Apathy Sketchpad

You may remember, some time ago I put up a bit about Second Life, an online 3D world where you can pretend to have a social life by talking to other people who have no social life.

Well, all that stuff’s been back in the news again since then, mostly because they’ve found out that people with no social life are no better than anybody else. They’ll kill you and take all your stuff if they think they can get away with it, and of course they can in these ludicrous online worlds, because there’s no police force and no real moral reason not to go around killing people. It’s a video game. If you get killed in it all that proves is that you’re not as good as you thought you were.

Of course, the vicitms in all of this don’t see it that way. They feel like they ought to be protected from such people. They’ve spent years building up huge business empires in the game (because of course it would never have occurred to them to try doing so in real life), often with real-world value, and they don’t want their character killing off because then they have nothing. And yet, they very very rarely do anything about it. There’s the very occasional area of the odd one of these games that has an actual government and police force, but for the most part people just expect the people who make the game to govern it for them. That, to me, takes what little fun there may have been out of the whole thing. Watching societies emerge before our eyes could be an interesting experiment, but watching nerds live in a computer game that’s designed to be exactly the same as real life but less scary is just like Big Brother with worse graphics.

It’s quite an interesting situation, though, as far as I’m concerned, because here is a world that genuinely was created by an intelligent designer, and at that, an all-powerful creator who you can actually e-mail with your questions and complaints. And do you know what happened?

Some people were banished, and when that didn’t stop people sinning, someone had to be crucified.

You can read what you like into that.

A bit back someone sent me a link to WAYN.com (which stands for “Where Are You Now”). The idea is that you sign up and then people can contact you forever, thus rendering Friends Reunited obsolete. I don’t care about that, though. The link required me to register to see it so I did just that. It wasn’t worth it.

Now I’m getting an HTML email every month listing all the perfect strangers on WAYN.com who are planning to take a holiday anywhere in West Yorkshire, presumably in case I want to stalk them. They’re mostly nineteen year old girls. Frankly, it’s rather creepy.

The strangest part is that the HTML email also comes with a text part in case I can’t read HTML, and while the HTML part tells me, Andrew Taylor, about teenage girls holidaying in Yorkshire, the text part for some reason tells me, someone called Susan, apparently, about girls travelling to my home county, which apparently is Cornwall.

I don’t know what to do with these emails.

Well, so much for E3. It rolls around every so often and generally speaking it isn’t the most exciting event of the year. But this year something very odd happened.

This time last week all anybody could talk about on the whole sodding internet was how stupid a name “Wii” is. Now all I’ve seen anyone talking about is how great the thing is (and how stupid its name is).

We now know that the Wii will have compatibility with your old Cube pads, a fully motion-sensitive controller, a new Smash Brothers game, and so on and so forth. Which raises a question: what on Earth do the PS3 and the X-Box 360 have to offer? As far as I know, nothing. The PS3 can play blu-ray DVDs, apparently, although I’ve never seen one of these blu-ray DVDs and personally I don’t see what’s wrong with the DVDs we have now.

I’ve heard precisely nothing about the X-Box 360, and all I know about the PS3 is that it’s going to cost an arm and a leg and have a very slightly motion sensitive controller. (I also know that Sony considered this idea years ago and decided against it, but of course once Nintendo do it they simply have to follow suit.) That’s two things, and both ones that the Wii does better.

I suspect the reason for all this is that the PS3 and the X-Box 360 don’t actually do anything that the PS2 and the X-Box don’t, especially considering the PS2 and the X-Box don’t really do anything the PSX didn’t do unless you have more than one of them. Frankly, I expect more than that if they’re going to be charging £600 for the thing. For that you could buy… well, we don’t know because the price wasn’t announced, but at least two Wiis.

I can only assume that Sony’s stand at E3 was hidden away in a corner and nobody found it, and Microsoft’s display X-Box had crashed before E3 started and nobody could fix it.

We have to get away from this idea of “next generation” consoles. We’ve seen what happens when you ask Sony and Microsoft to come up with a “next generation” console. They only go and take it literally, don’t they? Just like in biological generations, the “next generation” console looks exactly like its parent only slightly faster, and it takes millions of generations for any significant change to take place. Nintendo, on the other hand, make something actually new.

Well, I don’t think I want a “next generation” console. I’ll have something new, thanks.