Reader Responce 9

“Personally, I’m convinced historians of technology will one day recognize no essential difference between the ancient board game and then modern computer.” I found this quote in Dibbell’s novel Play Money, to be very interesting. Right now the modern computer is in hype and most games and entertainment arrive from this system of technology. Board games seem to be so old fashion and not nearly as advanced as the computer. Dibbell is right though; look how much and fast technology has grown from there and the time for this transformation has not been that long. I found this quote interesting, because it really makes you wonder exactly how far technology can take us, and what new form of “games” we will be brought to.

“In a sense Adventure was a metaphor for computer programming itself.” Dibbell here was talking about Steven Levy and his explanation of Hacker. If you think about it, everything involving computer programming is combined with some sort of adventure. Many of these virtual worlds and games are filled with adventure and that’s what makes them so attractive to people. We as humans have a great need for excitement and adventure and that’s what computer programming brings to us. We are able to test or limits and be adventurous in ways that we could no do in our real lives.

Dibbell also goes over the word “cyberspace” which we have heard much of throughout our course and is substantially what our course is about. Dibbell describes cyberspace as “the name a generation of mid-1990s Internet virgins gave to the alternate dimension they couldn’t help sensing they stepped into every time they went online.” An example of this cyberspace is shown in both the novels, Snow Crash and Neuromancer. Gibson’s cyberspace in Neuromancer is described as a dark, sleek “consensual hallucination.” In Snow Crash which we had read in our class, hackers had created the virtual world of the Metaverse that I think could also be described as this “consensual hallucination.”