Digital Dialogue
A new advance in video-gaming will feature interactive dialogue commands for characters. Science fiction? Nope. The evolving face of virtual reality.
The upcoming game Mass Effect features a theme that is becoming more familiar as we draw closer to the year 2012. A race of green-scaled aliens is about to kill all organic life on the planet. Your mission, thwart their plans. Sure, it's geeky and about as old as science fiction plots come, so what's the catch?
The game allows for players to interact with one another romantically in dialogue, and while in dialogue screen boxes, a user can interrupt his character and command the discussion in a general direction. If the conversation is pursued too aggressively, the other character might assume that you're being rude and respond accordingly.
While these advances in gaming are fascinating and completely awe-inspiring, one has to wonder how useful they. Even the nerdy and prolific Terence Mckenna, while fascinated with virtual reality, suggested that our VR efforts would soon be dwarfed by a much larger and more cosmic transformation coming our way.
Tweet- 11-17-07
- Adam Elenbaas's blog
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Comments
Virtually Virtual
Interesting, perhaps gamers will go deeper and deeper into the game. Videodrome - style.
But I'm intrigued by William Gibson's recent assertions that in order to participate in a virtual reality, one need not put on a visor or head set, one only needs to sit in front of a screen and watch "Lost" or something similar.
From a recent Gibson interview:
What are the major challenges we face?
Let's go for global warming, peak oil and ubiquitous computing.
Ubiquitous computing?
Totally ubiquitous computing. One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real, the virtual from the real. In the future, that will become literally impossible. The distinction between cyberspace and that which isn't cyberspace is going to be unimaginable. When I wrote Neuromancer in 1984, cyberspace already existed for some people, but they didn't spend all their time there. So cyberspace was there, and we were here. Now cyberspace is here for a lot of us, and there has become any state of relative nonconnectivity. There is where they don't have Wi-Fi.
In a world of superubiquitous computing, you're not gonna know when you're on or when you're off. You're always going to be on, in some sort of blended-reality state. You only think about it when something goes wrong and it goes off. And then it's a drag.