If there were 100 people selected at random, 90 of them would have no idea what I mean in this post. 5 of them would understand and find it bizarre.

I am a creature of the virtual. Before there was an Internet there were BBSes.  The physical world, for me, has always largely just been the place that requires me to move my carcass between terminals to get back into the real world.

In another decade or two, it won’t be “the Internet” but something beyond it where I think more and more people will be like me – the virtual world is the real world and the physical world is just an issue we have to deal with due to having to provide our physical selves the necessary nutrients to continue.

A lot of people I know think of the Internet as a “tool”. It’s a thing they use to help them in “the real world”.  But for me, cyberspace (for lack of a better term) is where I live.  That’s why when something goes terrible (like the launch of our most recent game), it’s incredibly painful because there is no escaping it.  In Cyberspace, everything you do can be tracked, logged, reported on, etc. There is no “coping”. And “unplugging” for our kind is a challenge because the physical world is just so…boring. 

For me, the strengths of being online are in the communities. That’s what I care about.  I work on non-game software to pay “the bills” in the physical world and work on games (and skinning programs) to help build and create virtual communities with like minded people. 

I think in the long-run, human existence will become more and more virtualized. I even had second thoughts about our new house because, in the long run, it won’t matter. Our various sensory inputs will get their “data” from the virtual world.  I’m not predicting we’ll live in “The Matrix” or anything like that. Rather, it’ll be something completely different than what we have now, it won’t be something we can imagine, it’ll be something new and amazing.