The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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9:58am on Thursday, 4th June, 2020:
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I've recently read a couple of (fiction) books about players stuck in virtual worlds. Both have led to a successful series of "light novels" with accompanying manga and anime renditions.
Sword Art Online concerns players trapped in a virtual world by its crazy designer. They enter the world using some kind of helmet that intercepts their nervous system. The crazy designer arranges matters such that you can't log out of the game, and if anyone in the real world tries to remove the VT helmet that you're using as an interface it fries your brain. Oh, and getting killed in the virtual world itself also fries your brain. It turns out [spoiler alert!] that the crazy designer is so crazy that even he doesn't really know why he's done this.
I only read the first novel in the series. It's either badly written or badly translated, but I can see how it might appeal to teenage boys who don't really care about such things so long as the story is half-way decent (which it is, but I saw the ending coming a mile away, plot holes notwithstanding).
Log Horizon is concerns players trapped in a virtual world by methods unknown for reasons unknown. Players can't die in the virtual world, but they can be imprisoned and enslaved. The world is not the same as it was before everyone got stuck in it; in particular, the non-player characters have intelligence they didn't have before, and the physics of the world allows for the making of objects without having to use the usual "put ingredients in the crafting window, click, and there's your object"" system. This means they can make objects that the game design doesn't anticipate.
I read the first story (translated as a manga book) and the second (translated as a light novel). I don't know why it is that so many stories in the mangaverse need a secondary character who's obsessed with women's underwear and another one who's female and is obsessed with the cuteness of another, more serious, female character; Log Horizon follows the trend, anyway. The novel reads like a novelisation of a manga version, with sudden changes of point of view; whether it came after the manga or was written to guide the manga, I don't know.
Of the two, Log Horizon asks the more interesting questions. I'm tempted to read more in the series to see what it does with the NPCs, but I'm put off by the protagonist and his frequent bouts of introspection regarding his insecurities.
Back in the 1980s, I plotted out a book concerning the creator of a virtual world who gets stuck in it. Here's the premiss.
The protagonist goes into a diabetic coma, the hospital connects his brain to a neural response monitor, leaving him with a socket at the back of his skull. When he gets home, he hooks this up to his computer to see if he can. He nods off and finds he's dreaming but under conscious control. Five seconds of dreaming can seem like half an hour, so he's able to think at super-fast speed. He gets his computer to make a loud noise to wake him up, and realises he's the first person to have experienced thinking at dream speed. Riches await! To show what's possible, he needs an application to evangelise it to other people with neural jacks, so those who don't have them will want to have the surgery they need just to access said application. That would be a virtual world, then. He spends all his savings on the best computers he can afford, networks them together and accesses the cluster using his neural jack. On this, he designs and implements a virtual world. All goes swimmingly well, he populates it with sapient NPCs and interesting stories. He's a god of this world, and can change it at will. He polishes it so it shines. Then, when it's close to being ready, he backs up the character database and forgets to reboot the game. His account privileges are offset by 1, and he's now a "guest" instead of "god". He's immortal, but powerless. None of the executive commands work for him any more; sadly, "exit" is an executive command. He's now stuck there until someone in the real world unjacks him, but he's told all his friends and family not to disturb him for a week. He's going to need an insulin injection well before then. His only way out is if he can crash the game from within.
That was the basic idea (all mine, except Roy Trubshaw suggested using diabetes as the ticking clock). I pitched it to a friend who was a former book editor, and he said no publisher would be interested because too few people played MUDs to understand what was going on. I did write the first chapter, about 5,000 words, but there seemed little point in continuing.
I wish I had pursued the idea now, given the success of Sword Art Online and Log Horizon. Oh well!
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