Hello world. It has been some time since I had the leisure to post. But now I have a wordpress app! It’s the future. Jetpacks. Robot servants. A life of opportunity. Utopia or dystopia?
The fictional stories I read in the 1980s promised technological wonders such as these, and none so wondrous as the idea of virtual reality. Whether you remember the headsets of the 90’s or the holodeck from Star Trek, the notion of advanced technology blurring the line between what was ‘real’ and what could be experienced as real was a topic of much excitement and possibility. Of course, so was teleportation, but this post isn’t about that.
What I have been thinking about is the distinction between ‘swords and sorcery’ style LARP and the recent popularity of ‘augmented reality’ games made possible by the popularity of technologies like the iPad or smartphone. These games need such technology to create a consistent game world in a way that messing about in a field with some foam swords does not. Yet even foam swords and costumes are products of technology, artifacts that ‘mediate’ our engagement with our imagined world.
So I wonder about the role such objects play in our ‘pretend’ world compared with the ‘real’ one. Food for thought… (To be continued….!)
Seriously Learned 