After the novelty-coated optimism of the 1990s, the ‘dotcom crash’ in the first decade of the 21st century failed numerous web-based companies and brought out new cynicism regarding the internet in both academics and in the public. On the other hand, those companies that survived the end of the first boom, such as Google and Apple, emerged stronger and became household names. Google produced a myriad of new user-friendly applications, among which is a particularly good example of the representational cycle between reality and literature. In 2005, Google released ‘Google Earth’, a virtual representation of the globe available to download to personal computers. One of the original developers, Avi Bar-Zeev (2006, 2007), acknowledges in personal blog posts the striking similarity that Google Earth bears to the virtual ‘Earth’ program in Snow Crash. In Stephenson’s novel, the ‘Earth’ program acts as a panoptic surveillance device, which turns
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information from the real world into realistic graphical representations. It lets Hiro examine what is happening in any place of the real Earth at any given moment:
A globe about the size of a grapefruit, a perfectly detailed rendition of Planet Earth, hanging in space at arm’s length in front of his eyes. […] It is a piece of CIC software called, simply, Earth. It is the user interface that CIC uses to keep track of every bit of spatial information that it owns – all its maps, weather data, architectural plans, and satellite surveillance stuff. (p. 99)
Unlike Stephenson’s original version, Google Earth does not provide real time information, but it does allow the viewer to examine realistic representations of actual geographical features and places of interest. Bar-Zeev notes further that while influences to the concept itself likely originated in several different creative works, such as in the Powers of Ten documentary films, and in Star Trek, Snow Crash was certainly highly influential to the developer team, to the point that Bar-Zeev attempted to persuade Stephenson to visit the company offices for discussion. Since its real-world inception, Google Earth has been used for a number of educational, awareness and tourism purposes. In REAMDE (2011), Stephenson reappropriates the concept in an ironically mock-modest remark, self- referential in its obvious lack of direct references:
The opening screen of T’Rain [the virtual world of the novel] was a frank rip-off of what you saw when you booted up Google Earth. Richard felt no guilt about this, since he had heard that Google Earth, in turn, was based on an idea from some old science-fiction novel. (p. 38)
Google’s success took advantage of the continuing rapid progress of personal home computing that had started, in earnest, in the mid-1990s. While laptops, mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs) had existed in the mainstream since the mid 1990s, access to information, still and moving images and voice technology was now no longer dependant on phone lines or wired or wireless internet connections, thanks to 3G technology. Apple’s release of the iPhone in 2007 marked a significant milestone in ubiquitous computing. Personal technology used to access the internet had not followed the predictions of the 1980s of wearable suits and goggles, but its portable, omnipresent nature had, by now, made it no less intimate. The emergence of social networking and the
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popularity of video and image sharing sites have strengthened the general familiarity with computing technology.
For the moment, mobile devices are not powerful enough to handle the vast processing power required of modern desktops and laptops used to access today’s complex, graphically detailed virtual worlds. As Castronova (2005) observes, the attempts at full- body immersion were abandoned in favour of immersion in the sense of powerful experience of a narrative. Since Ultima Online and EverQuest, dozens of MMOs have been released, to varying degrees of success, headed by World of Warcraft (WoW) (2004) with its ten million subscribers.6 Most of them have remained in business since their launch. Although the level of narrative dynamic and its restrictions to the gameplay vary from game to game, from WoW’s mostly linear narratives with players having little effect on the game world at large, to minimal narrative in economy-, exploration- and building-focused games such as EVE Online or Wurm, games, in general, have triumphed over non-ludic virtual worlds.
The most notable of non-ludic virtual worlds is Second Life (2003), which was directly inspired by Stephenson’s Metaverse (Sydell 2010). Although Second Life is, by far, the most popular virtual world in terms of published academic research, in practice its use is increasingly restricted to the academics themselves, artists and corporate or educational representatives. Instead, the majority of virtual world enthusiasts prefer the narratives of the ludic worlds. While the ludic worlds offer greater or lesser immersive roleplaying experiences by allowing the user to cast him- or herself in a setting-appropriate role, in
Second Life, at least theoretically, the user is assumed to remain in the virtual ‘shadow’ of
the real world. Fantastic features may appear, but they are treated as ornamental, not as ‘real’ in the context of the setting world’s own reality, as the case is with ludic virtual worlds. In World of Warcraft, a dragon is often a monster to be defeated, but in Second
Life, a dragon is far more likely to be someone’s art installation, pet, or even a statement
avatar. Second Life represents the illusion under control, a ‘safe’ immersion, in which the mutable environment is subject to the user’s whim, whereas, according to this approach, a
6 As of February 2013, WoW’s subscriber numbers were reported widely as having fallen to ‘mere’ 9.6
million from the ten million at the launch of the latest expansion in late 2012.
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ludic virtual world presents a dangerous level of immersion, which removes the user’s critical faculties, as he/she is borne away by the fantastical narrative.
In the literature of the 2000s, the ludic turn of virtual worlds has not gone unnoticed. A new strong trend of representing virtual worlds as games has emerged in the past decade, following Williams’ Otherland series, which came to a conclusion in 2001. In a rare instance of the virtual appearing in poetry, John Redmond represents a tragic childhood memory via a text-based Dungeons & Dragons MUD in his ‘MUDe’ of 2008, present in a collection of the same name. Charles Stross, also strongly influenced by his experiences playing D&D, employs not only the motif of a ludic virtual world but also many of the relevant tropes in the text of Halting State (2008), which examines the connections between the real world and the game world through border-crossing financial crime. The same premise of a crime investigation joining the real and the virtual occurs in J.D. Robb’s
Fantasy in Death (2010). Diane Duane’s Omnitopia Dawn (2010) envisions a game
universe, in which the players can not only see and hear, but also taste and smell the virtual. In Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One (2011), a vast MMO dominates the culture of an otherwise ruined real world. Most recently, Neal Stephenson has followed the ludic trend with his REAMDE (2011), which also uses the vehicle of financial crime, joined by the threat of terrorism, to explore the borders between the virtual and the real.
Elements of the ludic trend also appear in Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End (2006), which, additionally, heralds another new trend of representing the virtual as a graphical overlay superimposed over the ‘real’ world by means of spectacles. This graphical overlay, known as augmented reality (AR), also appears in Halting State and its loose sequel Rule 34 (2011), used in both texts for a variety of purposes such as entertainment, navigation and law enforcement. In the spring of 2012, augmented reality took a considerable step forward in actual reality, as Google announced its Project Glass: a computerised headpiece for sharing and accessing content online. Similarly, Google also launched its augmented reality massively multiplayer game Ingress for beta testing in late 2012. Played on a mobile device application, the player is presented with a map of the nearby area with particular locations marked for exploration.
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As the number of texts featuring virtual elements has increased, they have also moved towards the mainstream. On the one hand, texts of greater complexity and depth than those following the typical conventions of cyberpunk-derived science fiction have appeared.
Plowing the Dark (2002) by Richard Powers was the first novel to explore the virtual from
a non-science fiction perspective. Instead of focusing on gaming, the technology itself or on warnings of the future, this novel chooses to explore the relationship between language, the virtual image and the human experience. In Air (2004), Geoff Ryman asks questions about the mutual confrontation of cultures and about the role of the media in modern society. His virtual is part television, part internet, part hallucination, as globalization invades a remote village in central Asia. Following the strong connection between information technology companies and the economic growth in the 1990s, as well as the dotcom crash, Don LeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003) comments on the artificial nature of what we call reality and its financial crises. David Cronenberg returned to the questions of technology and the society in his film adaptation of Cosmopolis of 2012.
On the other hand, even more conventional fiction has changed its approach toward the virtual, to a degree. Rather than always representing fully outlandish situations in the intermediate to far future, literary texts about the virtual are increasingly set in the near future, within a few years of the present, or set in a way that the exact time is difficult to distinguish. Features of information technology and the virtual in particular can now play supportive roles, and they are no longer innovative enough to function as the main themes or motifs of narratives. Such features have become elements of high-tech, high-success society. Computing devices and data manipulation now represent status, rather than something unfamiliar and unsettling, as in the 1980s. Examples of recent ‘technothrillers’ featuring virtual elements include Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon (2002), Ian McDonald’s River of Gods (2004) and its sequel collection of short stories, Cyberabad
Days (2009), Daniel Suarez’ Daemon (2006) and its sequel Freedom (2011), as well as, to a
very large degree, Halting State by Stross, its loose sequel Rule 34 (2012), and Stephenson’s REAMDE (2011).
In 2012, Jeremy Bailenson, director of Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University, and Jim Blaskovich published Infinite Reality, The Hidden Blueprint of Our
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Virtual Lives, in which they discuss the potential of virtual reality. They argue that the
human need for escapism has always driven creativity and new media for that purpose, from stories to the written work, cinema, and digital games in consoles and mobile technology. Virtual reality, they suggest, is just another extension of that need. More recently, in an online article, Bailenson has also pointed out that another function for VR in the present day and the near future world would be news reporting. He suggests that in ten years’ time, people might be personally experiencing news events instead of passively watching them on TV (Stark 2014). The same article describes a VR experience of witnessing the beating to death of an illegal immigrant, a real-life event translated into a virtual news item, and the effects of the experience on the viewer. In November 2013, the popular science magazine New Scientist reported that it had now become possible to simulate tastes (Marks 2013). The article drew an immediate conclusion that gamers and ‘VR explorers’ might soon be able to taste simulated food on their VR or traditional computer equipment. In April 2014, an article in the same magazine discussed the new enterprise by the creator of Second Life, Philip Rosedale, called High Fidelity (Murphy 2014). The article quotes Bailenson’s assertion that much of the original virtual reality, as well as Second Life, ultimately failed because of the poor quality of the available graphics at the time. The article wonders if High Fidelity’s extremely quick rendering of graphics and the subsequent resemblance to reality does not lead to the so-called Uncanny Valley.7 In the article, Rosedale quips, ‘We like to say we are crossing the Uncanny Valley and getting away with it’ (http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22229664.000-second-life- 20-virtual-world-recreates-the-real-you.html#.VEJ-nIvF-A0 [Accessed 18 October 2014]). The implication seems to be that the users of today are more able to psychologically handle artificial representations of humans than those in previous decades.
In a concrete example of the development of technology for 3D virtual worlds, in March 2014, Sony announced ‘Project Morpheus’, a headset for the upcoming PlayStation 4 games console. Oculus Rift, already mentioned in the Introduction, is another, currently more visible example. When Facebook bought Oculus Rift for two billion dollars in March 2014, the official announcement stated that ‘virtual reality technology is a strong candidate to emerge as the next social and communications platform’ (Facebook press release, 25
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March 2014). Subsequently, the Oculus Rift CEO Brendan Iribe has suggested that such a new kind of social media platform could be a ‘Metaverse’ that joins separate virtual worlds (Hollister 2014). The term was recognised by his audience at the TechCrunch event at which he made his speculation, and described by Mark Wilson on Fast Co Design online magazine as ‘a concept from Neal Stephenson’s book Snow Crash [...] I guess it's like Snapchat or texting works now, but in photorealistic 3-D’ (http://www.fastcodesign.com/ 3030126/facebook-really-is-building-the-metaverse [Accessed 18 October 2014]). The connection between our currently available technology and virtual reality is suggested in an article by the New York Times technology reporter Farhad Manjoo as a key to the renewed interest and optimism in the commercial success of virtual reality (Manjoo 2014). Having visited Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, Manjoo argues that the public will embrace the new kind of virtual reality because he sees it as the natural extension of every major technology we use today. He suggests that it will be used for the same purposes as the current technology: learning, communication and entertainment. Further, his article points out that the development of mobile technology has brought down the cost of powerful displays and tracking components necessary for VR headsets.
In addition to virtual reality headsets, augmented reality has also been taking steps forward. In a January 2014 issue of New Scientist, Sandrine Ceurstemont, experimenting with the Oculus Rift headset, calls a version of augmented reality a ‘mixed reality’, which blends physical and virtual elements. Also in 2014, Google’s Niantic Labs published Ingress, a smartphone app, which has become an early real-world example of an augmented reality game like the ones featuring in Halting State. It involves several fictional personae and fictional companies, many of whom post in-character material on the internet. The game itself assures the player that it is not a game and that the events described in it – the struggle for alien portals for the fate of humanity across the world – are really happening. Players must interact with the real world, even if it is (so far) only in terms of covering the physical distance from one portal location to another, in order to play the virtual game. Although the borders between the virtual and the real are still easy to distinguish, for the moment, the beginnings of their blurring can already be discerned. It remains to be seen how the introduction of the Glass headwear by Google will influence this game, and many likely others.
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The economic and societal concerns of Cosmopolis, Air, and the crime-related aspects of works such as Halting State and REAMDE, owe a lot to Neuromancer and the cyberpunk genre generated by it. The early works were both fascinated by and wary of the new technology, which seemed to bend the limits of reality much like mind-enhancing drugs. The effects and consequences of drug addiction: crime, displacement, loss of identity, shattered societal structures, were applied to a world apparently on the brink of addiction to the virtual. From the antiheroes and dystopian settings of the early texts, it has been logical to extend texts on virtual technology towards with more contemporary, mainstream, issues, such as the intrusion of the media or the effects of technology on economy. While the days of the cyberpunk style are mostly past, literary narratives of the virtual, as listed above, generally remain fairly dark. Aside from their major themes, today’s narratives typically touch upon issues such as climate change, political questions, or individual concerns such as identity or psychological troubles. As will be seen below, despite its contemporary mainstream presence in today’s society, the virtual remains an Other, far more likely to be connected to negative rather than positive attributes.
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