>Are today's Internet addicts hooked on MUDs or MOOs? They are, kind of. The very same "addictive" mechanics in MUDs have been filtered and dumbed down into po

>Are today's Internet addicts hooked on MUDs or MOOs? They are, kind of. The very same "addictive" mechanics in MUDs have been filtered and dumbed down into popular freemium games. >I'm pretty sure none of them owned a house This is what bothers me most about sites like HN and Reddit. Its a lot of loud proclamations of the future from people who are more or less kids. They've never bought property, never been responsible for raising a human life, never paid 'real' taxes, never buried a parent, never have been in positions of leadership, etc. They don't understand the status quo, let alone whats good about it and what's bad. They just yell about how everything sucks and how a revolution is always brewing. The problem is that its rare for revolutions to be brewing, so they all fall for this dumb hype machine. Reading /r/futurology on reddit is cringe inducing. Everything amazing is just 5 or maybe 10 years away. As someone who has been reading sci-fi and futurist junk since he was a kid, well, lets just say none of that fun stuff happened and "boring stuff" like commodization of SoC's onto touchscreens and better wireless data standards are the real revolutions, yet no one was really singing the praises of smartphones or saw their potential. Even when I had a Treo with 1mbps EVDO it was seen as an "executive toy" by even the most techy kids because it couldn't play games. How wrong they were. The problem is that tech is almost exclusively a young man's game, so its young men who will be making the calls. Everything is filtered through the experiences and expectations of INTJ males. They don't have the social understanding to know that maybe people don't want to a tissue box sized device strapped onto their faces or that lots of people, especially women, suffer strongly from motion sickness illusions. Or that FP shooter "presence" isn't a compelling experience, even if its 'neat to experience.' There's a major, major hurdle to overcome here. Normal and social people don't want isolating boxes strapped to their faces. INTJ males do. This conflict isn't going away. VR isn't a shoo-in here. It has nothing but an uphill battle. Shame articles that point this out are often marginalized. Only Jeff's celebrity saves him here. Sadly, there is probably a real and major revolution going on under our noses right now that is ignored by HN and Reddit because "it doesn't play games." I have my own thoughts on the matter, but I really don't want an argument about who is the better futurist here, so I'll keep them to myself, but life as seen through the eyes of hardcore gamers isn't mainstream. Older men and women with kids and bills are mainstream, not Steam and freemium addicts. I wish more people could accept that here. If your revolution can't win over parents, minorities, and the elderly, then you don't have a revolution. I remember seeing the mockups of the first iphone and looking at my Treo and thinking, "Wow, Apple solved this. They made a smartphone grandma can use. This is going to be big." Meanwhile geek media was calling the iphone a toy, slashdot was in hysterics about how terrible it was (no 3G? No games? No keyboard?!?!), etc.