I did something tonight that I'd never done before, and realized that 21st Century Technology had raised the bar of human interaction to another level.
Over a decade ago, in 1993, I wasted a lot of time on my PC playing a game called "Wolfenstein 3D". It was one of the first first-person shooter games, but was actually just running around in a flat maze from a 3D perspective. As video technology improved, so did the 3D modeling that allowed spiral staircases, elaborate textures and lighting, with detailed characters and objects.
The original "Wolfenstein 3D" contained a warning screen about the graphic violence, even though it is extremely mild by today's standards. Yes, you might see low-resolution blood spurting from a Nazi when you shoot him, and his body falls to the floor, but in "Return to Castle Wolfenstein", you see the body falling down a flight of stairs, or over a parapet to the courtyard below, and if you kick the body, realistic blood will spray from it and spatter the walls and make a larger pool around the body.
Now, I was first exposed to on-line, multi-player gaming while working at Xerox in the 1970s, where I played a real-time version of a Star Trek® game with people located in California and England from the Alto on my desk in New York, using DARPAnet. I had even worked for a while at a place that hosted an interactive 3D chat environment, where people had a choice of avatars, or virtual bodies, that they could control as they moved around the various objects and interacted with other avatars, some controlled by people, but others by software, known as bots.
Unless you've been living in a cave for the past year, you're aware of multi-player, on-line gaming, and have a glimmer of an idea of what it's all about, even if you've never actually seen someone doing it. The difference between using one of the stand-alone game consoles, like Xbox or PlayStation, and a PC is that the QWERTY keyboard allows you to type full text messages to other players, rather than using canned phrases that you select from a menu.
Thirty years ago, I spent my lunch hours chasing and battling Klingons and Romulans located on other continents, using what we now call the Internet, with a $20,000 ancestor of the PC that had a black & white monitor. I say that to say that doing the same thing from home with a machine that cost one-twentieth the price, and was two thousand times more powerful, makes the experience less impressive to me than to someone who has never done it before.
What struck me was that I was doing something for the first time that millions of teenagers have been doing for years ... I was talking on the telephone (using a hands-free headset) with a friend who was playing in the game universe with me. By the way, I was in Washington, DC, and he was in Brussels, Belgium, at the time.
Since I had never played one of these teamwork oriented battle games with a stand-alone game console, I had never thought that the paradigm encourages players to form teams of neighborhood classmates, within the same local calling area, so that they can overcome the lack of a keyboard for messaging. It's as if they are in radio contact with each other in the virtual environment, so they don't have the lag in action that typing on a keyboard would require. They can concentrate on moving their avatar, manipulating objects and firing at their opponents, while they shout encouragements or taunts at each other.
That made me wonder about how this will affect society as it becomes more pervasive. First, there was telephone, that allowed people to converse on opposite sides of the world very inexpensively ... it only costs me ten dollars to talk to my friend in Belgium for six hours. Second, the 3D virtual environment with avatars allows us to play virtual paintball as we stalk and slaughter our opponents, or cooperate in some other virtual endeavor, either from across the street or on another continent, also for next to nothing.
But when you combine the two, you have something that is really more than the sum of its parts. The funny thing is, a lot of people are abandoning voice communication for text-messaging and Instant Messenger. This is because it provides anonymity in a way that hearing one's voice cannot ... you can disguise your gender, age, and nationality by typing instead of talking.
In many ways, the new technology has allowed us to remain more apart and isolated from each other while at the same time allowing us to interact with greater speed and over longer distances than ever before. But for those who wish to be more revealing and intimate over long distances, the use of avatars and voice goes even further than video-phone communication, because you don't just see the other person, you are able to cooperatively interact with them in the virtual 3D environment. Write now, it's pretty much confined to teenagers shooting at each other, or racing cars through fantasy landscapes, but this is only the bleeding edge, and within the next decade, we'll be doing more kinds of things with avatars in this 3D virtual landscape.
What's different from what we've assumed would happen is that the combination of the live audio with the virtual video has created something entirely different from what we imagined with video-phones, which, by the way, have really not caught on, except for the on-demand pornography market, and even that is only one-way communication.
Last update: 2005-04-29 by Dennette@WiZ-WORX.com