The Increasing Allure of the Virtual

Recently I found myself revisiting those ideas current a decade ago about the possibility of an "exodus to the virtual world" in which, finding playing MMORPGs far more satisfying than our daily offline existences, millions of people forsake this world for some other.

I have to admit that I found such arguments implausible, simply because economic necessity forces us to stay stuck in this world.

Still, considering the history of science fiction it does seem to me that attitudes have changed over time, and particularly after we had our first contacts with "virtuality." Conventionally the response we were conventionally "supposed" to have to the thought of a life online as an "alternative" to reality was suspicion and revulsion, in line with the old sci-fi trope of a virtual world as something used by an oppressive system to obscure reality for its own selfish ends--a tradition going back at least to Olaf Stapledon's classic Star Maker (1937).

However, in Ready Player One (2011)--published years after online, virtual life became a common experience--while the narrator piously acknowledges the "real," offline, world as our proper focus, the only place where, as Anorak tells our hero at the end, we can really find happiness, the fact remains that the adventure was really all about saving the virtual one which was the only thing that made bearable existence in this broken and oppressive real world that the book's hero and his generation inherited. (And the sequel, 2020's Ready Player Two, in spite of the twists and turns the story took, ultimately doubled down on that line, escalating the escapism with high-tech neural interfaces treated as, in the end, a positive development.)

It seemed to me that the shift in attitude implicit here attracted little comment at the time, or since--and that in the decade since its appearance, in which immersion in virtuality has only become deeper and more widespread, I have noticed nothing giving the impression of our moving in any direction but the one I discuss here.

I suppose that actual, lived experience of virtuality has done something to erode the old prejudices. This includes, of course, experience of the technology. That experience, it might be admitted, has not been wholly positive. But at the very least it has offered enough people enough pleasure, enough comfort, to make them rethink their prejudice--while I can't help thinking that this has been the more pronounced because of how the century actually did go. Every era has its share of misery, disappointment, fear--and for some, catastrophe. This is all the more obviously the case when we look away from the pampered upper strata by, of and for whom history generally is written, and to whom the media is so hopelessly devoted. In the United States, at least the twenty-first century has, by modern standards, been especially painful and discouraging in ways that are statistically measurable--from economic disaster that game-playing young people have felt particularly keenly, to incessant war, to climate catastrophe, and now pandemic, with worse expected on just about every score, and the media complex blasting the bad tidings at us with ever-greater intensity 24/7 despair for all it is worth under the pretense of "informing the public."

People are hurt, frightened, and made to feel helpless all the time (ironically, while often being made to feel guilty in spite of their powerlessness, which is of course making it still worse), and amid it all going somewhere else does not look so bad as it might have, perhaps the more in as the conveniences our gadgetry affords us--substantially a matter of easy distraction or escape during unpleasant commutes, dull classes, the tedium of working when the boss has his back turned, and so much else we find onerous--can seem like just about the only good thing this century has brought into the lives of non-billionaires. And in the process it becomes harder to resist a pleasant virtual world over the real one--and harder for even those who do not make the same choice to judge those who choose this form of escape as harshly as they might otherwise have been inclined to do.