LOVED it. And not only because I've also written a story (as yet unpublished) that takes place inside an MMORPG.
I was interested from early on when the giant spider showed up, and when they were talking about the game world and how it had some normal stuff like monsters and swords of cleaving, but threw in stuff that never existed like pirates and knights. That was a really cool way to introduce everything. At first, I was a little skeptical about the world--how could we end up in a world so much like our own but without having originated with a world that had knights and pirates. But of course that makes perfect sense from the final view of the tale. That guy makes a great villain, apparently convinced that he's doing the world a favor while twisting everything to his will. Creepy!
And, on to some philosophy: I liked the explanation of quantum observation through gaming concepts. It made sense to me, but then I'm a software engineer not a quantum physicist. The story struck home on some philosophical musings I've had from time to time. I know I'm a gamer geek because I have, from time to time, noted in my mind when seeing something in real life "wow, that's an impressive rendering". Something as simple as a waterfall, I ponder how each water molecule is moving independently of one another, individually too small to see but creating a beautiful whole unit we see as a single thing, a waterfall. Even when done well in a computer graphics display, water isn't stored down to the particle, it's more likely represented as a warpable reflective surface which acts as a boundary between different settings for the physics engine, MAYBE with a few water droplets splashing on the viewscreen, but not on the particle level as a whole. And if you leave the area, it does not continue to exist in any dynamic sense, only continuing on as some stored values that can be brought up by the graphics engine when you come back. In the real world, all of these infinite interactions are happening ALL OF THE TIME. This is possible because there's no central power coordinating the atoms, each exists because it exists, not because someone REMEMBERS it to exist. In this way, a simulation world is sort of analogous to those religions/cultures who believe that the world is a dream dreamt by some sleeping god--In this case the god is the CPU and the dream is the game. The only things that exist are those things that it keeps track of.
And on to my intentional avoidance of MMORPGs. I avoid them for several reasons:
1. Subscription-based games would drive me to play more for the sake of efficiency. Though I'm many years out of college, I still have a college economic mindset--stretch my dollar as far as I can. If I paid a monthly fee and didn't play, then that would be wasted money. If I paid the fee, and played 10 hours, then I would think that I could've gotten more for my money by playing for 15 hours. If I played 15 I would think that I could've gotten more for my money by playing 20 hours. And so on. I could probably resist the urge to play above a certain amount of time, but it would drive me nuts and I would be constantly irritable.
2. My schedule is weird. I rarely ever play games in long stretches or at the same time of day/week. Most of the potential fun would be hanging out with buddies, and I just don't think I'd ever be consistent enough chance to play.
3. There will always be someone better. No matter how much time I devoted to such a game, there would ALWAYS be someone I'd meet online who would be more experienced, more devoted, and more powerful in every way. To me, that kind of takes some of the fun out of it--because I'd try to not be obsessed, I would be automatically inferior (in the gameworld) to most everyone I came across.
4. I am inclined to game-binge. I've managed to avoid this for a long time, but I know the potential is still there. I did this from time to time in high school. One week I rented The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time over Christmas vacation, and played it pretty much nonstop until I beat it 5 days later. Literally, sitting in one place for 16 hours a day, joints aching, eyes bleary, only getting up to use the bathroom or to scrounge up just enough food to stop my stomach from growling.
