Sure, I agree with the basic premise of the article but we already had that, and it’s more complicated than the article suggests it to be. What the article wan

Sure, I agree with the basic premise of the article but we already had that, and it’s more complicated than the article suggests it to be. What the article wants are more MMOs where your identity is more closely tied with your in-game avatar, akin to a character in Ultima Online that you spent months working on so that you have enough of a personalization applied to bond with it, and also with the people you’re playing with as a result of having spent a long enough period of time doing things with them (quests, raids, RPing events, etc). Would VR help? Potentially. But the delivery mechanism is for a lot of people excruciating at first - headaches, dizziness, inability to sleep, etc. A normal computer screen usually doesn’t cause these issues so blatantly. As I have mentioned, I agree with this article. Although I think this is a solved problem that is simply dormant. MMOs shut down quickly because they don’t make money. This economic crisis will only make this more apparent. A non-insignificant number of people have grown up in early 2000s on MMOs, so they can understand through experience the psychological power of both healing and destruction (mostly through bullying, griefing) that these games hold. But I am not sure if the contemporary world of gamers can step back in time to a more innocent period of the Internet where it was more about communicating with people you’d see every day on forums, MSN/AIM/ICQ and less about random sniping comments on Reddit and Xbox. I also want to make it apparent to the slightly older HN crowd that we are the last generation of people who had a childhood without internet and always-connected computers, and an adult life being surrounded in technological marvel from them. Our perspective and experience is alien to most gamers today, so any commentary around this subject should keep this in mind.