What I like, is to be transported emotionally and spiritually by a virtual environment to a place in my mind where I can be deeply involved with a story and its characters.
Now admittedly, one can do most of that with a good book, so why not be a writer? Or for that matter, a filmmaker. The world of the theatre has many ways to bring you into the world of its characters, but that pales in comparison to the sheer thrill of finding myself in the company of other virtual companions, some human driven, others computer driven, who are telling the story with me, not at me or to me.
I find it transformative, it makes me develop new sides of myself, and it deepens my understanding, and my world perception. In fact, I find this experience so compelling, I decided to make something of it, a game perhaps? I’ll let you, the reader decide what it should be called.
Cyberspace may very well be the next biggest meme after God and religion. If not, then it’s certainly the most fertile ground a meme ever landed in. If cyberspace is ” a Civilization of the Mind” as John Perry Barlow states, then of course it will have all that a civilization does good and bad, important and banal. And if we stop believing in it, would cyberspace just disappear?
What if you had a game that was about the belief in that meme, which traversed the virtual realms of cyberspace, and demanded that you transform yourself to play through it? A game where you seek to give away the energies or labors of your avatar, so you can transform to the next state of being; a game that demands you travel across the servers of the world to find the next stage in your transcendence, and a game that lets you bring home the new perspectives that it has shown you.
And what if, that game had aspects based in our real lives woven into it?
One of the most exciting experiences I ever had in New York City was the Angel Project in 2003, directed by Deborah Warner.