Really

It’s always fun  to see someone confirm and reinforce your beliefs in effective and eloquent ways.    Thus, last October, when game designer David Perry’s TED talk, “Are Games Better than Life”, was made available, the link was passed around the virtual worlds community, usually without any additional comments beyond “watch this,” or “this guy gets it.”   It really is an inspiring talk, given in 2006, before the boom and bust of the Second Life/Virtual Worlds hype cycle (back when there were only 5 million World of Warcraft players…) – reminding me of  what it is that motivates my interest in this technology.

There are three points of the presentation that stick out for me.   Around six minute into the talk, Perry shows a video timeline of the evolution of video games from extremely crude to hyper-realistic graphics.   It is clear that if the technology continues to improve, within 5-10 years, complex, highly interactive environments and characters will be as easy to generate as web pages are today.  The second point is at the end of the talk, where Perry points out that kids are now growing up in a world where realistic graphics and artificially generated worlds are common-place.   Unfettered by the mental constraints placed on us by using older technologies, and not distracted by the “shiny”, they will be the ones creating innovative games and utilities that we can’t even imagine today.  Our attempts to recreate reality in virtual spaces, and the desperate drive to bring application sharing to virtual worlds so we can watch PowerPoint slides in them, will be at best regarded as quaint, and more likely (given the way kids are today, with their hair and their clothes), scorned.

Finally, where I found the most resonance with the way I feel, is the middle section of the talk, which is a video called “As Real as Your Life,” by Michael Highland.  I actually had to watch it twice before it sunk in that the video is sort of a negative view of video games – you might pick up on it after the first few seconds, when he says “I am a video game addict”, oh yeah, that’s a bad thing.  But the video is really about the power of video games to have emotional and psychological impact, “I’ve had life-altering experiences in games”, he says at one point.  And while this impact can certainly have negative consequences, the power to educate, communicate, and inspire through virtual worlds is what makes the technology so interesting.  It’s not that one can recreate a real location in a virtual world, it’s that one can create completely new and impossible environments and experiences in a way that is indistinguishable from the physical world.   So, while I don’t want to put down or discount reality (don’t get me wrong, I love reality, some of my best friends are real…), I agree completely when Highland says: “…it is the power to break down reality that is so fascinating and addicting to me.  I know that I am losing my grip – part of me is just waiting to let go.”