Whither Online?

I’m working on getting some of the stuff that hasn’t been on the site put up in the next few days. As part of converting over the KGC talk (still coming shortly) I also came across this opinion piece, which appeared in Game Informer a while back. So it’s now on the site in the Gaming/Essays section.

Anyone remember what cyberspace looked like a decade ago? There we were, all fresh arrivals in the Metaverse, dreaming of Snow Crash’s virtual bars and William Gibson’s skies like televisions on dead channels. We wondered if the Holodeck would require one of those newfangled 3d hardware video cards or not. If we were really old-school sci-fi fans, maybe we thought about Bradbury’s Veldt or Vernor Vinge’s “True Names.”

Back then, we dreamed about dynamic worlds that we could morph on the fly with a thought (or at least a twitch of a mouse). We had a lot of grand visions about really realistic NPCs that would move about the world like the ones in Ultima VII did. We thought maybe the orcs would be invading virtual towns because they wanted to, not because there were spawn points set up by the city gates.

These days, after suffering through Lawnmower Man and Disclosure, maybe our dreams are a bit less lofty…

Read the whole thing if you want.

I also went ahead and linked my GDC 2004 talk A Grammar of Gameplay and my Training Fall 2005 keynote Why Games Matter from the Gaming/Essays page as well as The Love Story Challenge and a talk I gave at a local IGDA chapter meeting, both from 2004.