I've lost friends to WoW. To my perspective, they could literally be dead and I would have the same experience - I know they are online but they are completely inaccessible inside their game world.
That Bruce Willis movie with the immersive VR was a catchy prediction for the new opiate. Large portions of society are waiting for the chance to lose themselves in a deterministic, programmed world that is more pleasurable than their reality. It's terrifying to consider the ramifications of this. If you can plug in, feed yourself some poptarts and hydrate every 8 hours, and otherwise float in limbo being someone you love more than your real self, we're going to see entire classes of people disappear, just like my WoW friends that I'll probably never chat with again.
Caroline continued. "So they learn where the pleasure points are by hook or
crook, then stimulate themselves directly. And when they get it right, they
never do anything else. They get everything maximized, tuned up, and they just
sit there forever enjoying it."
"Right. Now is a creature that is doing that, not interacting with the world
at all any more, human?"
Caroline thought about it. "No."
"Prime Intellect thinks otherwise. But it has its doubts."
Without God/Prime Intellect to keep these people blissfully alive, though, natural selection will quickly check this kind of progression.
Once you short circuit your pleasure systems - which evolved to keep you alive and reproducing - you'll soon be displaced by a species with better self control.
> Large portions of society are waiting for the chance to lose themselves in a deterministic, programmed world that is more pleasurable than their reality. It's terrifying to consider the ramifications of this. If you can plug in, feed yourself some poptarts and hydrate every 8 hours, and otherwise float in limbo being someone you love more than your real self, we're going to see entire classes of people disappear, just like my WoW friends that I'll probably never chat with again.
You're describing the Metaverse from Neal Stephenson's `Snow Crash'.
But that is NOT what the Snow Crash Metaverse is about, and there are countless science fiction stories that do directly approach this subject matter.
Stephenson's Metaverse is very much the WWW with 3d goggles and a semi-constrained semi-realistic physics. It has people playing games, like the web. It has people mingling socially, it has people mingling for business, and it has places where those lines blur, like the web. It has people telecommuting to work, even, and it looks a lot like using a VPN. It has spammy ads, like the web, and savvy clients have plugins that try to identify and block those ads, like the web. Except for the extrapolation that we'd want 3d intput for everything, and the extrapolation that we'd want computer-vision cameras converting the upper half of our bodies into input devices, it's basically a very conservative extrapolation of the web, with only minimal changes. It's the single least far-reaching speculation in that novel; nearly every page discussing something OTHER than the Metaverse is way-out-there stuff (franchise nation-states, the whole nam-shub thing, man-portable fusion power (for Reason), smartwheels and microradar as consumer-grade goods, rat-things, it just goes on and on).
As for stories that DO actually talk about this (unlike Snow Crash), my favorite is God Is An Iron, a short story by Spider Robinson, that he later expanded into the novel Mindkiller. And not that I'm the hugest fan of Niven, but Niven's Ringworld has, as a side point, the same thing going on (Ringworld is the book that Bungie basically lifted whole-cloth to write the plot for Halo, ha ha).
Oh, and for anyone still reading this a week later, I finally remember the name of the book I really wanted to give as an interesting in-depth commentary on all-consuming augmented reality (which is somewhat related to the topic of gaming as opiate):
Aren't we programmers also living in the limbo of work and study to forget our nihilism? Or maybe it's just me.
The programming mini-world with its mini-quests and mini-heroes, disconnected from the cold reality.
And they didn't die or disappear, they just joined another group. It just happens that the barrier is quite thick.
But yeah I'm still a bit worried by what you say.
That Bruce Willis movie with the immersive VR was a catchy prediction for the new opiate. Large portions of society are waiting for the chance to lose themselves in a deterministic, programmed world that is more pleasurable than their reality. It's terrifying to consider the ramifications of this. If you can plug in, feed yourself some poptarts and hydrate every 8 hours, and otherwise float in limbo being someone you love more than your real self, we're going to see entire classes of people disappear, just like my WoW friends that I'll probably never chat with again.