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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,
Here's the link: http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidewalt/2011/09/19/neal-stephenson-reamde-video-games/ Don't everybody thank me at once.
Sorry about the mess.
We need to get creative! Just pretend that I've just insulted your operating system of choice. Go on a rant. I'll respond with something about linux running on a beowulf cluster of laser headed sharks, and with any luck we'll be able to get this one back on track.
:*(
Now all we need is a link to a web site. I, like many others, can only enjoy reading slashdot when I know that there is a small web server somewhere in the world, all alone, sitting in the dark, crying at the load that's been placed on it.....
I wonder how many people noticed that before commenting.
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 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..
There's also Charlie Stross' "Halting State", but he chose to write it in "second person" style which is highly offputting.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
I'll continue to fill my free time working on personal projects or having sex or playing with my kids.
-1 questionable usage of "or"
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
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.
I would argue that desite not outright saying the Metaverse in snowcrash was paid monthly, it probably was. The reality in the novel depicts a free market capitalist "utopia" where everything is owned and licensed and paid for. Nothing in that world escapes ownership and associated costs for access.
I considered True Names -style cyberspace to have been realized the first time someone tracked down an opponent in an MMO and shot him in real life, and the overall concerns with Real ID in WoW. I never saw neural interfaces as a necessary part of "cyberspace".
True Names was the most amazingly predictive piece of science fiction.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.