Fun Inc. by Tom Chatfield Read Free Book Online Page B

games of the 1980s, my mind was very quick to project itself – and a version of me – imaginatively into the other world of the machine. It was like falling down a rabbit hole, or stepping out of the back of an ordinary wardrobe into a winter forest. And this combination of projection and wonder is something that many students of game design take extremely seriously.
    Intriguingly, the standard term now used to describe a person’s presence within a video game is one borrowed not from narratives (i.e. a ‘character’ or ‘protagonist’) but from mythology: an avatar . The word is taken directly from Sanskrit, and features prominently in Hindu mythology. Its translation in English is usually ‘incarnation’ but, more literally, it means ‘descent’, and implies the process by which a higher spiritual being takes on mortal flesh. It is a word that historically has been used to describe the great heroes of Indian myth and legend, for instance Rama, hero of the epic Ramayana , or Krishna, hero of the Bbagavad Gita and Bhagavata Purana .
    This may sound a thousand miles away from what happens when you start to play on a computer. And yet in many ways it’s hard to find a more evocative description of one central aspect of the game-playing experience than this notion of embodi-ment. It’s also something that has recently been highlighted by James Cameron’s $200 million film Avatar (2009). In this science fiction epic an injured US marine is given new life in an alien world by the transference of his mind into a specially bred alien body. It’s a futuristic fantasy that’s very much of our time, exploring the degree to which technology promises not only the enhancement of our existing lives, but the possibility of entirely new kinds of existence, and even of entirely new worlds.
    Avatar is a fable about the fascination these possibilities exert, and the degree to which embodying a person in a separate avatar can blur their sense of reality and of what it means to be human. The central character, Jake, ends up shifting his allegiance from the humanity of his original body to the alien race whose planet he finds himself on. It’s also, incidentally, a film whose creative process itself embodied a blurring of real and fictional worlds, thanks to the use of a ‘virtual camera’, which allowed the director to see in real time the digitally constructed characters and environments that his real actors’ performances were being modelled onto. As Cameron put it in an interview with the New York Times , ‘It’s like a big, powerful game engine. If I want to fly through space, or change my perspective, I can. I can turn the whole scene into a living miniature.’
    Such blurring has long been a reality in the world of video gaming, which itself draws deeply on the realms of science fiction and fantasy for inspiration. Between 1978 and 1980, a two-man team designed the first true virtual world – the very first ‘place’ hosted on a machine within which multiple people could interact. It was, for them, a natural enough decision to make it a place corresponding to the established universe of fantasy role-playing games – of swords, sorcery, dark forests and mysterious caves. This is the place from which almost all modern virtual worlds descend, and in many ways the very familiarity of its details is liable to overshadow the radicalism of its conception.
    One of these men was Roy Trubshaw, a graduate student at the University of Essex; the other was Richard Bartle, a fellow student one year Trubshaw’s junior, and now a professor himself at Essex. The virtual world itself was a text-only zone they called MUD (for Multi-User Dungeon) and, as Bartle explained to me, the motivation behind its creation was unapologetically ambitious. ‘What I wanted to do was make worlds. I wanted to make places that people could visit. Because when you visit a place that isn’t in the real world you can be yourself in ways you can’t in