The title and content of the article, in which Hanke espouses the virtues if Niantic Labs (an AR company), were cognitively dissonant for me.
> The concept reached one of its most complete expressions in Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, where virtually everyone has abandoned reality for an elaborate VR massively multiplayer video game. A lot of people these days seem very interested in bringing this near-future vision of a virtual world to life, including some of the biggest names in technology and gaming. But in fact these novels served as warnings about a dystopian future of technology gone wrong. As a society, we can hope that the world doesn’t devolve into the kind of place that drives sci-fi heroes to escape into a virtual one
I'm trying to understand what Hanke is really saying. Is he saying that VR sucks, and AR, specifically AR that encourages people to interact with the real physical world, is where its at? I assume by "biggest names in technology and gaming" he is referring to Niantic's competitors? Specifically what about those bets does he disagree with?
I really want to gripe about "Ernest Cline's" Ready Player One. There was an element of dystopia to it, yes, but it was only the movie adaptation that came away with the takeaway that the virtual world was bad. In the movie they decide to add in the protagonist making the executive decision to shut down the virtual world on a couple weekdays or something. That pissed me off. That world was people's livelihoods. This kid lived in a poor junky slum and had a great social life and presumably some level of income in the virtual world when the movie starts. At the end of the movie he is super rich and has a hot girlfriend (who's character arc was largely that she perceived herself as ugly?). There's really not that much in the film or the book that says that forcing people to go unplugged made any sense.
The actual book was about a virtual world gone extremely right. The dystopian part was the corporations that sought private control of the platform.
Bonus complaint: The evil corporation in the film literally enslaves people and brazenly murders others in public, yet it's CEO is brought down by some unremarkable local cops? What?
The world in RPO is pretty nonsensical and the whole thing is a vehicle for nostalgia with a fairly formulaic plot. Nothing wrong with that it’s a fun beach read, particularly if you’re of a certain age. I was mildly terrified by the number of people I met a few years ago whilst working in VR who considered it aspirational. We’ll absolutely get a dystopia if the metaverse is based on teenage fantasy. Particularly with an AR vision that is rushing to put glorified ads for Disney and Marvel into the world.
You'd think the creator would have thought of something like that, but nah, he wanted to leave it to the coolest teen. Or, in the movie version, the teen most able to identify weirdly personal details from the author's private life.
I don’t get why escaping reality is bad. Is theatre bad? Books? Movies?
Providing a good escape from reality can lower people’s demands of reality, which can lead to a more sustainable future. If people can eat beans but be tricked into thinking they’re eating steak it can improve health and lower emissions, for example.
Trying to trick people into desired behaviour through escapism rather than creating a shared culture of stewardship, responsibility and self-control is exactly what a dystopian nightmare looks like.
I think you should look at the roots of theatre. The principal function of theatre wasn't escapism but Catharsis, the cleansing of one's emotional state to be able to re-engage with the world and to renew and restore oneself.
Good fiction engages a person with the world and prepares them to improve their society and culture. It doesn't produce a bunch of obese Wall-E people who live on canned beans binging Netflix all day.
And books, tv, gaming, rock and roll? These complaints don’t seem all that new. People do like escaping. I certainly don’t want to spend all my time socializing, and when I do, I prefer part of it to be digital.
Such great points. The tech of today is constantly attempting to rerout user back into itself. In a way this is unprecedented. A product that necessitates your constant use. Books don't necessitate re-reads, neither does a flip phone. But, the tech of today is all about consolidating your experience.
I'm starting to think my relationship with books might have been unhealthy in some of the same ways as video games. Theatre and movies might be similar for others. Less "escaping reality" and more "passive consumption at the cost of active creation".
Books feed you minimum data ... a string of characters ... completely devoid of any of the senses that you actually imagine you are experiencing: an active colorful audible 3D world.
Your own brain does almost all the work of manufacturing the reality, the author only provides the barest of guides. And your mind also adds layers of meaning onto whatever meaning the author makes explicit.
So I would say the act of reading a book is far from a passive or trivial activity.
In fact, I am hard pressed to imagine another activity so dependent on our own brain's ability for continuous creative production. D&D, scientific research, etc. all happen at a much slower pace.
I think the slower pace indicates more effort and greater levels of integration of different concepts. The kind of creativity involved in reading is like paint-by-numbers, while writing is like actual painting. It takes much more than an order of magnitude more time to write fiction than to read it for me, because it's so much less structured.
I agree with that. Creative production and problem solving, accompanied by a strong internal standards pushing us further for higher quality or impact than we achieved before, is the pinnacle.
But reading is far more active form of receiving, than other forms of learning or entertainment.
Well recreational drug abuse is bad, and video game addiction is bad, and ignoring your problems forever is bad. Ultimately it's a matter of degree and costs associated with the escape.
I would never make a blanket statement like VR or the metaverse is bad (especially cause it doesn't seem to exist in a fully realized form yet) but the vision doesn't particularly inspire me, and Hanke is trying to appeal to that POV by mentioning dystopian scifi representations of it, where it represented an escape from a disturbing reality.
I don’t know about “bad”, but any fictional or surrogate reality certainly seems to me like a vice. Whether or not it’s bad depends on if you abuse it too much.
I don't know why you're arguing reality is so great though. Other then us needing to exist in it, there's nothing here to recommend it. Hence caves and then houses.
Those things are nice. but they are mostly built in collaboration with universities.
Niantic took all my hard work, photographing places of historical or cultural significance(during ingress beta), and now use them to shovel people into stores.
VR is actually a “subverse” of reality but where people’s reality is subverted in a VR form.
Most of people’s experience would happen in this subverse, work, relationships, etc. Gamification would direct behavior throughout. You would code for FB or moderate for FB via this subverse.
Even physiological necessities would happen in two dimensions: in the subverse and in reality.
You summon the plumber gor the broken toilet in the subverse, they come to fix it within the subverse which is also expressed necessarily in reality.
It’s a potentially very scary proposition for whoever dictates the subverse in effect controls reality.
Even if it involves interacting with the real world, I've always found Pokemon Go (and other Pokemon games) kind of brutal: basically capturing animals and making them fight until incapacitated. People go to jail for that sort of thing in real life.
Of course there are plenty of game where you do things that would be illegal: GTA built an empire on it. But Pokemon is marketed towards kids.
The Detective Pikachu movie is actually premised on the recognition that battling Pokémon against their will is unethical. It's kinda strange to have that as canon, when the entire rest of the franchise encourages you to battle them and the games provide zero alternative.
On the other hand... I think your concern here is just about the worst example of pearl-clutching over video game violence that I've seen. Kids don't have a problem sorting fact from fiction when capturing Pokémon involves throwing a ball at them and the Pokémon somehow becoming entrapped within.
> The concept reached one of its most complete expressions in Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, where virtually everyone has abandoned reality for an elaborate VR massively multiplayer video game. A lot of people these days seem very interested in bringing this near-future vision of a virtual world to life, including some of the biggest names in technology and gaming. But in fact these novels served as warnings about a dystopian future of technology gone wrong. As a society, we can hope that the world doesn’t devolve into the kind of place that drives sci-fi heroes to escape into a virtual one
I'm trying to understand what Hanke is really saying. Is he saying that VR sucks, and AR, specifically AR that encourages people to interact with the real physical world, is where its at? I assume by "biggest names in technology and gaming" he is referring to Niantic's competitors? Specifically what about those bets does he disagree with?