If you die in the game, you die in real life | Hacker News Reader

If you die in the game, you die in real life

palmerluckey.com

115 pointsbuu700112 comments

There is something that makes me deeply uncomfortable about how casual he is about making a killing machine, and how there is no acknowledgment that it's a horrible invention. There is seemingly no forethought or justification, he saw it in an anime and made it then brushes it off as art in one line at the end.

It's not technologically challenging nor does it have beautiful craftsmanship, like some homemade guns. I really don't get it.

It reminds me of the suicide helmet, made of iron surrounded by shotgun shells. But that was something chilling and impressive both in intent and form.

This is "A Modest Proposal" style satire.

I considered it but, as others have commented, the author works in Defense. You don't usually satirize a system or culture you're actively and willingly building.

You usually don't, but the system doesn't care either way. The system packages up critique and commodifies it into benign impotence regardless.

Yeah, this is as low-brow as joking about war horrors. This has potential to be truly horrific. Imagine political and war prisoners and their entire families being strapped to this thing and then enslaved for their entire lives on the threat of having their brains blown to bits at any second. Surely this is worse than any form of torture imaginable and worse than death. It's difficult to see the funny part.

Luckey's suicide device is indeed disturbing, but this scenario is just outlandish sci-fi. Why jump through all the technical hoops when you can pay a goon to pull a trigger? Historically, this has already happened a million times.

You don't have to pay the goon if he wears that.

It's not about the death it's about the slavery.

Yoking a human brain to perform tasks that only a human can get right, but not having to pay them, a basically get to use them like software.

About the only thing keeping this from becoming a reality is it probably costs more in labor to maintain the bodies than to just have desperate people perform the same tasks for extremely low pay.

Then again, Palmmer's current company builds automated weapons. Imagine a missile guided by an on-board human. Not remote, on-board. The Japanese did manage to employ Kamikaze's but generally it would be pretty hard to source a supply of willing and trained volunteers for that. But you could stick someone in this, run them through training games more or less perpetually, until one day it's not a game and the victim simply does their usual job unaware they are a human bullet this time.

Still probably impractical because of the life support, but maybe not. You don't need any more life support than an ordinary jet fighter for a short one-way trip, and what was impractical yesterday is no longer impractical tomorrow.

It should be thought about, because it can actually be done roght now, which means someone somewhere will do it, or already has.

Imprisonment and forced labor already exist. Remote control weapons already exist. Nobody is wearing explosive collars.

You should think about solving these problems in the real world, not a fantasy cyberpunk dystopia.

> Nobody is wearing explosive collars.

They've been used repeatedly in real life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Brian_Douglas_Wells is probably the most famous example, but they've been used even more recently by ISIS

Consciousness in a box used as an appliance is no worse than ordinary slavery eh? Moron.

> You don't usually satirize a system or culture you're actively and willingly building.

I feel like that's the most common time for you to satire a culture. You know all the intimate details.

I absolutely would. This is Andy Kaufman level comedy, which isn't to everyone's tastes, but does get under one's skin.

In this particular case, it's specifically designed to make you VERY uncomfortable, to show what could be if we're not vigilant. Pushing it in peoples faces makes it into a kind of inoculation, hopefully preventing it from actually happening.

As for the industry the author is in, this kind of product wouldn't even fit into a defense company's line. Defense companies produce products to neutralize an enemy, something for which an exploding headset would fall laughably short (maybe as a James Bond style assassination device?). A product like this would be more in line with a police/prison equipment supplier (for coercing people already under your physical control).

yeah this is performance art/trolling. It clearly seeks a reaction, which is amplified by the casual description.

If it was anyone but Palmer, my assumption would be that it is satire. However, since it is Palmer, my assumption is that he did actually build enough of it for it to be lethal if fully armed, and that it is genuinely a tribute to SAO rather than a warning about VR.

You’re wrong. When you work in defense or are a soldier, you make jokes about the system you’re in. When you’re in any field you make dark jokes about the field you’re in. I’ve done it, I’ve seen it, from time to time something goes too far if viewed from the outside.

I’ve seen it essentially everywhere, including working in defense briefly. A dark sense of humor reflects actually thinking about the the more complex aspects of the work you do.

A Modest Proposal was satirizing how the English treated the Irish.

What’s being satirized here? The whole write up is basically a love letter to Sword Art Online.

If I made a game that shocked the players like in Never Say Never Again (which I have thought about doing multiple times since I was a kid), it wouldn’t be a satire. It would just be a thing.

Satire has a message. It has a target. What’s the target here?

It's really not. "A Modest Proposal" was a criticism of people and society. It was so ridiculous you'd have to sympathize with the point he's making or be devoid of morals. What's the point the author is making? It's just a morbid fixation that he says he got from video games.

Pretty sure this is not how satire is written. Was looking for an ice breaker throughout the blog which never came. Then I realised he is casually talking about killing people in real life as if its a video game

"The good news is that we are halfway to making a true NerveGear The bad news is that so far, I have only figured out the half that kills you."

Clearly satirical

Palmer Luckey's latest company is a defense contractor. Comparatively, this is performance art.

Not only your regular kind of defense contractor, of all things, Anduril is in the business of automated weaponry.

I should apply for a job there, sounds kind of awesome. I used to work for Lockheed and didn't do cool stuff.

Thank god the sort of people who mindlessly seek “cool” stuff to work on in the absence of any kind of ethics seldom have the intelligence, skill, or charm to realize any of their dreams.

It is far more ethical than ostensible moral superiority and thin ethical postering by SV crowd, Palmer addresses it quite well here: https://youtu.be/nK0NfL2M5L4?t=820 and here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q95LjvFdoAQ

Is it better to addict children to gambling in mobile apps, or to build hopefully unused tools to defend those same children from invading rapists and murderers should the need ever arise?

Ukraine wouldn't exist if not for modern weapons systems.

If you love your peaceful life, you have war machines to thank.

America is secure, as is Western Europe, due mostly to terrifying war machines.

Keeping us all safe and at peace is something some might regard as truly noble.

I don't build weapons systems, but I would if I had the opportunity. It'd beat the shit out of predatory adtech and addicting kids to algorithms.

Moral questions aside, inertial navigation and guidance, fuze design, radar, multispectral optics etc are wildly more interesting problems to solve than "how do I hook whales for $700 in this shitty iOS game?"

Maybe we'll see an influx of new minds in defense now that Facebook and friends seem to be falling apart and firing everyone.

Maybe it'll make us all safer, happier, and richer (because war destroys wealth, and weapons can avert it entirely).

So what is it with right leaning tech guys in defense going for LOTR?

Palantir, Anduril. Does PL work in Thiel’s orbit, maybe connected at FB?

Was Tolkien right leaning himself, I would be surprised by that but I honestly don’t know.

> Was Tolkien right leaning himself, I would be surprised by that but I honestly don’t know.

Yes, but the small-c conservative Catholic sort of right-wing. He would have hated reactionary modernists like Thiel.

Indeed, but from the other way around. Tolkien hates industrialization, he hates technology as a whole. He hates GRRM-esque "Does Aragorn have a tax policy that make sense?".

So he would hate Thiel and Luckey for their technology and control, who is like Sauron and the Orcs. Maybe more on Luckey, since Virtual Reality would be a horror show from a traditionalist mind, anyway.

But it's fine, since the entire point of the Sagas for Anglo culture is for the people in it to twist it the way they want to, after all.

How do you feel about this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthanasia_Coaster

I also found it weird how he talks about "the SAO incident", in which thousands of people were affected as though it was real.

For context, the whole anime touches on this part, and how to see the inventor of the machine.

To spoil a bit, it’s a mixed bag and he isn’t the horrible villain you’d expect. Arguably the main characters have a lot of sympathy for what he created and half forgive his atrocities.

To dig a bit more, I think this ambiguity resonated with many people who would give up their current life if they could live a new (hopefully better) one in a different world (they keyword being “isekai”). Most of the isekai genre is super fluffy fantasy, and SAO sits at the border of somewhat plausible if science could advance at a crazy pace.

For many, even living in a world with well defined rules and somewhat of a fair (albeit deadly) meritocracy would be a lot more bearable than their current situation. I don’t expect Palmer to be in that boat, but he also seems to be more on the tech bro side, so who knows ?

You are right to be uncomfortable, I am too, and it’s I think a pretty important aspect of how some people view the world in this day and age.

Reading it again I feel like this is most likely satire. It just feels so contradictory to the entirety of the author's background, it's odd.

You can always tell great satire by how many people take it seriously.

At risk of sounding obtuse, what is being satirized here? Or he’s just proposing an absurd scenario?

I don't know, but it sounds a lot like A Modest Proposal.

A modest proposal was about the English's treatment of the Irish and how their conversations come off as barbaric while mascaraing as intellectualism. So he presents a solution to the Irish problem. This in tern is making fun of weebs that want SAO but forgot the premise of the show.

A Modest Proposal was written to sway the readers to a line of thinking about a topic that was prevalent at the time.

What prevalent issue and what line of thinking is Palmer's article about?

Right now it seems more likely to me that Palmer had an idea, built it, shared it along with their interest in anime or SSO in particular, and is not making a moral argument about the state of the world and what we should do about it.

I imagine that if you travelled in Palmer Luckey's circles, you'd understand that the line of thinking is "The Metaverse is going to be so awesome!"

It's really not, the reason that Metaverses have failed for 30 years straight is that there's not actually a lot of value in a place where "everyone can be whomever they want to be" because that's only skin deep and an awful lot of people fail to distinguish between how they present themselves and who they really are. To give an obvious example: the SCA, the society for creative anachronism, has a system of peerage; there are lords and ladies, dukes and dutchesses. That's all well and good, but a sizable minority confuses their play-world politics with their real world standing, and act like royalty while working as janitors.

> you'd understand that the line of thinking is "The Metaverse is going to be so awesome!"

> It's really not

That is an understandable message. My comment is only about how the analogy to A Modest Proposal is not apt. Not with my understanding of the article or any of explanations I am seeing so far in these comments.

He is, he's painting himself as a monster for a laugh.

> what is being satirized here?

All the people that ask him if he's building SAO. The joke here is he's taking them extremely literally, interpreting them as wanting the thing in the show accurately. Willful misinterpretation. But people are really asking for all the good parts and none of the bad parts. So he's actively making fun of them while reminding them the plot thesis of the show and how horrific it is. Look at all the people here who took the author's (pretty obvious) satire extremely literally too.

> So he's actively making fun of them

He is making fun of people who want the "good parts"? Super realistic, immersive VR? Or a brain to computer interface? The "bad parts" are not a consequence of the "good parts" in reality or the show to my understanding. So what is there to make fun of?

> So what is there to make fun of?

The joke is about SAO, not VR

So he's making fun of people who are concerned about his ethics? When he's founded a company that makes military weaponry? Sorry, not funny.

From my perspective the VR game in SAO is a VR game like any other. There are no bad parts. The possibility of dying is not central to the original game experience.

What people might want is accurate VR physics, good AI (speech recognition and synthesis), flawless full body tracking and a community of players all starting from zero at the same time. Those who want permadeath don't need real-life death, you could just delete their character like so many other games do.

It’s the same format as ‘100 years ago people thought we would have flying cars by now’. 13 years ago a Japanese author thought that by 2022 we would have ‘full dive’ VR technology indistinguishable from reality (that also had a fatal design flaw of being able to kill its wearer). Today we’ve only managed to reproduce the fatal design flaw, not the amazing VR experience.

I dunno about that.

Japanese Sci-Fi / Anime tradition has weird things with regards to near-future dates. Such as the end of the world in 2000 (1st impact) then 2012 (Evangelion). Or British Mechas take over Japan to call it Area 11 (Code Geass), Or Sword Art Online happening in 2022.

There's also that weird Eden of the East anime that took place in 2010 (when the anime was released in 2009), that predicted that cell phones can do everything in the next year.

Sometimes, its more fun to imagine near-future Sci-Fi. I'd honestly put something like "Stargate SG-1" (from the 90s) akin to this style of SciFi. I don't think anyone was saying we'd have faster-than-light travel figured out from ancient alien artifacts in the 90s (despite the show taking place in the 90s).

British Mechas take over Japan to call it Area 11 (Code Geass)

My understanding is that the main plot actually takes place in the 1960s, not the near future. The timeline is a little confusing because of the alt history/calendar aspect of the Geass universe.

I have no idea what great satire risked anyone taking it seriously. Was anyone convinced that Irish babies were really being eaten?

> Was anyone convinced that Irish babies were really being eaten

I think so, considering that one of The Onion's top YouTube videos is one of its most disliked because so many people were fooled (about the euthanization of a 12 year old)

The best satirist must have been Stalin or perhaps Jesus then

Not every joke is satire. What point is he trying to make here?

No one is taking it seriously, everyone is just satirizing reactions to posts like the one submitted here. But since you are taking those reactions seriously, they must be good satire.

These are the words from the artist himself:

> At this point, it is just a piece of office art, a thought-provoking reminder of unexplored avenues in game design. It is also, as far as I know, the first non-fiction example of a VR device that can actually kill the user. It won’t be the last.

It's not satire. He's creating shock art.

The fact that he took a suicide helmet beyond a literary invention and into the real world is unsettling. It's an inability to distinguish what is wholesome from what is depraved. At the root is the artist's failure of imagination; an inability to imagine how completely revolting such a thing of fiction would be if it were real. The man spend likely hundreds of hours of thinking on it, ruminating on it, like suckling on a candy, and then, rather than being turned away, giving it shape, willing it into the world with the same zeal. That is why people find this skeevy.

It is fascinating, and I'm not sure if in isolation it may mean all that much. But people will respond very different to the morbid obsessions of an eccentric crackpot like say HR Giger than that of a tech suit with a history of monetizing VR and AI-weaponry.

You become what you behold. This man is becoming machine, willingly.

"The fact that he took a suicide helmet beyond a literary invention and into the real world is unsettling. It's an inability to distinguish what is wholesome from what is depraved. At the root is the artist's failure of imagination; an inability to imagine how completely revolting such a thing of fiction would be if it were real. The man spend likely hundreds of hours of thinking on it, ruminating on it, like suckling on a candy, and then, rather than being turned away, giving it shape, willing it into the world with the same zeal. That is why people find this skeevy."

I don't think you or anyone else gets to claim to know that.

I find this comment, and people who can't examine and consider a thing in abstract, can't seperate their unthinking emotion from their reason, more alarming and skeevy than the original article.

If you think I don't have the right to say you are only revolted because you lack the capacity to understand a form of rumination and are an unthinking emotional reactor, you would be correct, I don't have the right to claim to know that, and you would be a hypocrite.

It just feels a little hard to find a satire like this funny when it's written by someone who founded a company that builds autonomous weapons of war. Like, someone who has made it his job to make it easier for the military to kill people... yeah, no, I don't find his satire about technology that causes death all that funny. You can't be a part of the problem and then satirize it. It doesn't work that way.

As always, Silicon Valley techbro CEOs only deliver the boring and shitty part of SciFi dystopia without any of the cool and exciting advantages.

Don’t Create The Torment Nexus

https://mobile.twitter.com/alexblechman/status/1457842724128...

Carver's Gate nailed the metaverse imho. In the mid-21st century, climate change has rendered the Earth desolate and uninhabitable.

People spend all their free time staring at a screen, trying to earn meaningless Internet points. Our protagonist, Michael Paré on the Sci-Fi Channel six times a week, is a troubleshooter:

> My name's Carver, I'm a DreamBreaker. I police the thin line between escape and addiction.

> DreamCor feeds our fantasies so we don't smell the stench of our own rotting souls.

> Sound confusing?

> It is.

> Come one, come all. Play the AfterLife. Excitement, stimulation. Arouse those primal instincts. Live because you know death is near.

The problem he's investigating is pure fantasy -- scifi tech called the Transcender is letting monsters out of the VR into the real world. And no one ever considers the obvious reason why this might work (i.e. because their own crummy real-world life is also a simulation).

And okay the acting, script, and effects are not good. But they definitely nailed the tone of the Metaverse.

Not funny, not good, and not satire. In fact I bet this does enough damage to Palmer's brand he takes it down and apologizes.

After his rant about Jason Calacanis I think he's done with apologizing for things people don't happen to like.

Sword Art Online isn’t even that good, from what I hear. Log Horizon is a better virtual reality isekai as far as I can tell.

I never really got into SAO and haven't watched Log Horizon but in the same theme "I Hate Getting Hurt, So I Put All My Skill Points Into Defense" was pretty fun.

For others searching for it the short name of this anime is Bofuri. It is one of my favorites and the second season is coming out Jan 2023. Really funny plot showing unintended consequences of the protag accidentally breaking the game design to become op and some fun side scenes of frustrated developers.

Highly recommend bofuri. It’s a fun poke at accidental exploit of game mechanics from unusual and unexpected way of playing a MMORPG.

If you didn’t watch it and anime is something you enjoy, you definitely should give it a watch. I saw all the seasons and throughoutly enjoyed it. While the premise of the show is pretty simple, they really do it justice by showing how life would look like after spending literally years in virtual reality, how people adapt to the new situation etc.

They touch on wildly different genres and target a different public IMO.

SAO’s main point is to have people take VR seriously. The author touched on it in his previous series (Accelworld), but it didn’t resonate as much, so he kinda repackaged it to reach the same conclusion after 4+ arcs of novels/ anime.

Log Horizon feels to me less about VR and more like a sheer isekai, not unlike the many “I reincarnated into this dating sim as the villainess” kind of series we are getting in troves now.

Funnily enough, I've heard that SAO devolves into harem anime status.

Log Horizon is more about the MMORPG genre, with scenes that are basically like deconstructed WoW battles, or subverting mechanics present in MMO games.

Both devolve into harem status, but at different speed and degrees.

SAO is pretty fast and goes straight into it (each anime seasons adds 2 to 3 potential members to the harem). Log Horizon takes more time but still ends with a bunch of potential love interests and dedicated eps to these relationships.

I still personally enjoy Log Horizon more for the group dynamics and the main character spending time to raise a guild instead of playing the lone wolf adventurer.

Hoping we get more series where the protagonist get in and out of the VR worlds, to have a more liminal kind of space.

> Hoping we get more series where the protagonist get in and out of the VR worlds, to have a more liminal kind of space.

Was that what .hack was about? Or perhaps that was an MMORPG that was depicted as VR-like, for the visual drama.

There are a few novels that play with this idea in the 'litRPG' genre. The 'Awaken Online' series is the best of them I've read, and has a mix of IRL and VR scenes depending on the book.

As with the SAO books the focus soon goes from VR to AI/AGI.

Bookmarking to forestall the inevitable future protestations that 'nobody could have seen this coming.'

why not just kill the metaverse/in game user/account? it is just as impactful, possibly more impactful and you get the same finality without being deemed an illegal device?

i'm thinking back to my mmorpg days playing ragnarok on a private US server where i spent easily 2 years of my teenage life leveling a blacksmith to lvl 99 while also becoming the richest and most powerful guild leader on the server. if i had the consequence of losing that account due to in game death, i'd play completely differently too...

It wouldn't work. After 10 minutes 95% of people will have taken off the headset getting their account banned. The playerbase of the game would quickly decine. If taking the headset off kills you, people will be stuck in the game and there will be a lot more at stake in the actions they take.

Allamaraine, count to four

First shap.

You are better off watching Black Mirror Playtest episode than wasting time reading this article.

Btw. this is nothing new, I already proposed in my high school essay 20+ years ago we could replace airbags in cars with device which would impale the driver to encourage people to drive safely in safer and safer cars each day, which discourage people from actually driving safely (I've got D from my conservative retirement age teacher).

By the founder of Oculus.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Luckey

A "one life in game per player" might be fun, though (or at least, one per multi-year game reset or something like that). Would be hard to do without something like Worldcoin's infrastructure underneath, but a sufficiently expensive piece of hardware it's tied to might be enough to make it fun.

One life in game where respawn takes 10 months :)

The 10-20 years to restore your previous stats would be the annoying part.

Did this guy just come in his time machine from the 90's?

Like an exploding headset triggered from the server

Now is the 10th anniversary from 1st SAO anime. As Palmer said, it was exactly the right time for Oculus movement.

This might the cringiest post I've seen, especially those tacky cake toppers.

Yes. I cringed so hard I’m wearing my endothelial layer as skin.

This is lame, all the risk with very bad reward. There are very realistic medieval battle reenactments. And sometimes people get injured and even die!

Cool, Markus Copper did some stuff like this.

I think after his passing there was a search for some of the sculptures that were live with explosive that could kill you if you played the game -

https://www.wired.com/1995/07/the-helsinki-killer-ball/

It would be pretty cool if duels were still legal, you could have some elaborate game living as an abstraction over a duel to settle your fued.

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