Wagner James Au / New World Notes

"We're Not Ready For An Era Where People Prefer Virtual Experiences To Real Ones" is a classic post from 2012, citing an important just released study:

Co-authored last year by leading virtual world academic Edward Castronova [it] suggests that people get more happiness from being in Second Life than they do from good news in their real life. In other words, as he wrote on his blog, "Second Life is providing a big chunk of life satisfaction, just as big as the factors that previous researchers on life satisfaction have found were the 'biggies,' like health, employment, and family relationships."

It calls to mind a scene in The Matrix (watch above) where Cypher, a guy who enjoys eating virtual steak even if it doesn't exist, decides to betray his real life friends in exchange for an even more luxurious virtual life. AI representative Agent Smith promises to make that happen.

"I think few MMO/virtual world players would make as stark and serious a choice as Cypher did," I observed back then, "but at the same time, we are already well acquainted with many who do sacrifice aspects of their real life for their virtual one — jobs and chores skipped, friends and loved ones ignored, so some of us could spend just a little more time socializing or gaming in a 3D digital landscape that doesn't strictly exist."

I'd argue that it's a false choice, since we often enhance real life friendships in virtual worlds, or just as important, can form new friendships that transcend distance, national origin, and other accidents of our birth. And metaverse platforms enable many of us to make some or most of our real life income from our virtual world content.

But looking back, the wild thing is many in the virtual world/virtual reality industry willingly took on that Agent Smith role, offering to pacify the poor of the world by giving them a better virtual life. As I wrote in my book:

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