Are Wii all becoming Marie Antoinette?

[imomus]

In my new Wired News piece, Reality's for losers: Give me Wii, after feeding an air guitar t-shirt and two new gaming systems through a moral grid featuring "the 4 Es" (ethics, etiquette, environment, embodiment), I conclude that you can't really accuse these technologies -- which all use motion detection to make our gestures productive in a virtual world -- of leading people away from "reality", since so much of what we do now happens in virtual, electronic space anyway.



But I do end on a slightly sinister note, addressing a somewhat qualified banzai to the electronic shepherdesses we see in these Wii promo clips, then comparing them to Marie Antoinette (and no, I do not plan to see Sofia Coppola's film) and reminding the world of her fate.

In this metaphor, the virtual world maps to the Ancien Regime of pre-revolutionary French aristocrats, with their ultra-privileged pastimes and their high-Gini decadence. Could there be some Information Age version of the French Revolution coming, some kind of uprising on the other side of the "digital divide"? We're so deep in our "second lives" that it would undoubtedly impinge on our consciousness suddenly, catching us by surprise then leading us to a guillotine which isn't virtual in the least.



Revolutionary scenarios like these may just be projections of liberal guilt, though. Virtual worlds are much more liable, as things stand now, to be attacked by their own users. Virtual world Second Life was hit, this weekend, by a malicious attack "which caused self-replicating golden rings to appear in the virtual world, and significantly slowed down the servers". It wasn't the first time. In 2004, one user created self-replicating zombie objects which swarmed avatars. Another punished an ex by creating robo-zombie touts who handed out virtual photos of him masturbating. "This is for revenge," read the accompanying note. "Please pass it on. Shouldn't piss off someone who has nude pics of you."

Another parallel with Marie Antoinette; the "shepherdess queen" was also humiliated by being forced to show herself naked to the crowd before being led up the steps to the guillotine.

Comments

[telephoneface.livejournal.com]

the embodiment factor is tantalizing, but one of the things i really like about the wii (and one of the reasons it might end up as the first system i buy since the super nintendo) is that nintendo appears to be breaking from tradition once again in the realm of graphics and environment immersion. ps3 and xbox are touting realer-than-real (for another couple of years, at least) graphics and gameplay, whereas with Wii you can see in titles like Sports and Wario Ware a tendency to celebrate the unreal and cartoonish nature of the game world.

i see alot of characters with floating limbs, some retro-polygonal avatars, evidence of vector graphics and unrealistic hand-drawn animations influencing the look of these things. if this trend continues, if they come out with more brilliantly odd variations on Paper Mario, i may just cave in. the new Mario Bros. game will feature planet-hopping and galactic environments that only take place in the most fantastic of dreams.

if this embodiment technology is used to transport us into not a faux reality but some kind of hyper-unreality, then i may just climb aboard..