Alright, let me assert right up front that none of us, even the youngest of the young, are not going to be around to play it, but I have a pretty good track record at predicting these future developments. Back in 1998 I started an online children's publication company with a young novelist. We called it Chapter & Verse and had to build the whole site from scratch since no one else thought it was a good idea. Then Amazon and Barnes and Nobels swooped in, bye bye C&V. Also, I was developing online courses years before the pandemic pushed education that way. More recently, I was exploring marketing my images as Non-Fungible Tokens - NFTs - at least a couple of years before Dolly, and other less endowed pop and sports stars busted the field wide open. Sorry, I couldn’t resist.
So why aren’t I as rich as Elon Musk? Well, that’s pretty simple. My strength is predicting. When it comes to taking the idea to market? The whole business side of things? Pretty clueless I’m afraid. But that isn’t a problem with this concept since, as I said, we won’t be around to play it. You know how prognosticators are always saying “So perhaps in 30 years, this that or the other thing, may become commonplace?” This is more like 300 years, if then.
But let’s play with the idea.
First, we need to focus on the multiverse. Yup, here I go again. But I have been talking about the multiverse long before the silly movie about a multiverse of madness came out. In truth, it may not be silly, I haven’t seen it. But the promos seem to be pushing PT Barnum's assertion that you could never go broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
But to clarify, and greatly simplify, there are three dominant flavors of ideas about the multiverse:
Flavor one asserts that our "here and now" universe is just one of a bunch of universes that all came into being simultaneously at the Big Bang and have been independently floating off around in spacetime ever since.
Flavor two has little baby universes growing out of those independent universes, initially sharing characteristics with their parents, but eventually popping off to go their own way.
Flavor three, and the one I like best, and upon which my ultimate video game depends, is the “many worlds” version. You can visualize this version by looking at a pine tree. The tree has a central trunk from which other branches grow. The cool thing in this flavor of the multiverse is that when we make significant choices in our lives we determine the primary direction of the central trunk of our “here and now” universe. But all those other choices that we did not make - the paths not taken, if you will - branch out and continue off in “another world” version of what our life would have been had we made that choice. Whew.
OK. So here is how the video game would work, and the challenges that cause me to posit that it will be a long, long time coming. First, we would have to determine the bottom of the tree, the “where it all began point” of our particular "many worlds." Logically this would be when we were born, and could begin to make independent choices. Then the game would have to move on up the tree to get an understanding of each branch of the tree - each “choice point” that, in addition to the choice we made leading to the "here and now" around us right now, set some new worlds spinning off our central trunk - the paths we did not take. I talked about this a bit in the last post where in one world I became a forest ranger, and in another married my 6th grade sweetheart, remember? All of those "paths not taken" would be contained in the ultimate video game - the UVG. Or maybe better, UVVG for the "ultimate virtual video game" because, the UVVG would allow you to visit each of those many worlds, follow each of the paths not taken, while still returning to the “real here and now” in which we actually exist.
Or not. And that “or not” is why I push my game out centuries in the future, because without that default to your “real here and now” the game does begin to take on shades of psychosis with an accompanying potential for addiction that makes fentanyl seem like MMs. I mean odds are that as we traipse around in those very real seeming "many worlds" we are going to find one or many alternative worlds that seem quite preferable to the one we currently inhabit. Perhaps a "perfect world!" So why not stay? Well, at the moment my thinking is we cannot stay because we aren’t really there. It’s a game, an artificial construction. Maybe like Scrooge in the George C. Scott 1984 A Christmas Carol movie - my favorite version - you would "be there", but nobody in that world could see you or interact with you. And at some point you have to take off the VR googles, or the batteries run out, or something, and the UVVG ceases to function. But you remember that perfect world, and there you are like a kid stuck with their nose against the window of the candy store - seeing, remembering, knowing, but never being able to go in.
I have these visions of the opium dens of the 1800s where people lay around in a stupor living, but not really, in their particular drug-induced fantasy world. Pick your own version of these personal, ultimately destructive, fantasies. There are plenty of them out there in myths and fictions. And sadly in contemporary real life, with the addicts aided by today's descendants of opium. And it is this easy digital path to psychosis and addiction, not to mention the incredible technological and the science/physics challenges to be overcome, that forces me to push the UVVG out there centuries in the future.
But if we could do it right, safely, harmlessly, wouldn't it be awesome?
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