warchild
Charter Member
Searching through YouTube as is my normal habit at five A.M. in the morning I came across a few very old movies from the fifties; movies that were considered to be epic and great at that time. John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, Montgomery Cliff type movies. Then I noticed their average running time was an hour and thirty minutes. AA whole hour and thirty minutes. How did people stay in their seats for so long?? Yeah, I'm being facetious. Since those days, Movies expanded to two hours, three hours, and then theres Star Wars and Lord of the rings with over twelve hours each.
In the late 1970's a little company called Convergent Technologies created a Mini-Computer that boasted of all things, a graphical user UI, and a flight simulator ( yes, there was flight before Sublogic ), and in the early 1980's the first video games began appearing on Commodore P.E.T.'s and Amiga's. They were all ( including the flight simulator ) just distractions. Things you could do for a few minutes or an hour to break the hum drum plodding of daily life.
In the early 1990s a video game called "Doom" came along and everything changed. People started spending more time playing video games than they did anything else except work. The late 1990's brought Wing Commander, Privateer, the very first "Zelda" game and Star Fox. Let us also not forget Microsoft Flight Simulator 5. People were spending more and more time in video games than could possibly be imagined, except perhaps by the video game companies. The movement to replace real life with Fantasy was on, and divorce rates skyrocketed.
Now its 2020. The year the United Stated burned. Seattle, Portland, Chicago, Washington, St. Louis, and San Francisco. Civil War is on the tip of every tongue and no one stands silently on the sidelines watching the terrifying parade of chaos unfolding in front of our eyes. We have games like Elite Dangerous, Eve Online, Elder Scrolls: Online, a Thousand games that are all, online, and now we have Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020. With the advent of global lock-downs ( except for countries like Sweden and Japan ) we no longer have to worry about going to work each day. Nor do we have to ever leave our favorite fantasy, as major corporations search for a vaccine for the flu, and look for ways to track you and your health records with a chip implant. We become the computer.
The fact that MSFS2020 presents us with a world so real that it begs for VR and mods to make it more and more real till its indistinguishable from the worlds outside our doors is terrifying to me.
No one asked the world to be the way it is, but are some leveraging that world to manipulate us to become lost in our fantasies to a complete extent? I dont know.. What are your thoughts? No uncivil conversations please. lets stay who we are and keep it objective..
Pam.