Red pill, or blue pill?
Blue pill all the way, right? From The Matrix to Snow Crash, Neuromancer toReady Player One, getting out of meat space and living in digital, ignorant VR bliss has always had an appeal. Stuff the truth – give me a virtual pet dinosaur, a digital X-Wing and a no-pain all-gain polygonal six pack and you can use myactual body as a battery for as long as my cholesterol-packed heart keeps beating.
It all gets a bit weird though when, like myself over the weekend, you pop on a virtual reality headset, and enter a virtual recreation of the so-called ‘Metaverse’ which is meant to contain these fantasised experiences.
The game which gave me this VR-equivalent of the Inception mind-shag is the cyberpunk-inspired TechnoLust, which takes the point-and-click gaming form and transports it into virtual reality through fully-explorable 3D environments.
I’d been playing on an Oculus Rift, and the game’s core inspiration was plain to see – this was the cyberpunk dystopia of Gibson and Stephenson brought to life (with a side helping of Blade Runner and Ghost in the Machine, too), in VR.
I’d entered the meta-Metaverse. And that rabbit hole goes deep.
Meta-meta-meta-meta…
There were the faceless cyborgs of the classic manga, the neon billboards of the Ridley Scott masterpiece, all present and correct. But then there were also the Rastafari hackers of Neuromancer, the telephone line travel of The Matrix, the fluorescent ’80s glow of Ready Player One’s idealised arcades and the VR couriers of Snow Crash.
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Source: TechRadar