Will I Still Be Addicted To Video Games?

By Chris Taylor

Jeff Bridges got zapped into it in TRON. Keanu Reeves reached it by means of a red pill in The Matrix. In Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash--a cult classic in Silicon Valley--our hero, Hiro Protagonist, goes there wearing goggles and a pair of virtual-reality gloves. It's where I expect to be spending my evenings in the twilight of my life, without ever leaving the comfort of my sofa. And--who knows?--maybe I'll meet you there.

What is it? It's a clean, well-lighted universe of one's own, built by computer but experienced through as many senses as you can afford. It's a perfectly legal mind-blowing experience to rival Timothy Leary's best trips, and it makes today's PlayStations seem as primitive a pastime as bobbing for apples in a barrel.

You could call it a game, although that word will cease to have any real meaning when this alternative world is complex enough to contain its own baseball leagues and its own population of children playing hopscotch on the streets. The people we meet there will look and feel almost as real as the ones we encounter during our waking lives. If you've chosen a multiplayer universe, they may even be those same working stiffs, except that they will probably inhabit designer bodies that are a lot more interesting than their own. Our quests, our goals will be of our choosing and will almost certainly not involve corporate mission statements or our boss's action-agenda items. Here, our presence is of primary importance, and the universe truly does revolve around us.

Impossible? No, inevitable. Three important trends are on a collision course: the growing power and wealth of the game industry (the 21st century's answer to Hollywood), exponential advances in silicon and biotechnology, and a demographic shift that will put purchasing power in the hands of a generation that was brought up on video games and sees no point in putting them away. Already, the majority of people who play on PCs and video consoles are over 18. Tens of billions of dollars are being spent by the likes of Microsoft and Sony to ensure that they'll still be customers at 81. The odds are in the video-games makers' favor; even Big Tobacco doesn't have a product this addictive.

How will we travel to our alternative universes? The most exciting possibility is to use some form of biologically engineered computer wired directly into our heads--an exobrain programmed to provide a better, more mathematically intricate imagination. In David Cronenberg's recent movie eXistenZ, squidgy pink packages called bioports plug directly into special jacks at the base of players' spines. The upshot is rather like what happens to your TV when you connect it to a VCR and press PLAY. Visual and aural information from the real world is overridden; your bioport provides all the sensory stimuli you need. Technically, it's just a question of getting the right hookups. If there's anything we already know from playing games, it's that our brains eagerly adapt our physical responses to the onscreen action. Next time your six-year-old plays Pokemon on his Game Boy or your teenagers blast away at their pals on Quake, watch what happens to their breathing and blink rate. One steadily increases; the other drops away to almost nothing. Their bodies are getting ready to fight.

Not that there's anything unusual about this; play is one of our most natural activities. Like dreaming, it helps us prepare for situations we might be forced to face in real life. (The U.S. Army already uses a Quake-style battle simulator to increase the weapons-firing responsiveness of its troops.) Imagine how you--or your business--could use a universe that mimicked the real one down to the slightest detail. Worried about asking your boss for a raise? Plug in the bioport, and see how a character like him might react. Want to see how well you could defend your home against an armed intruder? Enter your specs and have a go. Wary of giving your teenager the car keys? Let him drive around a virtual version of your hometown first.

"More and more, games are going to be about the player telling a story," says Will Wright, creator of this year's hottest PC game, The Sims. "It's up to us, the designers, to give them rich, open-ended environments." The Sims is very much in that do-anything vein; your aim is to micromanage the happiness of a suburban household, right down to the color of the roof tiles and the frequency of the bathroom breaks. In the future you may simply drop yourself into the Sims' house and hang out with them for hours at a time--a life away from life, a home away from home. Urban dwellers will escape their cramped confines by building vast Sims mansions in the cybercountryside; rural folk will get over their city envy by constructing a city of their own, brick by virtual brick.

What will make or break this scenario is the level of artificial intelligence found in the Sims themselves. After all, our brains were built to enjoy levels of social interaction higher than simply killing our opponents. We want to talk to them, to gossip, scheme and plot. Building computer characters that can pass our personal Turing tests is no easy task--but if anyone has the money and the motivation to fund neural network research, it's the game industry. "True artificial intelligence will come out of games first," says veteran designer Peter Molyneux, who should know. His latest epic, titled Black and White--to be released this fall--features creatures so complex they can go out and build websites of their own free will.

Personally, I'm planning to get my bioport operation just as soon as someone designs a total sensory version of the classic empire-building game Civilization. The task of supervising the entire span of human development--from cracking the whip at the construction of the pyramids to spearheading the colonization of outer space--should be enough to keep me occupied long past my 81st birthday. As Molyneux puts it, "What we're talking about is the ultimate drug. If I can build a world where you can smell a rose and be a god, would you ever want to come back?" Not me. In my dotage, I'll happily resign myself to the 21st century equivalent of a crack den with a pink squidgy thing strapped to my spine. Move over, Jeff, Keanu and Hiro--I'm coming in.