Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION - Posts Tagged "writing"
How Writers Think
So, against your better judgement, in defiance of the warnings given by family, priest and professor, you want to know how a writer's mind works. How they come up with their crazy ideas.
Okay. Here goes. My explanation will have to include a small amount of biographical detail, but you'll understand why in a moment.
In late 2007, I moved to Los Angeles with the vague goal of working in that sprawling abstraction known as "the entertainment industry" while I polished what I thought was the final draft of my first novel. And in fact by the following year I'd scored my first real gig, writing what is known as a "technical draft" of a screenplay for a make-up effects shop owner who had the option on a British horror novel. I parlayed this gig into a full-time job at the effects studio in question, and when that job went the way of all flesh in 2010, I worked freelance as a "make up effects technician," a sort of helper monkey to the actual make up effects artists, until the summer of 2013. When that too began to dry up, I fell ass-backwards into something called game capture, i.e. helping to make trailers for games like Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed, FarCry, Watchdogs, Destiny, and many others.
Game capture is sometimes referred to by initiates as "virtual production." That is, it is exactly like the production of movies, television shows and commercials, the only difference being that the set, and to some extent the actors, are virtual. Now, anyone who has worked in production will tell you that it is about 20% work and 80% waiting. It takes hours to set up a shot, and after the last take is captured, hours to set up the next one, and during these down times the actor/game capture technician is free to do what he likes so long as he doesn't stray too far from the capture bay. He can sleep, eat, read, surf the web, drink a beer, play with his phone, listen to music, or chat with the other techs, and I spent countless hours doing all of these things, as well as editing my various novels. Sometimes, however -- and this is kind of ironic, I grant you -- I played video games of my own. It is true that most of the games I played were very old, probably because my laptop was an ancient Dell Inspiron E1505 with a processor that was old enough to buy alcohol, but they were better than nothing during those seventeen-hour days when we spent only three hours working and the rest goofing off.
One of my favorite games was "Civilization." If you're not familiar with it, Civilization is a strategy game which allows the player to build and guide a civilization over the course of about 6,000 years of history, from the Stone Age to the Nuclear, and beyond. I found this game fascinating, not leastwise because it bore no resemblance whatever to the slam-bang, adrenaline-infused, first person shooters that I played at work. But simultaneous with playing endless matches of Civilization, I engaged in a conversation with one of my co-workers, who was speculating about the nature of the universe (you speculate about a lot of shit at three in the morning when you've done nothing but drink coffee and eat donuts all day). He mentioned a theory, which he seemed to remember hearing in Carl Sagan's "Cosmos," that our entire universe might simply compose a single atom within the toe-nail of some other being, and so on and so forth in both directions: infinite regression, infinite progression, infinite reality extending infinitely.
I countered with the idea that is gaining currency among quantum physicists, i.e. that the universe is not "real" in the sense we generally use the word, but actually a complex, three-dimensional hologram, which may have a finite limit on the amount of information it can store (much in the manner of a video game), and may, by extension, have a Great Projector (a hologram, presumably, cannot project itself, but that's an entirely different debate). I looked up the article in question, from a website called Motherboard, and read the relevant passage to him: "If we are living in a giant hologram, can we really say that all the sim worlds and massive multiplayer online games we’ve built aren’t as real as our universe’s planets, star clusters and galaxies, all of which boil down to quantum dots on a cosmic bitmap?"
At that moment we looked at my laptop, where a game of Civilization was in progress. In point of fact, I was at that moment about to drop a nuclear bomb onto a large city held by one of my enemies: my finger was hovering over the button which would deliver the warhead.
"If this theory is true," my friend said. "You are about to kill millions of people."
"If this theory is true," I replied. "Pac-Man has a soul."
I pressed the button. Bang went the virtual city of my virtual enemy, reduced to virtual rubble by my virtual bomb. We got a good laugh out of it. But later, as I drove home over the dark, whisper-quiet streets of Hollywood, I couldn't help but wonder about the future. The version of "Civilization" I was playing was more than ten years old. The most recent versions were much more complex, and that complexity also extended to the game's artificial intelligence. Was it possible, I wondered, that at some point that the tiny bits of data within the game, representing individual groups of people within cities, might achieve some semblance of consciousness? And what about the M.M.O.'s mentioned in the article? What about games like Sim City or Second Life, which are not games at all in the conventional sense but virtual online worlds, which now exist, via their servers, independently of their users, to the point where they are actual "places," albeit ones without a physical existence?
Several episodes of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" dealt with the moral dilemmas inherent in the idea of machines or holograms developing self-awareness. But in the case of "Star Trek" the plots usually revolved around the entity in question wanting to be granted the same status as his human counterparts -- wanting to be seen as "real" and wanting freedom of action within the framework of the "real world." The reverse idea, the idea of human beings descending into the alternate reality of the hologram and the machine, was never fully explored.
What do I mean by this? Well, it's been said for years that virtual reality would take gaming to its next phase, the point where a player does not stare at images on a monitor but actually experiences the physical reality of the game via neural and sensory interfaces, and can interact with that "reality" in much the same way he interacts with the real world. It would be possible, given such immersive, interactive technology, for a person not merely to see, hear and feel that cyber-reality but perhaps, one day, to smell and taste it as well. In a certain way, the virtual reality of the game would become indistinguishable from the "actual reality" of everyday life. It would be "real."
Now, suppose for a moment that the characters within the game in question achieved, over the course of time, not merely intelligence but consciousness. Became self-aware and began to exhibit the characteristics of intelligent beings. Imagine for a moment that you are gaming within this virtual world full of free-thinking beings, and you encounter one which has, say, the physical attributes of Lara Croft. Thanks to your neural-sensory interfaces, you can do quite a bit more with Miss Croft than exchange treasure maps and witty banter. You can -- if she's willing, this is a sentient being after all, and she packs a gun on each hip -- take her to virtual bed. And if you do this, you are not simply masturbating with a computerized blow-up doll: you are actually experiencing sexual intercourse with a willing partner, albeit one that doesn't exist within the confines of our own physical reality. But the wildest part, the part that my writer's brain was leading to perhaps from the very first moment this discussion began, comes in the form of the next question:
What if Lara gets pregnant?
What if, when you achieve climax, your physical ejaculate is matched by "virtual ejaculate" which, no less real for its nonphysical state, joins with Lara's nonphysical "egg" and creates a program within her being which, at some future moment, will emerge as a baby whose attributes are drawn from both Lara's information and from your own? What would your rights and responsibilities be in regards such an entity?
Preposterous questions, you say. Lara isn't "real" and therefore neither is the baby in her virtual womb. Well, we have just demonstrated that Lara, being sentient, is very much "real," and her baby, when it is "born," will be equally real, at least within the virtual reality in which it was conceived. Although the baby may owe its conception to something as simple as an algorithm that calculates the odds of pregnancy after sex, and then initiates a fetus-program within Lara as a "triggered event" within the game, the baby will nevertheless be "born" a conscious entity, with its characteristics perhaps partially based on the information the computer has about you on file: your looks, intelligence, speech patterns, habits, and perhaps even your psychological makeup.
Would it be your child? If not, what the hell would it be? One thing seems certain: this child-thing, being a hybrid of sorts -- neither human nor strictly speaking a self-generated sentient program -- need never "die" in the sense that we physical beings experience death. In point of fact, death, within the confines of virtual reality, need not necessarily be a permanent phenomenon or even exist at all. (Theoretically, a series of redundant backup servers and cloud drives scattered over various locations could keep a program running indefinitely in some form or other, even if the servers upon which it originally existed were physically destroyed.)
The truth is since no computer is at present self-aware and "alive" (so far as we know and presently define the term), we have yet to be able to examine how the concept of life, or of death, would operate in regards to beings who exist within a virtual sphere of reality. And even if the master program of the "game" reality regulates and sets limits on "life" in much the same way as human life is regulated by its biological clockwork, even if the child eventually "dies" by virtue of being erased somehow, wouldn't this mean that the progeny of your "child" could, in essence, form a virtual branch of your family that might go on for centuries or millennia to come? Isn't it possible that servers containing this reality could be sent into orbit around the sun on small spacecraft, using solar radiation as their power source, and thus, in a manner of speaking, achieve almost literal immortality, perhaps never even realizing that their reality within the servers was not physically "real?" Could not our own, supposedly reality, our very existence at this second, be nothing more than information processed through sophisticated closed-circuit servers, monitored and regulated, but not necessarily directed, my a master intelligence?
This is the type of shit writers think about at 4 AM when driving down Hollywood Boulevard, eager to get home so they can crack a beer, pet their cat, and catch four hours of sleep before they get back in the car and return to work.
But their thinking, fuddled as it may be by too much caffeine and too little sleep, doesn't stop there. Their theorizing can be taken still further. Through the interactive technology necessary to achieve virtual fatherhood, we can ourselves descend into the virtual world of the game and act within it, effecting its environment in whatever way we choose or can get away with. The denizens of that world, however, cannot do the reverse. They have no physical reality per se, so they cannot leave their reality and interact with ours. But let us supposed robotic or even android technology is suitably well-advanced within the next few decades; wouldn't it be possible for a being from the game reality to upload itself into such an android, whereupon it would occupy a physical body, and be able to move about in our world? What if Lara Croft could follow you home?
And what if she was pissed?
All of these thoughts ran through my head, in some fashion or other, as I traded neon-lit Hollywood for shadowy Burbank. And as I lugged my laptop into my dark and silent house at four in the morning, I could still feel the warmth of the laptop through the fabric of my backpack. A slumbering electronic world lay within that machine. To me, it was just a game. An amusement. A distraction. But to someone, somewhere, perhaps it was something more.
Perhaps it was everything.
Perhaps it was my next book.
Okay. Here goes. My explanation will have to include a small amount of biographical detail, but you'll understand why in a moment.
In late 2007, I moved to Los Angeles with the vague goal of working in that sprawling abstraction known as "the entertainment industry" while I polished what I thought was the final draft of my first novel. And in fact by the following year I'd scored my first real gig, writing what is known as a "technical draft" of a screenplay for a make-up effects shop owner who had the option on a British horror novel. I parlayed this gig into a full-time job at the effects studio in question, and when that job went the way of all flesh in 2010, I worked freelance as a "make up effects technician," a sort of helper monkey to the actual make up effects artists, until the summer of 2013. When that too began to dry up, I fell ass-backwards into something called game capture, i.e. helping to make trailers for games like Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed, FarCry, Watchdogs, Destiny, and many others.
Game capture is sometimes referred to by initiates as "virtual production." That is, it is exactly like the production of movies, television shows and commercials, the only difference being that the set, and to some extent the actors, are virtual. Now, anyone who has worked in production will tell you that it is about 20% work and 80% waiting. It takes hours to set up a shot, and after the last take is captured, hours to set up the next one, and during these down times the actor/game capture technician is free to do what he likes so long as he doesn't stray too far from the capture bay. He can sleep, eat, read, surf the web, drink a beer, play with his phone, listen to music, or chat with the other techs, and I spent countless hours doing all of these things, as well as editing my various novels. Sometimes, however -- and this is kind of ironic, I grant you -- I played video games of my own. It is true that most of the games I played were very old, probably because my laptop was an ancient Dell Inspiron E1505 with a processor that was old enough to buy alcohol, but they were better than nothing during those seventeen-hour days when we spent only three hours working and the rest goofing off.
One of my favorite games was "Civilization." If you're not familiar with it, Civilization is a strategy game which allows the player to build and guide a civilization over the course of about 6,000 years of history, from the Stone Age to the Nuclear, and beyond. I found this game fascinating, not leastwise because it bore no resemblance whatever to the slam-bang, adrenaline-infused, first person shooters that I played at work. But simultaneous with playing endless matches of Civilization, I engaged in a conversation with one of my co-workers, who was speculating about the nature of the universe (you speculate about a lot of shit at three in the morning when you've done nothing but drink coffee and eat donuts all day). He mentioned a theory, which he seemed to remember hearing in Carl Sagan's "Cosmos," that our entire universe might simply compose a single atom within the toe-nail of some other being, and so on and so forth in both directions: infinite regression, infinite progression, infinite reality extending infinitely.
I countered with the idea that is gaining currency among quantum physicists, i.e. that the universe is not "real" in the sense we generally use the word, but actually a complex, three-dimensional hologram, which may have a finite limit on the amount of information it can store (much in the manner of a video game), and may, by extension, have a Great Projector (a hologram, presumably, cannot project itself, but that's an entirely different debate). I looked up the article in question, from a website called Motherboard, and read the relevant passage to him: "If we are living in a giant hologram, can we really say that all the sim worlds and massive multiplayer online games we’ve built aren’t as real as our universe’s planets, star clusters and galaxies, all of which boil down to quantum dots on a cosmic bitmap?"
At that moment we looked at my laptop, where a game of Civilization was in progress. In point of fact, I was at that moment about to drop a nuclear bomb onto a large city held by one of my enemies: my finger was hovering over the button which would deliver the warhead.
"If this theory is true," my friend said. "You are about to kill millions of people."
"If this theory is true," I replied. "Pac-Man has a soul."
I pressed the button. Bang went the virtual city of my virtual enemy, reduced to virtual rubble by my virtual bomb. We got a good laugh out of it. But later, as I drove home over the dark, whisper-quiet streets of Hollywood, I couldn't help but wonder about the future. The version of "Civilization" I was playing was more than ten years old. The most recent versions were much more complex, and that complexity also extended to the game's artificial intelligence. Was it possible, I wondered, that at some point that the tiny bits of data within the game, representing individual groups of people within cities, might achieve some semblance of consciousness? And what about the M.M.O.'s mentioned in the article? What about games like Sim City or Second Life, which are not games at all in the conventional sense but virtual online worlds, which now exist, via their servers, independently of their users, to the point where they are actual "places," albeit ones without a physical existence?
Several episodes of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" dealt with the moral dilemmas inherent in the idea of machines or holograms developing self-awareness. But in the case of "Star Trek" the plots usually revolved around the entity in question wanting to be granted the same status as his human counterparts -- wanting to be seen as "real" and wanting freedom of action within the framework of the "real world." The reverse idea, the idea of human beings descending into the alternate reality of the hologram and the machine, was never fully explored.
What do I mean by this? Well, it's been said for years that virtual reality would take gaming to its next phase, the point where a player does not stare at images on a monitor but actually experiences the physical reality of the game via neural and sensory interfaces, and can interact with that "reality" in much the same way he interacts with the real world. It would be possible, given such immersive, interactive technology, for a person not merely to see, hear and feel that cyber-reality but perhaps, one day, to smell and taste it as well. In a certain way, the virtual reality of the game would become indistinguishable from the "actual reality" of everyday life. It would be "real."
Now, suppose for a moment that the characters within the game in question achieved, over the course of time, not merely intelligence but consciousness. Became self-aware and began to exhibit the characteristics of intelligent beings. Imagine for a moment that you are gaming within this virtual world full of free-thinking beings, and you encounter one which has, say, the physical attributes of Lara Croft. Thanks to your neural-sensory interfaces, you can do quite a bit more with Miss Croft than exchange treasure maps and witty banter. You can -- if she's willing, this is a sentient being after all, and she packs a gun on each hip -- take her to virtual bed. And if you do this, you are not simply masturbating with a computerized blow-up doll: you are actually experiencing sexual intercourse with a willing partner, albeit one that doesn't exist within the confines of our own physical reality. But the wildest part, the part that my writer's brain was leading to perhaps from the very first moment this discussion began, comes in the form of the next question:
What if Lara gets pregnant?
What if, when you achieve climax, your physical ejaculate is matched by "virtual ejaculate" which, no less real for its nonphysical state, joins with Lara's nonphysical "egg" and creates a program within her being which, at some future moment, will emerge as a baby whose attributes are drawn from both Lara's information and from your own? What would your rights and responsibilities be in regards such an entity?
Preposterous questions, you say. Lara isn't "real" and therefore neither is the baby in her virtual womb. Well, we have just demonstrated that Lara, being sentient, is very much "real," and her baby, when it is "born," will be equally real, at least within the virtual reality in which it was conceived. Although the baby may owe its conception to something as simple as an algorithm that calculates the odds of pregnancy after sex, and then initiates a fetus-program within Lara as a "triggered event" within the game, the baby will nevertheless be "born" a conscious entity, with its characteristics perhaps partially based on the information the computer has about you on file: your looks, intelligence, speech patterns, habits, and perhaps even your psychological makeup.
Would it be your child? If not, what the hell would it be? One thing seems certain: this child-thing, being a hybrid of sorts -- neither human nor strictly speaking a self-generated sentient program -- need never "die" in the sense that we physical beings experience death. In point of fact, death, within the confines of virtual reality, need not necessarily be a permanent phenomenon or even exist at all. (Theoretically, a series of redundant backup servers and cloud drives scattered over various locations could keep a program running indefinitely in some form or other, even if the servers upon which it originally existed were physically destroyed.)
The truth is since no computer is at present self-aware and "alive" (so far as we know and presently define the term), we have yet to be able to examine how the concept of life, or of death, would operate in regards to beings who exist within a virtual sphere of reality. And even if the master program of the "game" reality regulates and sets limits on "life" in much the same way as human life is regulated by its biological clockwork, even if the child eventually "dies" by virtue of being erased somehow, wouldn't this mean that the progeny of your "child" could, in essence, form a virtual branch of your family that might go on for centuries or millennia to come? Isn't it possible that servers containing this reality could be sent into orbit around the sun on small spacecraft, using solar radiation as their power source, and thus, in a manner of speaking, achieve almost literal immortality, perhaps never even realizing that their reality within the servers was not physically "real?" Could not our own, supposedly reality, our very existence at this second, be nothing more than information processed through sophisticated closed-circuit servers, monitored and regulated, but not necessarily directed, my a master intelligence?
This is the type of shit writers think about at 4 AM when driving down Hollywood Boulevard, eager to get home so they can crack a beer, pet their cat, and catch four hours of sleep before they get back in the car and return to work.
But their thinking, fuddled as it may be by too much caffeine and too little sleep, doesn't stop there. Their theorizing can be taken still further. Through the interactive technology necessary to achieve virtual fatherhood, we can ourselves descend into the virtual world of the game and act within it, effecting its environment in whatever way we choose or can get away with. The denizens of that world, however, cannot do the reverse. They have no physical reality per se, so they cannot leave their reality and interact with ours. But let us supposed robotic or even android technology is suitably well-advanced within the next few decades; wouldn't it be possible for a being from the game reality to upload itself into such an android, whereupon it would occupy a physical body, and be able to move about in our world? What if Lara Croft could follow you home?
And what if she was pissed?
All of these thoughts ran through my head, in some fashion or other, as I traded neon-lit Hollywood for shadowy Burbank. And as I lugged my laptop into my dark and silent house at four in the morning, I could still feel the warmth of the laptop through the fabric of my backpack. A slumbering electronic world lay within that machine. To me, it was just a game. An amusement. A distraction. But to someone, somewhere, perhaps it was something more.
Perhaps it was everything.
Perhaps it was my next book.
ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION
A blog about everything. Literally. Everything. Coming out twice a week until I run out of everything.
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