Remember, we haven’t evolved from
Remember, we haven’t evolved from apes, we’re evolving *as* apes. My favorite two lines from a New Yorker piece on the virtual world Ultima Online:
Considered as an inadvertent and largely unsupervised experiment, U.O. raises questions about whether people can manage to coexist peacefully even when they don’t really exist….
Still, moving the game online has not been without its costs. In the original Ultima games, the player might have been all alone, but he did get to be the hero. In U.O., the player has to struggle for recognition. “Playing a virtual-world game takes some getting used to,” Garriott told me. “You have to realize that the world is what you make of it. Unfortunately, that means most likely you’re going to have a relatively mediocre life.”
As my friend Xander Blakely said (butchering Thoreau): “The mass of virtual men live virtual lives of quiet virtual desperation.”
The author, Elizabeth Kolbert, also has an online-only interview.