07.23.10
Inception
This movie is fantastic for the intelligent movie goers. Quality acting, good effects, and an interesting story line. Whats more, in the context of the movie it actually makes sense! I highly recommend you see it.
Still, as an experienced creator of virtual worlds, the psychology presented in this movie was quite interesting…
Many years ago I started creating my own virtual world, known then as Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz MUD (and later renamed Gundam Wing: The Awakening). MUD stands for Multi-User Dimension, and is a text based virtual world where people from around the globe can play simultaneously. Each MUD has a theme; in my case, the game was centered around the world depicted in the Gundam Wing anime. It was sci-fi, and the main draw was piloting large mech suits.
One of the interesting draws for me in this realm was the fact that, as an administrator, the world was yours for the making. You could build vast worlds. Cities, continents, and entire planets. You could create the means to travel between them. You could create the objects that players interacted with, and the non-player characters (NPCs) that gave the world its true meaning. You could implement logic within objects to make them behavior in a specific way, thus making NPCs seem more human-like.
In a very real sense, you played god. You decided what to make, how it worked, and what its purpose was. I had an even greater role as a coder. If functionality did not exist to do what I wanted, I simply created it. I could literally shape the entire game to my making. For me, it was like interactive story telling.
In the movie, the architects designed the worlds in which dreams took place. Interestingly, it is the people who then enter the world that fill it with their projections. However, for the people who go deep enough, they can play god. They can shape the world as they choose, in real time. They can create anything and everything they wish; once this goes on long enough, it can be hard to give up the power and distinguish between reality and the dream world.
This is an interesting thought to me due to the inherently addictive nature of virtual worlds. It is easy to lose yourself in a new realm with different rules. And yet, to this day, we are limited by the technology used to present this information to us. We must use keyboards to issue commands and the mouse to guide a virtual player (known as an Avatar or PC), which is presented to us on the screen. Focused people can lose track of time, but there is no doubt which world you are still in.
So I suppose my question in all of this is, what happens in the future? What happens when technology becomes better and we can blur the line between reality and a virtual world, and everything begins to look and feel real? What happens when you become the avatar, and you see the world through its eyes? This concept has been explored quite thoroughly (The Matrix, Inception, and perhaps done best in Ghost in the Shell), and it has always intrigued me. Would it be a wonderful gift to humanity? Or would it be its downfall?