What is 'Real'? What is 'Virtual'?

Some people take games to serious and get competitive some rage quit some just have fun im talking about other games not just EU

 

Don't have time to post a long one but yeh... its a good question. I've been here 9 years in 3 days time... one can ask a question. What is a real place? from our perspectives it is somewhere we can travel to, can go into and explore and remember and share with others. I can describe it and others will know it if they have been there. A real place also changes with time, it gets old, decays and is redecorated and modified

On Calypso we have such spaces. These are not places in tomb raider or other single player games, places you visit once and cannot go back to or can't go to the other side of or meet other people at random in them. On Calypso there are many places still there that I remember from 9 years ago. Sure they have changed, a little more than I'd like in some cases but they are there.

Adding in the planets and the frontiers between them as well as joining up the continents of Calypso into one navigable area also adds to this sense of place. Also there are the people. The people who were there 9 years ago who are still with us today. I've known people in game who have died IRL too...

I think largely as a product of time (I suspect the graphics and things like day/night and clouds have helped it feel more like the real world) I have come to think of Calypso as a kind of place, a fuzzy reality I can only experience through a keyboard and a monitor... I think the interesting question next is if we can step up the immersion with the latest incarnation of VR... that is a question yet to be answered however ;)

Wistrel

 

Hi,

This is, in my humble opinion, one of the two legs of future gaming. "Virtual Reality" MMO's, sporting a lot of social interaction, long time participation, very complex game rules, even the use of real world currency. We had Second Life as a beginning, EU as an alternative, meanwhile more and more of this kind are available (EvE?). Most avoid the clear RCE factor of EU, that's quite challenging - but I know about quite some such games where RL money transactions are tolerated meanwhile ("Just do it, but don't bother us if it went wrong!")

Regarding the extended times of use, and the often low costs (or self-decided costs), as well as the high impact of social behavior, these games are perfectly suited for the first generation of computer workers, savvy with the internez meanwhile, when they retire. We'll see a lot of these ppl in the games soon, they have arrived already, with their spearhead.

An important word here is "sandbox".


The other leg of future gaming, as I see it, is consoles, or console-like single player adventures, or even browser games. Maybe with multi-player additions, but clearly aimed to casuals/ juveniles, like all these war-games that are flooding the shelves these days.
These games aren't meant to be played for years, they are "fast-food-games". Classical food for the casual player, play an hour this week, another hour next week, just as it suits.

Don't accept any kind of duty, don't accept any deeper social interaction, play when you are ready, no obligations. It's for fun, when you want it.
And pay for your fun, often a lot more compared to the above mentioned option.

After a while, the users may come to the aforementioned group. When grown up.

An important word here is "theme-park".


This is what I think the gaming scene is developing to. The "Virtual reality" MMOs are quite weak still, but I'm very sure they'll improve a lot - I see ppl joining where you'd not think they'd touch a "video game" even with a pincers. 50 years + ppl in such games aren't exotics anymore, they get common more and more.

Have a good time!

 

I don't know if there's such a thing as virtual reality with 3D-worlds, mmo's; it is simply reality. We've made this a reality over recent decades by the clever manipulation of matter. If there is such a thing as virtual reality, then this whole life is in a sense virtual; again, the clever manipulation of matter.
When I'm playing games like Entropia and others, psychologically I experience things in a similar way to how I would in RL, physically there are of course differences.

 

A few days ago I had a feeling why do I play all the games I play buying guns levelling up spending huge amount of time and money for when I am gone when my life is over all the stuff I bought and levelled up for will have no use what would happen to my account or guns and skills, 90 years is not a long time.

 

In my opinion games and VR only stand out because they are the more tangible aspect of a community that nowadays uses the internet to connect itself. Remember when there where those deep strategy games you could play by letter mail, there were people just doing this. Some games would involve hundreds of people, just like if an eve online would take place in the minds of some people just connected by numbers on paper.

But now these places become "real" at least visibly.

About everyone that reads here in this forum belongs to the group that does know how to use the internet, at least in some ways.
There is a division taking place (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_divide) and we that are on the side of the digitally enabled have started to build our own worlds and are mostly oblivious to the fears of the other side.

It is now more than ever that ideas can become real in ways formerly impossible.

But how different is a VR really? Look at some of the crazy holiday resorts (IRL), which are completely artificial. True the steel and concrete are real, but applied to a formerly naturally beautiful place, does that not make this place artificial?

If you perceive a place as "real" takes place mostly in your head and if you live in a big city like for example in NY where about everything around you is artificial I would not be surprised if the scale tips over in some peoples heads and they accept their virtual go to places as more real than the city around them.

What I would be interested in is how large the numbers of the people are that accept virtual places to be a good thing, because when talking with people that are afraid of the internet I am shocked more than often how deep these fears are. The oncoming conflict might be harsher than we are aware of. Some I know would want to withhold internet access from children until they are of legal age.

For me this is a weird notion, I am close to 40 years old now and at least 20% if not more of my life take place online. Without computer games I would not have become a coder and I always used them to relax and refuel.
Much of the things I know and care about are without interest to the people around me, why should a mechanic care about bubble sort algorithms?
The internet enables me to find people with shared interests everywhere so for me its oftentimes easier to relate to people ingame than to the people around me, not because of some communication malfunction but just because of the same shared interests.

The people are real and now the places also become more real, this is an evolution I am extremely happy about!

 

About the above post...

Wow.

And rep given

 

Makes feel im in Revolution the tv series.