Come with me in the twilight of a summer night for a while
"Only God could be omniscient enough to understand and even interact with everything in the system"
"God?"
"At least what I call God. Even thought no individual can ever grasp the system as a whole, it's still programmed for anyone to look at any of its pieces. The entire world exists in binary code and is stored in records. The world that we witness is displayed on a screen. It's not reality. We're witnessing the illusion of reality, what the Hindus call maya. It's really just a shadow world. But the system itself is alive and constantly operating every moment of every day. I call that system God."
I didn't write that, it's a quote from a book I just finished reading (see if you can find it
) but I wanted to share this particular passage as it conveys more than anything a concept I realised about virtual worlds a few months back. I was attending a talk given by an ex-collegue who had moved to work for Linden. The subject was on their online game known as "Second Life". The fascinating thing about this game in particular is that it is made from primitive pieces of data that can be combined by players to make new ones the result being much like the building blocks of life. The most important thing I took away with me after the talk was the concept that neigther the programmers, the managers, the players or anyone knew exactly what existed within that world which has been created. The company themselves have a database and they can look at any moment to see that component A is connected to component C but that in itself is meaningless. The fact that these connections actually result in part in the creation of a beautiful sunset could only be seen from within.