A cursory glance at the Environment page of the Guardian online this week yields an article on the British government’s plan to downplay the Fukishima disaster in order to protect our nuclear industry, news that poachers in a South African wildlife park have killed its last female rhino for her prized horn, and a commentary on the fact that a proposed plan to cut maritime carbon emissions has sunk like the proverbial sinky-thing, due to economic restraints. In her 2002 book Loving Nature Kay Milton tells us that the market kills whatever it cannot encompass. The news these days concurs.
Meanwhile, esteemed scientist and author of Gaia, James Lovelock, informs us that our natural environment is off-the-charts fubar (not a direct quote), and it’s too late now to stop our forward march towards disaster. Our small efforts at bottle recycling and energy saving are futile, verging on laughable, and all we can do now is sit back and appreciate life while it still exists.
So, let’s say you decide to keep trashing the world, but you still suffer from an incurable case of Edward O. Wilson’s Biophilia, and you want to escape to an unblemished paradise, where tigers still roam and the waterfalls haven’t dried up. What do you do?
Get online.
There are upwards of nine million people currently subscribed to the MMRPG (massively multiplayer role playing game) World of Warcraft. The basic premise of the game is that you create a character, go on some quests, kill a lot of baddies and accumulate tons of gold. But the best bit is outside of all the action, in the environment. The amount of detail that has been poured into the landscapes, both visually and in audio, is awe-inspiring.
You can soar from rainforest to desert, from snowy mountaintop to jungle, from paradise island to volcano peak. You can hear the snow crunching underfoot as you sprint through it. Night falls in real time. It starts to rain and the drops make plopping sounds on the leaves. It’s sensual. It’s immersive. It’s so realistic that social scientists have written papers on the infamous epidemic of 2005, when an ultra-virulent blood virus spread like wildfire through the land, wiping out characters and their pets in the thousands; an event that took the builders of the game completely by surprise. It seems that even the bacteria are plugged in these days.
Jean Beaudrillard says that virtual reality is as real as whatever we currently call reality. Who am I to argue?
And best of all, once you have conquered, colonised and plundered the whole wide World, the gods bring out an expansion pack. You pay about fifteen pounds, and get access to new frontiers, be they floating lands in the sky, underwater cities, or even whole territories in a different dimension.
You never run out of land. You never run out of trees or oceans. You never run out of species. Moments after you slay a beast an identical one regenerates in its place. Nothing that you do, no matter how destructive you might intend it, has a lasting impact on the World.
As with all good epic battles of good versus evil, there are two factions to choose from in WoW: the Alliance, and the Horde. Which faction you belong to is the first decision you make in character creation. Members of the Alliance include night elves, dwarves and humans (who get a special passive ability called ‘the human spirit’). Members of the Horde include blood elves, the undead, trollocs and so forth. Different web sites give different statistics on the ratio of people who have Alliance characters versus those who have Horde, but it seems to work out at just slightly more Alliance than Horde members. In this largely pre-industrial world the motifs of the Horde include all the precursor signs of burgeoning industry: oil drills, black smoke, razed forests...
Yet the villains are so easy to dispense with here. Take out the 12 drillers, set fire to their equipment, collect their badges and present them to the mayor. Collect 3 gold pieces, and retire to Ye Olde Inn to manna-up and quaff dwarf beer. Job done. That’s nine million people accepting the ‘Save the Sparkly Lake’ quest. If Tony Hayward was imported into the game he'd be toast.
They intend…to make us dependable consumers of their artifice, which is to say addicts. They will do this in part by giving us instant and throughgoing fantasy. But the kind of experience they offer, through its allure and technical sophistication, is intended to control not to liberate. The consumer of virtual reality will be kept in a state of infantile self gratification, a kind of technological solipsism. As a result, virtual reality will tend to weaken our loyalty to real people, places, and communities and distract us from the real work that must be done in order to preserve a habitable earth and sustain cultures.
David W. Orr, from Virtual Nature.
What a buzzkill.
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