Tuesday, September 19, 2006
The perfect world machine.
In class on Friday, we concluded our discussion of whether or not we would ourselves enter a machine which would, in essence, make your dreams come true and make your life perfect, complete with hardships, trials, and perhaps unrealistic payoffs. This comes at the cost of completely leaving the real world once you enter the machine. While this sounds convenient, there is something that seems wrong with this concept to me, and I will try to articulate my opinion clearly enough here for others to either argue against it or at least understand it.
My first complaint is that this is nothing more than an escape from reality, an altered existence. Everything that happens in this machine will inevitably be to your benefit in the long run. Perhaps what is the machine's greatest strong point is something I consider a point of weakness. I should not have to get on a machine to succeed at something that is the goal of my life. The machine is going to require me to make some slight effort at the very least, but the reward is false everywhere except in your mind. While this is the drawing point of the machine, the fact that it doesn’t apply to the real world and is supposed to be a replacement for the real world ruins the concept for me.
I would like to compare this machine to video games, as that’s all this machine really is. I am definitely not one to say that video games have no purpose, nor that they are all a waste of time because their achievements don’t apply to the real world. The major difference from video games and this machine is that video games perhaps stimulate the mind and offer a vacation from reality, they do not replace existence. Games are getting to be so that one game can hold a hell of a lot of information, and MMO games sometimes feel like real world replacements since there is a lot of player-player interaction, but playing a game should be just that, playing.
A game should not become replace your life and claim your life as part of its twisted little program and claim otherwise. Achievements that claim to be made in the real world should be done with effort in the real world. Perhaps you can’t reach the same level of success that you could on the machine, my response to that is that is what makes the machine worthless. Attaining real skills and succeeding at something should not be fed to you.
I feel I still might not have expressed myself clearly enough, but let me know what you think and I can try to clear something up or consider another point of argument for or against the machine.
