A World Gone Virtual

Gaming Hamster is gaming. 

  This week in we are going to talk abut Virtual Worlds, meaning a world/atmosphere that exists in a virtual space as opposed to a physical space. Now, those who know me well will likely be expecting me to talk about videogames because I study/play videogames with great frequency and the subject of Virtual World lends itself so well to a discussion of videogames. Those people will be either disappointing or surprised. I'm not going to talk about videogames today. I'm going to talk about a movie.

  The film industry has made several entries that capitalize and explore the concept of worlds that exist in a different plain of existence, ex. "Inception" or worlds that exist in a computer environment, ex. "The Matrix." Both films are great and to a great job of exploring those various worlds but they have been talked to death and I have nothing new to add to their discussions.



  In the movie I want to talk about today the Virtual World exists in the internet and it wasn't created by robots as a way to subjugate mankind or for any malevolent reason. The world was actually created to bring the planet together. The movie in question is "Summer Wars," an anime, and the Virtual World is OZ, an internet institution that merges the social network and web browsers. Here's a trailer.

  Now, this is not a movie review. I will not be talking about the story, plot, or characters. It you want those details go watch the movie. I highly recommend that you do anyway. However if you don't want to watch the whole movie and would just like a shorter breakdown here is a Movie Review done by JesuOtaku on thatguywiththeglasses.com.

  I will be talking about OZ because it reminds me of an academic article, "Lessons From Lucasfilm's Habitat," that I read for my Digital Rhetoric class. The article was about a Lucasfilm project called The Habitat, which was an attempt, in the 90s, to create a Virtual World that people can live and interact in. In the Habitat people could create avatars of themselves to explore the world through various scenes. They can interact with other users in the habitat and interact with objects.

  Oz is the manifestation of the Habitat. Oz users create avatars to explore a world where they can socialize with anyone in the world via a universal translator. Through the avatars, OZ users can shop for real products, play games, hold business meetings, and control/maintain utility systems that humanity relies on for daily living  such as water and power.

  The Virtual World, OZ, is not only the manifestation of Habitat but also the logical extreme of the Habitat that even uses the word balloons to deliver chat communications. Everything in the descriptions of the Habitat was taken into OZ, updated, and used to bring the world together. The world is a 3D world with many different locations for the different services provided by OZ but that's just a graphical upgrade the biggest change from Habitat is the interface. Only home computers could access Habitat but with OZ any device that can connect to the internet from computers to cellphones to something that looks a lot like a Nintendo DS can connect to OZ.

  The world of OZ presented in "Summer Wars" is quite fascinating and a mirror of Lucasfilm's Habitat. If you found the concept of the Habitat fascinating but want to see a somewhat futuristic rendering of it go watch "Summer Wars" and tell me what you thought about it in the comments section.

Oh, and here's a cat.