Virtual Stuff

The
idea of a Metaverse did not arise with Linden Lab, but had its genesis in a
Commodore computer game from Lucasfilm called Habitat, Lucasfilm being the film
production company that brought us the steadily declining Star Wars franchise.

Habitat was made available in 1987 by the corporate progenitor of America Online,
Quantum Link. It was created in 1985 by Randy Farmer and Chip Morningstar, names
that are apparently real. It was a clunky, two-dimensional bit blocked world
that resembled a combination of South Park and a deranged Lego set. Apparently
the Japanese loved it.
However, the apotheosis of virtual worlds is described in the book ‘Snow
Crash’ by Neal Stephenson, which suffers from a representative selection
of the virtues and faults of all his work, i.e. the author gives an impression
of a demonic autodidact – a person who has learned a subject without the benefit
of a teacher or formal education. No matter that Stephenson studied at Boston
University specialising in physics but graduated in 1981 with a B.A. in Geography.
I suspect that his mind is always on fully immersed in highly diverting things
until another more consuming interest comes along.
‘Snow Crash’ could be a very good cyber punk novel. It starts with
wildly over-blown panache describing the protagonist of the book (referentially
named Hiro Protagonist) a hacker genius and also the best samurai swordsman
and pizza delivery person in both the real and virtual world.

‘The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory.
He’s got esprit up to here. Right now he is preparing to carry out his
third mission of the night. His uniform is as black as activated charcoal,
filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber
weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through
it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest. Where his body has bony
extremities, the suit has armorgel: feels like gritty jello, protects like
a stack of telephone books..’

Whilst not as cryptically filmic as William Gibson’s ‘Neuromancer’,
which starts ….‘The sky above the port was the colour of television,
tuned to a dead channel…’ you could be prepared to suppress your
critical faculties and literary sensibilities, at least temporarily, for the
pace and imagination packed onto almost every page.
The core premise is that a new virus (made up of a cocktail of religious manias
and binary code) will crash the prime virtual world called the Metaverse,
home to the best hacker brains and avatars extant, whilst also turning all
the Bogan poor white trash of the real world into gibbering religious simpletons.
A great idea, except the book periodically stops whilst almost undigested
extracts on the historical antecedents of glossolalia (speaking in tongues)
Babel and Sumerian history are dumped in the reader’s lap. Eventually
the book is resolved in welters of blood, exploding petrol tanks, and the
triumph of good over evil after the destruction of the nam-shub of Enki which
is a Sumerian tablet wrapped in clay envelope covered with cuneiform language.

Amongst the near parody of the hard-boiled style that harks back to Raymond
Chandler, there is some excellent extrapolation of future societal trends,
with the collapse of governments and the world being now being run by independent
franchises who manage law, order and commerce – one of which is The Mafia.

However, if there is a consistent element in Neal Stephenson books, it is
that, somehow and somewhere, editorial control has been subverted. It is almost
as if he managed to get the book back after editorial sign-off, and before
the pages were sent to the printers, he puts all The Really Interesting Research
Stuff back in again. In his last monumental trilogy ‘Quicksilver’,
‘The Confusion’, and ‘The System of the World’, there
is a great, admittedly large, single volume waiting to emerge from the sauna.
The three books are set in the 16th and 17th centuries, and tell the stories
of the ancestors of characters in the previous book ‘Cryptonomicon’.
The books traverse the Scientific Revolution England, the Civil War and the
European Wars of Religion. For an historical romance, which even has pirates,
it shouldn’t be hard work – but it is. ‘Cryptonomicon’ is
far better and two volumes shorter.
Of late, science fiction has become more dystopian, painting a picture of
bleak over- populated polluted world where people and machines merge into
a sometimes-violent synergy. However, the Metaverse of Second Life is far
more pastel coloured – giving people the opportunity to become the person
that they want to be in a world where there are few consequences – even though
it is a highly commercial world with an exchange rate with the US dollar.
It is a large-scale communal Sims 2. It is as much a mirror of society as
‘America’s Army’, the First Person Shooter game, developed in
2002 by the US army to aid recruitment, and presents a set of interesting
challenges in how far advertising can go. ‘America’s Army’ has
nearly eight and a half million players, of which nearly five million have
completed basic training. Great graphics, with captions such as ‘…enemies
can often be found on rooftops or balconies, not just in the street’
and ‘…the squad’s Automatic Rifleman prepares to provide suppressive
fire down the alley’, give you an idea that this may not be concerned
with normal concepts of interior decoration and patio design.
Ultimately both are political advertising, and it’s about time the two
virtual worlds collided.