We Live In A World Designed By Gary Gygax

Science fiction author Charles Stross is an old aquaintance of mine and someone who always has the ability to amuse, frighten and intrigue me all at the same time. The guy is just that smart. Witness this from his blog:

Sad to say, the political landscape of the early to mid 21st century has already been designed -- by Gary Gygax, inventor of Dungeons and Dragons.

Gary didn't realize it (D&D predates personal computing) but his somewhat addictive game transferred onto computers quite early (see also: Nethack). And then gamers demanded -- and got, as graphics horsepower arrived -- graphical versions of same. And then multi-user graphical versions of same. And then the likes of World of Warcraft, with over a million users, auction houses, the whole spectrum of social interaction, and so on.

Which leads me to the key insight that: our first commercially viable multi-user virtual reality environments have been designed (and implicitly legislated) to emulate pencil-and-paper high fantasy role playing games.

...There's no bloody escaping it. The gamers have given rise to a monster that is ultimately going to embrace and extend the web, to the same extent that TV subsumed and replaced motion pictures. (The web will still be there -- some things are intrinsically easier to do using a two dimensional user interface and a page-based metaphor -- but the VR/AR systems will be more visible.)

...We're already immersed in a neotenous society, where social adolescence is artificially extended and a lot of people never "grow up' -- that is, never accept the designated "adult" roles and social behaviours. Gaming is a pervasive recreational behaviour; the games industry is probably close to surpassing the traditional motion picture industry in turnover. Play -- historically associated more with childhood behaviour than with adultood -- is a behaviour that is increasingly continued into adulthood. And it has long-term psychological implications. Play is learning tool; young mammals play in order to explore their environment and develop strategies for coping.

An environment developed implicitly for gaming/playing, then re-purposed for acting/doing in real life, offers all sorts of interesting possibilities for behavioural traps equivalent to not understanding that location bar at the top of the browser window. The two general failure modes will be: (a) thinking that something is a game, when in actual fact it isn't, and (b) thinking something is real when it's just a simulation. These will also interact with a population who take longer to reach "traditional" adulthood (if they ever do so), and who therefore may engage in game-play or learning oriented behaviour inappropriately. [Emphasis Mine -C]

Now tell me that doesn't explain the Militant Right's fascination with war-all-the-time, neoconservatism and the "virtual reality" that the Bush administration promulgates.