Breaking... virtual ground

Whenever a an author writes a story, they implicitly always create a new world to act as the backdrop for the action. This world can be as small as a single room or as big as an entire universe; it can be created completely ex novo, even defining its own physics, or it can essentially be the "real" world (paraphrasing the 1989 movie Dead Poets Society, "not inventing a new world is a perfectly good way of inventing a new world"), but even in this case, the moment the first fictional events of the story happen they change the world for ever and it is not the "real" one anymore.

For centuries, when an author wrote a story they wrote a single story, with a beginning, a middle and an end, and even if the effect it had on each reader (potentially even every time a reader read the story) was unique, the story, the string of words that composed, was one whole all together. Then in the late 1970s, Edward Packard and R. A. Montgomery reached great notoriety with their Choose Your Own Adventure series where, instead of reading the book back to back the reader became a character of the story and was directed to jump to different pages based on their decisions. Of course, this lead to a book that contained several stories and could be re-read to reach different endings.

Photo: Samsung Newsroom

The popularization of computers then opened the door to the genre of adventure games, which are essentially transposition of the same principle to the digital realm: there is an overall narrative and the player takes the role of one or more of the main characters and performs a number of exploration and puzzle-solving tasks to progress in the narrative. Depending on the complexity of the story, the game my forbid you to leave a room unless you have completed all the relevant task or let you go out early and therefore force you to return later in order to finish the game.

The remarkable point of this and other types of games is that the world where they happened was just the backdrop, an environment aimed at giving interest and credibility to the game, but it was always intended with a purpose, the player had something to do. This gave birth to the so-called open world games, where, in most cases, the player was faced with a completely accessible world but mostly without a narrative arc and all the freedom to explore, occasionally driven by side-quests that did not need to be completed in any particular order, although achieving one quest (e.g. get an axe) might unlock a dependent one (e.g. cut down a tree).

For all the power of these games, including the online interaction with other players (e.g. the Massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) genre) they were never intended as replacements or simulation for real-life interactions: two players meeting in World of Warcraft where there for the game and not to have a chat over the weather at their respective locations, international politics, their families or anything of the sort. It was not really forbidden, but it was part of the etiquette of the game to stick to the theme of the game and stay "in character".

This all changed with the release in 2003 of the virtual world Second Life. Contrary to the previous examples, where the worlds were the containers for a narrative or the grounds to be explored, this virtual world is just a place where people can really have a "second life": they can have a house and a job, another group of friends, travel the virtual world to see other places, even potentially playing games in the game.

The idea of having a virtual world for entertainment, a platform were you could meet your friends for a number of different games or to watch a movie together is rather pervasive in the popular culture but one that I am particular fond of is the world of OZ from the 2010 Japanese movie Summer Wars, where the avatars sport the most crazy monster- and animal-like appearance all in very stark colors.

However, the most credible prediction of a future virtual world is depicted, in my view, in the 2011 novel by Ernest Cline Ready Player One. I have not found any mention of an explicit connection, but the book could be an understood as a corollary of virtual worlds like Second Life: if they are advanced enough and the internet connections hold, there is no reason why most of human interactions would take place in this virtual world. In the novel, the main character goes to school in the virtual world Oasis and there are whole companies working virtually together, all the time while each worker is at their home in a different corner of the country or even the world. (Does this start to sound familiar?)

Last week I mentioned that I had been trying a number of new things thanks to the extra time that the Working From Home is affording me and, besides trying to push my handwriting, virtual worlds has been the other theme that I have been exploring. The occupational health manager of the institute, realizing that social disconnection among the workers was a real risk decided to call for regular meetings in the virtual world to try to patch up the situation and allow everyone to get the latest news from the rest of the team. The solution that she chose is Wonder, which is similar to a zoom room but with the difference that you can establish different spaces to discuss different subjects. You can freely move from one station to the next and, as you move you stop hearing one of the conversations and start to hear the new one. All the while you are represented by a circle with your picture and you can feed your camera to the sub-room where you are discussing. All sounds reasonable on paper, but unfortunately I was late for the meeting last week so I will have to wait to tomorrow to have a more direct experience that I can accurately report.

A similar concept is served by Teooh, with the difference that it is a virtual 3-D environment and you are represented by a full-body avatar of your choice (you can adjust 15 to 20 parameters including the blue skin or Rastafarian hair). By clicking on an empty chair you get teleported to a different conversation and as you turn your head to look at the room your avatar actually points in the same direction, so it is easy to see who is paying attention to you. I landed on this platform through an article I read but unfortunately, at the time I logged in the only event was a get-together for VR-related enterpreneurs, so I did not find anything interesting to take part into. But I will be back and let you know how the experience went.

The final experiment of the week went to Gathertown, where the students have studied yet another virtual space to meet and goof around. The aesthetic is very much 8-bit view-from-above, but it has nice features such as built-in games and even personal desks. Unfortunately I did not read the invitation two weeks ago and this Friday there was no one in the room at the usual time, so I only got a vague impression. Let us see what happens when I finally manage to land on a real meeting.

The bottom line of this post (that has grown perhaps too long) is that the need for socialization is still there, perhaps even more now that we do not get any of it during the usual working hours, and  the tools for a virtual social life are getting more and more ready by the minute. Ernest Cline posited that high-end consoles were able to read your facial expressions and transfer them onto your Oasis avatar. I do not know how close we are to reaching that level of detail, but I know for sure that I would welcome the opportunity to have a relaxed chat with someone outside my household, so I am really happy to see the ground broken time and time again in this direction. Let us just see what the future brings. Have a good evening.