Closing Keynote: Emerging Life at and in the Virtual Frontier
Gundolf S. Freyermuth, Cologne Game Lab, TH Köln
The frontier to virtuality opened in the early 1980s, after four decades of preparatory technological work characterized by the conceptual separation of hardware and software, the technical realization of software’s affordance for virtualization, and finally, the development and implementation of software-based networking. By the start of the 1980s, thousands of digital networks had emerged, connecting computers numbering in the millions and an even greater quantity of users, albeit fragmented by proprietary protocols. In 1983, the Internet interconnected them.
In this pivotal moment, when the act of traversing the threshold between materiality and virtuality started evolving from a scientific endeavor to a mass cultural practice, three popular visions of future media took shape. To this day, they persist as foundational and potent models for both technical and artistic imagination: William Gibson’s Cyberspace (1982), Gene Roddenberry’s Holodeck (1987), and Neal Stephenson’s Metaverse (1992). Their common denominator is that they envisage liminal and hybrid spaces for living virtually between fact and fiction. In very different ways, Cyberspace, Holodeck, and Metaverse promise partial escapes from reality – but also the empowerment to overcome real problems through virtual experimentation with new ideas, behaviors, and identities beyond the boundaries of material space, cultural restrictions, and social consequences.
In my talk, I will investigate the frontier attributes of these three future media and their dialectical interplay – from the global hallucinatory immateriality of Cyberspace (thesis) to the Holodeck’s local playground of computer-controlled fluid materiality (antithesis) to the Metaverse’s software simulation of a global and semi-material 3D counterworld (synthesis).
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This talk was originally livestreamed as part of At Play: Between Reality and Make-Believe at Now Play This Festival
Thursday, April 11 2024
The Game Studies Day was produced by Federico Alvarez Igarzábal, Substitute Professor of Media & Game Studies (Cologne Game Lab) with the support of Cologne Game Lab and in collaboration with “In betweenness of play” British DiGRA & DiGRA Brazil and Counterpoint Arts
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