Sunday 24 August 2008

Pic of the day: Actually I hope to get back to manga and anime another day, Light willing. But there are indeed calculated to be around 1 million young Japanese who are mentally unable to leave their home or even their room to face the real world. How did this come about? And what is the connection to The Sims and Second Life?

Persistent lower worlds

You remember how I wrote about higher and lower worlds? I know I had already begun to think that way before my hiatus, and I do so even more now. So forgive me if I repeat myself – if I have forgotten it, presumably so have most of you.

While I use the daydream as the ultimate example of a lower world, one created and sustained by us, there are intermediate worlds where more rules apply, but they are still somewhat malleable. Games are like that. In principle, even a game of chess or go is set in such a "pocket universe", but it is strikingly obvious these days with computer games so realistic that you have to look closely to say for sure it is not a photo. But the graphics are not really what I'm talking about today. Rather, the fact that these worlds are partially real, partially imaginary, and what this does to us who visit them.

One important thing to remember is that when you visit lower worlds, you are stronger. (Likewise, when you visit higher worlds, you are weaker.) This applies over a broad range of qualities. By virtue of being inherently more real, you naturally expect to have a higher degree of control over your environment than you have in your homeworld. I would in fact argue that this is the best way to sort such worlds vertically: The lower you get, the less limitations to your shaping and molding the world you're in.

Note that I do not at the outset define "lower" as "worse" or inherently evil. The problem is not evil (although worlds can be more or less evil as well) but loss of reality. The lower the world is, the greater the difference in reality between the visitor and the world, and the more reality we "radiate" out into that world. Eventually, if not replenished, this reality is lost from us and we become weakened. We become less real, and in time less able to live in the "real world", our homeworld.

Since these worlds are made by people, they can certainly be evil in other ways, permeated by a view of life that is destructive in one or more ways. Examples would be "City of Villains", "Grand Theft Auto", and to a large extent "Age of Conan". These are all games that are popular but which don't resonate well with good people, because of the things the character is expected to do or because of the general color or atmosphere of the game. But even games where you are supposed to do good will still have the draining effect, which must be taken into account. These are separate effects and are not on the same "axis" so to speak. They do not balance each other.

Besides the objective vertical placement of such a game world, there is the factor of immersion. As long as the game is not very realistic, it takes some time to get immersed in it, although this varies from person to person. Modern games are however very immersive, with lifelike pictures and movements and sound. With the latest generation of game controllers pioneered by Nintendo, the control of the games will also be more lifelike than when we click and hold keys on the keyboard to control our characters. I am sure the future, if any, will continue to improve on this. In addition to the immersive quality of the game and the tendency of the individual player, the time spent is also very important. The longer you stay inside a lower world, especially in one session but also over time, the deeper your immersion. And the greater the immersion, the greater the leakage of reality. The imaginary world becomes more real to you, but at the cost of of your own essence. Depending on how much you value that essence of reality, you will choose your worlds more carefully.

***

In some games you are alone in the imaginary world, although you are in a certain sense accompanying the people who made it. You will usually have some power to change the world, either in general or specifically your "avatar". It is not a coincidence that this word is used to describe the main character you control in many such worlds. The word comes from Sanskrit where it means "one stepping down" from a higher reality into ours, that is to say, an incarnation of a god or demigod moves down into our world. In a disturbingly similar way, we step down from our reality into another world, frequently with some imaginary purpose.

Once the game is multi-player, however, the purpose suddenly affects other people as well. The expression "persistent worlds" is usually only used about massively multiplayer role playing games and similar worlds, such as "Second Life", in which time passes even when you are not there, and where your accomplishment are also recorded somehow.

Real people are still real people when they are in an unreal world, but not quite to the same degree. "Player killing" – killing the avatar of another player – is obviously not equal to actually killing the player! It is still a hostile act, and of hostile acts there are many in such multiplayer worlds. Many people who would hesitate to insult you to your face, will do so in a game, even when there is no role-playing reason for doing so. This can cause frustration and even anger, which the player will tend to bring back into the normal world.

Yet often even more dangerous are the positive interactions, because they snare the unwary and make them feel a need to return to the lower world more frequently than they otherwise would. Makers of multiplayer games tend to encourage this within reason, since addicted players are unlikely to leave for some competing entertainment. Some even have in- game weddings! I witnessed such events in Dark Age of Camelot, but I hear they exist in some other games as well. Obviously this makes a lot less difference if you are already married to that person in real life.

More common than love interests may be the comradeship of a "guild" or alliance of players with a common theme, a common base and a common purpose. In MMORPGs, there are regularly guild events in the more active guilds. Players who are active and competent will often rise to positions of responsibility, becoming officers or leaders. In these cases, you will definitely feel an obligation to return to the imaginary world and may even feel guilt if you don't. Rightly so, since those are real people. In a manner of speaking.

Again, there is nothing inherently evil in this, and in some cases it may be good. I would certainly describe my Sims 2 project as "good" and I believe it may have a small positive influence on the average reader. But there is no way around the fact that time spent immersed in a lower world leads to some loss of reality, which must be compensated either during the play or at other times. Otherwise we are diminished in various ways.

What we do to retain or rebuild our essence of reality is a different topic, more related to what we do to ascend from the ordinary world toward the "world of ideas" in its various forms, and other higher worlds. I will not cover that today.

***

It is worth mentioning that this concept is not only known from games. One of the best descriptions of a lower avatar is actually found in the somewhat controversial book series "The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever" by Stephen Donaldson. The main character in these fantasy books is a leper, literally, a man with leprosy. On several occasions he is summoned into a mythic land filled with magic and characters and events larger than life. (This epic series hails from 1977, which means it must surely have already been in the works when the first pen-and-paper role playing game was published in 1974. It seems unlikely that there was any direct connection between them.) The summoning of the main character coincides with some accident that renders him unconscious for a while in his own world. Time passes much faster in the Land (the lower world), so that a generation there only takes days or at most weeks in the ordinary world. (The accelerated speed of the world is also a defining trait of lower worlds, although I believe one or two exceptions exist.)

The conflict between rejecting the lower world and answering its need is the red thread through the two trilogies. The series is almost universally hated by female readers because early in the first book, the main character rapes an innocent young woman in the lower world. At the time, he is convinced that the lower world is a dream and his actions have no consequences. One would think he would be aware that it would have consequences at least for himself... but how much is any of us aware of what we are doing to ourselves when in lower worlds of any kind? As one of the imaginary characters says in the second book: "Madness is not the only danger in dreams. There is also the danger that something may be lost which can never be regained."

And this, dear reader, is my sermon today. There is also the danger that something may be lost, namely something of ourselves. But there is conversely the chance, under different circumstances, that something may be gained which shall never be lost. Perhaps I will be allowed one day to write about higher worlds, if I live. But for now at least, this is it.