You can always tell great satire by how many people take it seriously.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
The joke is about SAO, not VR
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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)