I was playing around with Google Earth, admiring the technology that lets me zoom in from a virtual outer space down into Times Square, where I can then look up and around at three-dimensional images of Manhattan, complete with advertisements in the windows. I can take a virtual tour of the entire world, all from the comfort of my own computer.
And it got me thinking—it shouldn't take that much work to turn this already existing software into a video game. Programmers would just have to insert characters into the digital world, along with cars, better resolution, and a loosely woven story. Heck, as technology improves, this “Virtual Earth” could be portrayed in such a high resolution as to be indistinguishable from our own reality. The program could even extrapolate what the interiors of buildings would look like, as well as create causal relationships between weather, the environment, and the various life forms built into the program.
And after artificial intelligence is perfected, that world could be populated with billions of self-aware individuals, each contributing to the societies where he or she lives. Those artificial individuals could even develop their own technology that lets them create a game within their own virtual world, having no idea that they themselves are already in a virtual existence.
...wait a minute...
And it got me thinking—it shouldn't take that much work to turn this already existing software into a video game. Programmers would just have to insert characters into the digital world, along with cars, better resolution, and a loosely woven story. Heck, as technology improves, this “Virtual Earth” could be portrayed in such a high resolution as to be indistinguishable from our own reality. The program could even extrapolate what the interiors of buildings would look like, as well as create causal relationships between weather, the environment, and the various life forms built into the program.
And after artificial intelligence is perfected, that world could be populated with billions of self-aware individuals, each contributing to the societies where he or she lives. Those artificial individuals could even develop their own technology that lets them create a game within their own virtual world, having no idea that they themselves are already in a virtual existence.
...wait a minute...