because there will (obviously?!) be so many different visions and agendas for what a metaverse should be. (And even if you limit the discussion to commercial exploitation, that includes deeply incompatible agendas, such as "my profit" vs "your profit.") Not that some won't be very popular, but there will never be one-size-fits-all. It's just human nature that no matter what you have, even if it gets a large userbase, there must be people who say, "This MUD is lame" or "This cabal is comprised of lamers" followed by "I'm going to make my own which fixes some problems."
If you don't hate the MCP then you're anti-freedom, and if you don't miss the MCP after Tron kills him then you're anti-order, anti-consistency, whatever. ;-) There's no right answer.
Vinge recognizes this with belief circles. Fragmentation happens, and you've got to include that if you want to seem realistic.
On top of the human nature issue, there's also the technical problem. All MMORPGs have a scaling problem to handle, and make tough choices and pay a cost, one way or another, to deal with it. Not only can you not fit everyone into one metaverse, it's also yet another crack for a schism to develop, because different people will want to pay the scaling cost in different ways.
If you look to WoW as the future, I think you're not keeping up. FWIW, though, I don't see Stephenson really implying that in the interview. AFAICT he's just talking about graphics hardware.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I'm going to pick up both Stephenson's book and the interesting looking Ready Player One. That said, I think most of the discussion here is linked to Stephenson's comment on the Metaverse and gaming/MMOs. It seems, as others have said that he didn't anticipate that gaming would begin to foster these virtual worlds in the way it did. I've seen many discussing over the past few years that basically "WoW is the Way Forward" and that is understandable if you realize those who chant such things are entities or hopeful corporate entities that will profit from such a narrow vision.
Since the beginning of persistent world gaming, there have been "Sandbox" MMOs - those of Ultima Online, and MUD/MOO heritage. Players have an integral ability to create and alter the world, or rules of the world. Later, came out of the idea to replicate a persistent world where one could play AD&D online, came the "Theme Parks", such as Meridian 59 and EverQuest. These focused less on player creation and more on players undertaking content created by the developer of the MMO, acting as sort of a Dungeon Master. World of Warcraft is the latest, and most populous incarnation of this gametype. By nature, Theme Park worlds are more accessible to a larger percentage of the public and that is part of the reason they're standing at the forefront today. The other reason of course, is technological - having users accessing ready-made content within certain parameters is MUCH easier than allowing them a much wider field of freedom. In something like a text-MUD its a lot easier to program in the ability for the user to do something complex and show it actually happening.
However, Sandbox MMOs have always been sitting on the sidelines. The best two examples of graphical Sandboxes in recent memory are Minecraft: where graphics are simple enough and there are some very basic literal "building block" rules, with all the content created by those on the server, and Second Life - the "hallmark" paradigm shift that was thought to be next step forward in Internet use and pretty much was the Metaverse-incarnation with the most comprehensive featureset.
Second Life gave the users the ability to create just about anything, given the Internet bandwidth and processing powers of the time. Any user could build, skin and even script functionality into the world, using textures and resources from anywhere, using built in 3d-modeling and scripting software. What's more is that the developer, Linden Labs set themselves up as a bank, transferring in-game dollars to real money and vice-versa. Charging real rent for plots of virtual land, around $250 monthly for a "zone", users set up their own economy. Anyone who took the time to make a chair could set up a virtual storefront to sell it for currency that could eventually be transferred into real money! Real estate owners leased space in their zones to those who wanted to run a virtual dance club, Kung-Fu fighting simulation, casino, or sex club, and those areas all had attractions or items for sale that cost money. Soon, many net-savvy businesses started to create Second Life presences; you could go to a virtual Nike shop and have your avatar try on a pair of the newest Nikes available, crafted in exacting quality. Blogs and even paper journalism started interviewing entrepreneurs that made their living in Second Life. Part of "Internet Cultural History" is of course the interview with the avatar named Anshe Chung, a SL real estate mogul who was one of the first real USD millionaires who made their fortune entirely in SL. Of course, what we all remember about that interview...were the cocks.
When the virtual-journalist and Ms. Chung sat down to discuss economics in a virtual world, thousands of flying, noise-making penises accosted the entire zone in one of the most infamous spam attacks in Second Life history. The interview had to be stopped and eventually proceeded in a properly secured area. Second Life had become a 3d microcosm of the Internet and as such... there were a lot of
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joel-fuhrman-md/vitamin-d-recommendations_b_800468.html
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/vitamin_D_recommendations.aspx
http://grassrootshealth.net/
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/
And on escaping from a "pleasure trap":
http://drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
And on walking while using the computer:
http://www.squidoo.com/walkingwhileworking
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Ko.
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Which must mean you're a fourth grader.
Was that a question without a question mark, or was it a sentence fragment?
BTW - use "between ... and", not "between ... or".
Im thinking this more closely resembles Oz from Summer wars.
Fail troll is fail. Not a big market for bridal dresses around here.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World