Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Worlds as real as our own

I’ve recently listed to a talk by John Seely Brown (former chief scientist at the Xerox Corporation) in which he argued for the positive role games can play in preparing people for work, dealing with complex tasks while working as a team. He used World of Warcraft as an example of how online games can help you develop those skills. Well... I play WoW myself and spend maybe too much time online catching up with RSS and Twitter feeds, but the way in which we breathe technology has a somewhat bitter taste to me. A world in which we cannot separate real worlds from virtual worlds seems to be just around the corner. Even direct brain-machine interfaces are being developed while you read this. Are the nightmares of The Matrix or eXistenZ within our reach or have am I just been watching too much science-fiction? Watch this video. It made me wonder...

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