A Parable from Star Trek
In the two-part Star Trek episode “The Menagerie” (1965)—which incorporated the series’ pilot episode, “The Cage”—a badly burned and wheelchair-bound Captain Pike, Captain Kirk’s predecessor, is given the opportunity to live out his life on a planet called Talos IV.
The Talosians are able to manipulate reality and create very pleasing illusions—in fact, entire worlds of exciting and tempting virtual realities. On the planet the crew meets a beautiful young Earth woman named Vina, who they think is a captive. They find out that Vina is there willingly; she was once an old and very badly injured survivor of a space ship crash. The Talosians gave her the chance to live in the illusion of youth and health. In today’s digital terms, we might call this illusory Vina an avatar.
Interestingly, this species, which has the power to control illusions, is dying. They refuse the offer of help from the Enterprise because they fear that the Earthlings would learn the power of illusion and also fall victim to it, like Talos’s own illusion-obsessed civilization.
In the end, Captain Pike has a choice: live a miserable existence as a quadriplegic burn victim who can’t even speak, or be young again and live the life of his dreams. Granted, option number two is not real—but it feels real.
Which would you choose?
Pike chooses to live life in a virtual reality (VR) as a young and healthy Pike avatar with the illusion-enhanced Vina. At the end of the pilot episode, the head Talosian philosophically says to the departing Earthlings, when referring to Vina and her beautiful avatar, “She has an illusion and you have reality. May you find your way as pleasant.”
Today, hundreds of thousands of people are embracing the idea that the illusion may indeed be more “pleasant” and better than reality, as avatar-based “synthetic communities” are exploding.
Avatars and Second Life
Let’s say you hate your life; maybe you don’t have it as bad as Captain Pike, but you don’t like who you are or how you live. Would you escape from that life if you could?
Many have.
With one million active users, Second Life is a thriving virtual community with its own shops, currency, concerts, relationships and, well, everything else that the real world has, only on a screen. Technically, you’re supposed to be 18 or older, but if you’re 13 or older you can use Second Life with some restrictions. If you’re 16 to 17 years old, you can access regions and search results that have a “General” maturity rating.
Around since 2003, Second Life is getting a new boost with the integration of immersive VR technology. With the technology still in development but now being beta-tested, soon Second Life denizens will no longer have to be limited to 2-D; they can laugh, talk, play music—and have sex—in immersive and much more realistic VR 3-D with their virtual Project Sansar platform. And, make no mistake, immersive VR is where all of this is headed. Virtual and augmented reality will be a $150 billion market by 2020, according to Digi-Capital.
Wait a minute, people can actually have sex in Second Life? Yes indeed. This is what one Second Life user posted as a helpful how-to for a sexually curious newbie, including how to search for a virtual sexual organ:
Social details:
Technical details:
There are lots of ways to animate your avatar. One way to kiss and hug is with an attachment called a “hugger.” There are free huggers available. Many pieces of furniture (especially beds) are scripted to provide you and your partner with a menu of animations. Touch the piece of furniture to call up the menu. A pair of “poseballs,” one pink and one blue, will appear above the bed. Sit on them . . . girl on the pink, guy on the blue. Touch the bed again to get the menu and change positions.
Or you may find pairs of poseballs just [lying] about. You can use those, too.
To get the most out of cyber-sex, you need to be able to “chat emote,” to fill in the details that the animations don’t provide. Next time you’re in world, try typing this, without quotes: “/me leans close to you, brushing your lips with hers.” Most sexual talk is done in private IM, rather than in open chat. Not everyone around you wants to “hear” you moaning and panting.
Like I said, these are strange times we live in.
Future Tech Now
In the future, the digital world will evolve beyond screens.
And that future is now.
From talking forks to smart clothes, new tech, according to MIT Media Lab scientist David Rose, is about making the computer more personal. Rose argues in his new book, Enchanted Objects: Design, Human Desire and the Internet of Things (2015), that people desire direct interaction with technology: “Screens fall short because they don’t improve our relationship with computing,” he writes. “The devices are passive, without personality. The machine sits on idle waiting for your orders.”1
Yet wearable tech like Google Glass and the iWatch have not lived up to the hype and the sales that were hoped for. Virtual reality technology, on the other hand, seems to be exploding. From Oculus Rift to the do-it-yourself and affordable Google Cardboard (starting at $3 without the smartphone), VR is on the rise.
And now, the next wave of blurred reality: the hologram and “augmented reality.”
Unlike VR, which immerses us in a new reality, holograms create three- dimensional objects in our real-life world. And now the Microsoft HoloLens has combined the two: both virtual reality and augmented reality in an immersive holographic experience, a device so futuristic that it makes 2-D Google Glass seem as outdated and primitive as the View-Master.
According to tech reviewer Abhijit in the blog Informatic Cool Stuff (ICS): “The ‘microsoft hololens’ takes you to a forbidden world. As you move around in a space, like your living room, the Holographic app moves with you. That means you could have a Skype call that follows you as you walk through your house. You can also pin your favorite apps to the physical walls in your space or rest them on a table, so that every time you walk into that room, that app appears in the HoloLens. If an app is pinned to a wall, you can say ‘follow me’ to un-pin it and have it move with you again. You can also resize those apps, making videos take up an entire wall, or shrinking a website.”2
And, of course, the ubiquitous porn industry is cashing in as well, taking full advantage of the new tech. In a Mashable story titled “VR Porn is Here and It’s Scary How Real It Is,” journalist Raymond Wong gushes, “I found myself transported into a bedroom. Kneeling before me was a female porn star who was seductively talking dirty to me. I looked down and saw some guy’s muscular body. Well, that’s not mine, I thought to myself. I was confused. Whose body was this? Then I realized, I was now this guy.”
The End of Reality
The futuristic HoloLens was developed by Alex Kipman. A stringy-haired Microsoft designer who looks the part of hipster visionary, he held a mind-blowing TED talk in February 2016 in Vancouver.3 Decidedly anti-screens because of their archaic two-dimensional limitations, the scruffy Kipman presented a jaw-dropping presentation of both the immersive and reality-creating 3-D and holographic possibilities of the HoloLens.
During his talk, Kipman criticizes the way that we have become trapped by screens and describes a future world of interactive technology that is entirely immersive: “Today, we spend most of our time tapping and looking at screens.” Interestingly, he then laments the social cost of this screen enslavement: “What happened to interacting with each other? I don’t know about you, but I feel limited inside of this 2-D world of monitors and pixels . . . my desire to connect with people inspires me as a creator. Put simply, I want to create a new reality where technology brings us infinitely closer to each other. A reality where people—not devices—are the center of everything.”
Sounds wonderful—tech that can socially connect people. The smooth-talking Kipman has the ability to sell a compelling vision of this new “human connecting” future tech. During his TED talk, the audience seems drawn into his utopian vision as, with a wave of his hand, he is able to create a 3-D ice cave, complete with hanging stalactites and growing stalagmites that seem to emerge directly out of the TED red dot on the stage.
Seeking to create what sounds like a digital Ubermensch, Kipman discusses the “infinite possibilities” of a quantum universe and the “super powers” that computers can give human beings, as he again decries the limitations of being stuck in a 2-D screen world while we can now have “digital powers” to create reality within our own world.
Later in his talk, he waves his hand and a magical garden with multicolored and oversized butterflies and 4-foot psychedelically colored mushrooms materialize, seemingly from the imagination of the Brothers Grimm—or Timothy Leary.
And as with Timothy Leary, with whom I had the opportunity to spend some time before his death—and who also, in his later years, had moved beyond psychedelic mind expansion and was talking passionately about VR mind expansion—you aren’t quite sure if you’re listening to a visionary or a madman—or perhaps a little bit of both.
Like a good showman, Kipman saves his best trick for last: human teleportation. As a 3-D actual representation of a Mars landscape appears on stage surrounding him, Kipman looks at the audience and says: “I invite you to experience, for the first time anywhere in the world, here on the TED stage, a real life holographic teleportation between me and my friend Dr. Jeffrey Norris from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.”
And with that, a smiling, casually dressed Jeff Norris—also wearing a HoloLens, materializes on stage in the virtual Mars landscape; the effect leaves me feeling like I’m watching a Chris Angel illusion. The holographic-yet-solid-looking Norris goes on to explain that he’s actually “in three places. I’m standing in a room across the street while I’m standing on the stage with you while I’m standing on Mars 100 million miles away.”
Amazing as it all seems, it’s important to keep in mind that, fanciful assertions aside, the biological Dr. Norris is actually in only one place: In that room across the street from the TED talk; the other two holographic Norrises are essentially CGI effects superimposed on a virtual landscape. But it’s certainly an impressive feat nonetheless, awe-inspiring for the sheer technical wizardry involved.
Kipman ends his talk with a humanistic flourish: ‘I dream of this future every single day. I take inspiration from our ancestors who interacted, communicated and worked together. We are all beginning to build technology that will return us to the humanity that brought us to where we are today. Technology that will let us stop living inside this 2-D world of monitors and pixels and let us start remembering what it feels like to live in our 3-D world.”
It’s an odd vision; using technology to “remember” what if feels like to live in our 3-D world when we actually do live in a 3-D world that doesn’t even require Kipman’s HoloLens to experience. And, ironically, it has been technology that has immersed us in the dreaded 2-D screen world that Kipman laments. We should also keep in mind that the illusion that the HoloLens creates—as technically brilliant and visually stunning as it may be—and it is all that—is still a CGI effect—a computer generated image masquerading as reality.
After watching Kipman talk, I am left wondering if I’ve just seen a visionary or a madman who will destroy the very essence of humanity with his VR crusade. I can’t help but think again of poor Captain Pike and the Talosians; is Kipman’s illusory world the one that we should all be aspiring to create and live in? Or, like the Talosians, is it the one that will decay our species? My fear is that far too many will become lost and seduced by the siren song of that VR illusion as their life in this 3-D plane of existence withers and dies.
Welcome to the Matrix. The future is now.
e-Athletes
It looks like a typical college pep rally: enthusiastic cheerleaders jumping up and down, leading the assembled students in a series of whoops and cheers; screaming students packed into bleachers as the various varsity teams are announced and enter the gymnasium to thunderous applause.
But this pep rally is unlike any that has ever occurred on any college campus before. This rally features one particular varsity team that is a first of its kind anywhere in the world: the first college varsity team of e-athletes—that’s right, video gamers—all of whom are attending college on athletic scholarships.
Administrators at Robert Morris University, a small college in Chicago, have decided that they want to be ahead of the curve in the booming world of competitive “e-sports,” a growing phenomenon in which professional e-athletes now play video games in front of thousands of adoring fans in crowded arenas like the Staples Center in Los Angeles, earning high-six-figure salaries.
Yes: there are people actually getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to play video games competitively.
At the Robert Morris pep rally, after the lacrosse and football teams have been announced in a frenzied auditorium and come out running and high-fiving each other, the school’s e-team is announced, also to very loud applause. At this point, a motley assortment of 30 young people, who all look as if they might be auditioning for a Revenge of the Nerds sequel, come sheepishly and self-consciously marching out.
Kurt Melcher, Robert Morris’s associate athletic director, takes the microphone and, while gesturing to the e-team, proudly boasts to the assembled student body: “We were able to recruit some very, very good players. Some of our top players are rated in the top .02 percent of all players in North America.” He then walks down the line of the e-team, slapping high-fives with young men who seem uncomfortable and unaccustomed to this sports ritual.4
Video gaming as a competitive sport has turned into a big-money business. In 2015 SuperData Research estimated that the global e-sports industry had generated revenue of $748.8 million that year but is anticipated to reach 1.9 billion by 2018.5 While different games hold high-purse tournaments where cash prizes can exceed $1 million, the kings of the hill are the fantasy games League of Legends and DOTA (Defense of the Ancients), whose teams compete against other teams in mythical strategy games.
With a rabidly loyal fan base, the League of Legends world championships sold out the Staples Center in 2013. At these arena tournaments, tens of thousands of screaming gaming devotees pay to watch a handful of players compete on an elevated stage while their video screens are magnified on large projector screens so that fans can watch their every move. Top players are treated like rock stars, receiving not only great sums of money but product-endorsement deals as well.
E-sports have exploded globally in the last five years, but this is not an entirely new phenomenon. We can trace its roots back to the 1990s in South Korea, where the growth of e-sports was influenced by the mass building of broadband Internet networks following the 1997 Asian financial crisis.
That financial crisis also brought about a very high unemployment rate, which caused large numbers of Koreans to look for things to do while out of work. Thus, e-sports were born. The Korean e-Sports Association, an arm of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, was founded in 2000 to promote and regulate the controversial, fledgling sport, which was often played in mammoth cybercafes.
Then, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, e-sports experienced phenomenal global growth, in both viewership and prize money; although there had been large tournaments, the number and scope of tournaments have increased significantly since the turn of the twenty-first century, going from about ten tournaments in 2000 to about 260 in 2010.
The rise of an actual professional video gaming circuit has done several things for the lives of everyday teenage gamers. I can say that in my own experience of having worked with teenage gamers over the past decade, the industry has helped to incentivize those teens’ continued and obsessive play, feeding their hopes that they too may join the elite ranks of the paid pros. Just five years ago, it would have seemed an expression of pure fantasy for a teenager to say, “I want to be a professional video gamer.” Now, while unlikely, it is possible. So in the mind of the obsessed kid playing video games in his room for hours on end, he’s now “in training.”
Years ago, when I would facilitate meetings between frustrated parents and their gaming-obsessed kids, the frazzled parents would cry some version of: “What are you going to do with your future if all you do is play video games all day long while you flunk out of school!” The usual reply from the kid was either a shrug of the shoulders or, from the more ambitious, “I’m going to be a game-tester for the gaming companies!” Invariably, the parents would look down in despair.
I have found this scenario to be similar to those of kids in past generations who dreamed of becoming pro athletes, musicians or actors, however statistically unrealistic those dreams may or may not have been. For years, parents would often encourage their kids to dream big but keep their feet on the ground and do well in school so that they could have a plan B—just in case.
And now, just like kids who aspire to be traditional pro athletes, the video gamers have their own big-money heroes, the Michael Jordans of the e-world, whom they can tell their parents they want to emulate. Along with ‘I wanna be like Mike” or “bend it like Beckham,” we now have “I wanna game like Dendi” (i.e., Danil “Dendi” Ishutin, a popular 26-year-old Ukrainian player who has made over half a million dollars gaming).
Beyond competing in huge tournaments that sell out arenas, enterprising gamers now also have Twitch, the online streaming site through which gamers can have their own channels and accrue subscribers who are willing to pay $4.99 a month to watch them play.
Twitch launched in 2011 with a simple premise: that the entertainment value of—as well as the ability to monetize—video game play comes not just from playing but also from watching others play and talking about games. Twitch quickly became the top video-game-streaming site, drawing more live Internet traffic than traditional sports competitors such as ESPN, Major League Baseball and WWE.6
With 60 million monthly unique visitors, each spending almost two hours on the site daily, Twitch is attractive to advertisers eager to connect with its audience of mostly Generation Y males who aren’t reading newspapers or watching television. Amazon.com certainly agreed—they shelled out almost $1 billion ($970 million to be exact) to buy the site in 2014.
While some gamers with channels on Twitch struggle to make enough change to buy their weekly supply of Mountain Dew, others make annual incomes in the low six figures, having achieved the video gamer’s dream: sitting at home and playing video games while others pay to watch. According to my gaming clients, the key to success on Twitch is either displaying an entertaining personality while you play or being a well-known strategist from whom viewers can learn.
Still others have hit a grand slam in monetizing their gaming. Take 26-year-old Swedish gamer PewDiePie. Born Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg, he took a leap of faith in 2011, when he abandoned a degree in industrial economics and technology in order to focus on his burgeoning YouTube channel. His YouTube clips are what’s known as “Let’s Play” commentaries: entertaining walk-throughs of video games that have grown increasingly popular.
But his parents were not thrilled with this career turnaround; angry that he would give up on his academics, they cut him off financially, after which he went to work at a hot dog stand in order to fund his videos. PewDiePie soon gathered a following online, and in 2012 his channel surpassed one million subscribers. Now, with over 40 million subscribers and ten billion views, he makes an estimated $4 million a year from advertisements and endorsements.
What can parents now say when their kid says: “Mom, Dad, I want to be the next PewDiePie”? In the new, shifting media landscape of the digital age, he might have a better shot at YouTube stardom than at being, say, a book editor.
One of my obsessed video-game-playing clients, “Eric,” wants to bypass college for several years so that he can train and give professional gaming his best shot. When his flummoxed father tried to talk him out of it, the young man pointed out that his dad, too, had once had a dream—playing pro baseball—and had also bypassed college in order to pursue it. The father, in fact, had played minor league ball. How is this different? Eric asked.
After that exchange, the father saw his son’s situation in a different light and became more accepting of Eric’s dream of playing video games professionally.
Unfortunately, the very bright Eric was failing most of his classes because of his training. And while people can become rather obsessive about sports, they don’t usually develop a whole host of clinical disorders as a result of playing baseball.
Nevertheless, Eric is an articulate advocate for what the gaming experience represents for his generation. He asked me to view the documentary Free to Play (2014) so that I might better understand this new professional gaming culture. The very well-made film, with a guest appearance by pro basketball player and video game enthusiast Jeremy Lin, follows three top gamers as they pursue their dream of winning the DOTA 2 championship. The compelling film paints a sympathetic and appealing picture of both gamers and the gaming culture.
But interestingly, when I looked closely at the credits, I saw that the film was made by the Valve Corporation—a video game company and the makers of DOTA 2.