World of Warcraft, Redux

World of Warcraft

I finished Neal Stephenson's Fall. It starts with a man dying, having his brain digitized and uploaded into a computer where he creates a digital simulation of a world, a world that has only a single island in the middle of an endless sea. Neal doesn't talk about this digital world much, everything is focused on our heroes' activities on the island, the bulk of which is an adventure story set in medieval times.

Fighting is done with sticks and stones (swords and crossbows), and the occasional magical spell, no guns here.  In the last half of the book he spends about one page out of a hundred talking about what's going on in the real world, and that is a hard science-fiction fantasy. It costs money to become a citizen of the digital afterlife. There's the digitization, and then there are computer systems needed to simulate you and your place in the world. So many rich people want to be digitized when they die that supporting bitworld has become a major industry on, and off earth. A hundred years go by and we have orbital power stations that feed power to simulation computers that are also in orbit. Asteroids are being mined for raw materials. Seems that every resource on the planet is directed towards expanding bitworld.

And it's really just a very fine simulation of World of Warcraft. The adventure story was a fine tale with heroes and villains and supernatural monsters but it seems like kind of a waste. I mean so much could be done with simulations of the real world, why would you want to spend your energy on a pumped up video game? Oh, that's right, entertainment is the biggest industry in the universe. If it isn't, it will be shortly.

You don't have to use your massive computer power to simulate the real world. You could create any kind of universe you wanted, with whatever kind of rules you liked. You could allow time travel, teleportation, becoming invisible, not having a body at all, being simply a collection of photos charging off in all directions simultaneously. The possibilities are endless. But maybe being as we are starting with people, and people are familiar with what they are, maybe simulating people as people is the right way to go. But why are we back in the medieval days?