Investigations of a Dog

[Edit April 2012: I now regret posting this as it may have given trolls ideas...]

More on cavalry charges later this week, but today I’m taking a break from that to write about virtual reality. This was one of the many interesting things that Wulf Kansteiner talked about at the Institute of Historical Research the other week. He pointed out that we are now very close to the point where virtual worlds become indistinguishable from reality. Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games are increasingly popular, and have both a bigger and more diverse player base than the strategy games and shooters which are the focus of my (stereotypically male) gaming interests. Second Life has moved the genre away from Tolkienesque fantasy worlds towards a simulacrum of a more familiar reality. He also suggested that Artificial Intelligence is reaching a level of sophistication at which it becomes difficult to tell the difference between computer controlled and human controlled characters.

The discussion after the paper revealed a lot of scepticism, which is understandable to a certain extent. I still have my doubts about whether AI can pass the Turing test, and about whether the Turing test itself is really any use (there’s a whole post in that, so I’ll leave it for now). For the last 20 years or more we’ve been repeatedly told that Virtual Reality is nearly here, but it has usually failed to materialise, or turned out to be comically disappointing. One of the objections raised during the seminar was that gaming is entirely an audio-visual experience and is therefore fundamentally different from experiencing reality through all the senses. It has to be conceded that vibrating controllers don’t go very far towards redressing this, and that VR helmets and gloves now look like a quaint retro-futurist fantasy. However, it’s easy to miss the ways in which VR is already here, because the boundaries between the real and the virtual are becoming increasingly blurred.

It might seem counterintuitive and even ironic, but text based roleplaying games are among the best examples of Virtual Reality in action. Aren’t text games artefacts of the 1980s which weren’t even very good back then? How can typing “GO NORTH” or “TAKE SWORD” create an illusion of reality? Could you ever feel that you were interacting with independent sentient agents when “THORIN SITS DOWN AND STARTS SINGING ABOUT GOLD”? Well, if you want to take the sword, kill the goblins, and get the gold, then text is a limited medium and modern 3D graphics give you a much more satisfying experience. However, in many ways text has proved to be more powerful and flexible than 3D graphics.

Back in the 80s I was nerdy enough to play The Hobbit on my Commodore 64. If you were a really hardcore nerd (and if you had a lot of money), you could buy a modem and log on to Compunet, where you could chat to other nerds in real time. Using text. 20 years later, we’re still using text to communicate with each other on the internet, but it isn’t just for nerds any more. Even cool, sexy people like to use e-mail, chat on AIM or MSN, build profiles and send messages on Myspace, write blogs and comment on other people’s blogs on Blogspot or LiveJournal. In the 80s, home computers were a niche hobby, in which operating the computer could sometimes be an end in itself, but now they’re utilities which most people are happy to use without understanding very much about how they work. You don’t even have to have a computer: text messaging from mobile phones is a massive phenomenon. What all this means is that people are used to interacting with other people through text. It’s part of how they experience reality.

This isn’t even a new thing which depended on digital technology. Before we had the internet, there were letters and telegrams (and games were being played by mail long before most homes were connected to the internet), but there can be no doubt that new technology has vastly increased the amount of text based communication. The internet has also allowed new ways of communicating through text. Blogs are superficially similar to diaries, but they are public and interactive in a way which wasn’t possible before the web.

The LiveJournal blogging website was originally set up in 1999 to give people an easy way of writing about their real lives without having to know anything about designing or running a website, and to allow networking between people and groups. It now has nearly 12 million journals and communities. LiveJournal is right on the frontier between the real and the virtual. I first set up a LiveJournal in 2004, to keep in touch with my real life friends, but since then my friends list has expanded to include people I’ve never met. Some of these are friends of friends, and some are just random people with shared interests. I’ve never been as heavily involved in LiveJournal as some of my friends (I’ve mostly used it for flippant timewasting, or band promotion), and I have even less time for it now that I’m writing this blog. However, I’ve seen plenty of it from the inside, and it’s been interesting to observe how people use it. There is plenty of inconsequential fun, but LiveJournallers can also turn to their friends list for advice or support in difficult times. Users can, and often do, share intimate details of their lives with people they’ve never met, and clearly care about each other a lot. My friends list even includes not one but two transatlantic marriages in which the couples first got to know each other through text based internet communication. “Aren’t these people just freaks and weirdos?” I hear the regulars at the IHR Philosophy of History seminar cry. Well, I admit that they’re maybe not “normal” in the way that car salesmen from Reading or accountants from Stevenage are “normal”, but they’re not socially retarded sex pests or gun-obsessed neo-nazis either.

If anything, many LiveJournallers are more open-minded, imaginative, and creative than the average person. One of the ways this manifests itself is in using LiveJournal for roleplaying games. Milliways Bar (named after Douglas Adams’s Restaurant at the End of the Universe) is a LiveJournal based game in which players take on the roles of fictional characters. These characters interact with each other through the Milliways community, and through their own journals (players create and write a journal for each character they play). This is only a game in the broadest sense. Power-gaming Dungeons and Dragons nerds will be put off by the absence of a combat system, character classes, wandering monsters, and experience points. It’s as much about creative writing as about playing, and since all the characters have to be from an established canon, rather than invented by the players, there’s a lot of crossover with fan fiction.

As is often the case with fan fiction, the parameters of playing/writing in Milliways will seem militantly realist to anyone with even a passing acquaintance with literary theory. There are rules which cannot be broken. Continuity is king. There seems to be no place for absurdity, aporia, unreliable narrators, or free-floating signifiers, and no distinction between story and plot. While this kind of objectivism might seem to be wasting some of the opportunities that the medium presents, it also has interesting consequences for the relationship between play and reality. Every player has to feel that their character exists in an objective reality along with all the other characters, and that their universe has at least some coherent rules which will always be true. There’s a lot of room for research/speculation about why fantasy and science fiction fans seem to be particularly obsessed with realism and continuity, but for now it can just be noted that the Milliways universe is a lot more realistic than the limitations of the medium (which are almost non-existent) require. Rules are also needed to avoid players’ feelings being hurt, because at least some of them identify very closely with their characters. This is another way in which the distinction between real and virtual breaks down. Players can get upset in real life because of things that have happened to their characters. Relating to a point that Wulf Kansteiner made, memories of things that happened in Milliways are just as valid and significant as memories of the real world.

Text based role playing games are the point at which real and virtual become indistinguishable. There is no difference between writing your own LiveJournal as yourself, describing what has happened to you in the real world, and writing a LiveJournal in character, describing things that have happened in a fantasy world. The interface is exactly the same. There is no reason inherent in the medium why you would be able to tell the difference between a real person and a fictional character. In practice, Milliways hasn’t broken down the barrier to this extent, because a lot of the writing uses the third person and describes actions in the present tense, which is very different from the way that most people write “real” journals. However, the technology is in place to allow a virtual reality roleplaying game which appears no different from the interactions of real people (in fact one of my friends had an idea for a collaborative epistolary novel written in character through LiveJournals, but nothing has come of it yet).

The development of new technology was a necessary condition for this situation to arise, but it’s not a sufficient condition in itself. People who thought that ever improving technology would have to do all the work in catching up with unchanging reality were barking up the wrong tree. The real and the virtual are converging from both directions. Reality is getting more virtual at the same time as the virtual is getting more realistic. Culture is just as important as technology. When the media we habitually use to interact distance us from the reality we’re interacting with, a convincing simulation only needs to simulate the medium, not the reality itself. This negates the technological limitations which have dragged down attempts to simulate direct interaction between a person and a virtual environment. Simulations of tanks and planes were the earliest success of VR, because when you’re driving a vehicle, that vehicle is a medium which distances you from the rest of the world. The primary role of the simulation is to simulate the cockpit, a much easier task than simulating direct contact between a human body and a whole world. In the 1980s, even home computers like the C64 could simulate flying a plane quite convincingly (or at least more convincingly than they could simulate most other things). The SIMNET tank simulator used by the US Army is realistic enough to be a substitute for real exercises (see my post on More Games and Simulations).

Some people will still be sceptical. The internet hasn’t turned us all into cyberpunks or lawnmower men. We still can’t build you, or remember it for you wholesale. But if you take off the retro-futurist goggles and take a broader view, you will see that Virtual Reality is already here, and that many people have failed to notice it precisely because it’s so convincing.