Something I've been thinking about off and on since the early '80's when I predicted the emergence of huge multi-user virtual environments...
I've been trying to get the local Ballys to buy some of the new VR bicycles. I used them in the early '90's at a spa that had four of them as an experiment, and even with the crude graphics of then, they were still a BLAST!
In that version, you got to drive around in a bucolic setting of small villages, winding country roads and hills. There were races, in which you could play Lance Armstrong, and, perhaps best of all, you could invent your own games on the fly.
One of my faves was "bully the poor delivery vans." With great effort, and the peddle friction was matched very precisely to the incline and terrain and whether there was sssooommmthhhiiiinnnngggg in your way - like an innocent computer driven delivery van sedately making its rounds - you could force the van off the road, at which point the computer would get confused and the van would wander around looking for the road. I used to try and corral all the vans in the village green, up against the fountain.
Even more fun was "Death from Above," which required that at least a couple of the other networked bikes be driven by newbees, preferably female, not realizing the interactive potentials of the environment. I would take shortcuts to get ahead of them, and then perch on an overlooking bluff, high above the road. Then I would SWWOOOOOP down and crash into them at 80 mph or so, knocking their bikes completely off the road.
Even though there was no feedback through anything but the visuals, audio, and the pedal friction, by then they were mentally inside the game, and would respond with, "OH MY GOD WHAT HAPPENED!!" I would be madly laughing my head off meanwhile.
So, if I can convince them at Ballys, we can have races, adventures, demolition derbies, and, ultimately, perhaps links to both other clubs over the net, AND links to existing MUDDs, like the online SIM World.
So, what does this have to do with utopias? Wellll, if you have followed the gaming scene at all - and I am NOT a gamer, personally, but I could be persuaded - then you know that it is becoming more and more integrated with mundane reality.
It takes WORK to earn the hit-points or gold doubloons, or magic charms, or armor, or fashion dresses, or horses, etc., etc. Some people don't have the time or patience, but do have MONEY.
So a new industry has grown up, mostly in China, so far, or Vietnam, I think, but the work in this new industry is done by sweatshop labor at dirt cheap prices, and it consists of playing the games and earning the points, property, spells, whatever, and then selling it for either virtual dollars or real dollars. There is a market now to convert virtual dollars into real dollars, and it is not small - as in 100's of MILLIONS of dollars! The IRS is starting to pay attention... For real.
With virtual money or gold, etc., a gamer can then buy real-estate in the virtual world, buy the latest hi-tech virtual electronics for his virtual home, the latest in hi-fashion duds for his avatar, and even virtual sex, including, as it happens, with virtual children.
The latter has drawn abrupt scrutiny, of course, even though no actual children are known to be involved, and if they were, it is hard to determine exactly how they might be being harmed, as most net-savvy children are certainly not naively inclined to think of storks and cabbage patches in connection with the nitty, gritty of sex, and there is no actual physical contact going on.
So, pedophilia, slavery, torture, bondage, black magic, including necromancy, compete with people pursuing more positive lifestyles in the existing VRs, where tens of millions of people now spend many hours each week.
Not me. But then real-reality is as much as I can handle. It depends on how much you try to get done, I suppose. However, the VRs have begun to show some considerable positive benefits to the users. On the purely physical level, the notoriously violent "First Person Shooter" games have been shown to drastically improve reflexes and, interestingly, the ability to cooperate with others. These games are typically team efforts. Think football, with AK47's. The Air Force reports that, due to the games, the AVERAGE kid testing to become a fighter pilot now tests to begin with at already the level of a WWII Ace.
However, as the level of reality, both graphically depicted and in terms of the sophistication of the players, keeps going up, as it certainly will, then inherently non-violent MUDDs, like Sim World, will likely start mutating even more into what people really want.
Some people want social utopias. And the Sims, right from the beginning, were aimed at replicating and simulating real world economics. So, here is our big chance. Rather than imposing our social theories on our fellow humans willy-nilly, but essentially by force of arms, why not start building VR demonstrations of what we are after. If the theory is good and the simulated reality is reasonably accurate, then we can build little enclaves and counter cultures on line that will demonstrate that our ideas really could work.
Like the aircraft and automobile manufacturers who now design everything as a virtual model and get the bugs out long before anything is mocked up in real-reality, let's think about creating our dreams and testing them where it's safe. Then we can SHOW people what we're talking about. And, as people are attracted to the utopian VR, they can't help but ask why they can't do it in the mundane world of atoms and quarks as well.