Inside a Computer System: Difference between revisions
m
clean up
m (update links) |
m (clean up) |
||
Line 8:
If you're completely attached, either your consciousness has been transferred into the system and you don't have a "real body" outside of the system, or you are "stuck in a pod" and are connected to it. You may or may not know you're within a computer system.
While there is some overlap between the two concepts, this differs from [[Cyberspace]] in that when you're
To make things easier on the audience (not to mention, where relevant, special effects budgets) the computer environment is generally depicted as being very similar to the physical world; i.e. people still look like people, they still have a "body" and a "location" and they obey most of the laws of "physics", etc. These rules are almost always tampered with (e.g. defying gravity in The Matrix), but the fundamentals are mostly the same (e.g. Matrix-people have only 4 limbs).
Line 17:
== Anime & Manga ==
* ''[[Serial Experiments Lain]]'' has this as the central theme of the story. Notably, it treats
* In ''Silent Mobius'', this is [[Mad Scientist|Lebia Maverick]]'s main shtick.
* ''[[Ghost in the Shell]]''
Line 34:
== Comics ==
* ''[[Kimmie 66]]'' takes place almost entirely in "lairs", basically VR environments.
* In ''[[Nth Man: The Ultimate Ninja]]'', [[Reality Warper]] Alfie O'Meagan traps John Doe and Colonel Novikova inside a video game, complete with horrible 8-bit music, [[Goomba Stomp
* Minor [[Firestorm]] villains Bug and Byte are a brother and sister with the power to ''physically'' enter computer systems (à la ''[[Tron]].)''
Line 63:
* Vivian Van Velde's novel ''[[Heir Apparent]]'' rests completely on this idea. Gianine gets trapped in a virtual reality fantasy game when it's damaged, and has to win the game to escape.
* Piers Anthony's [[wikipedia:Killobyte|''Killobyte'']] involves a paralyzed cop and a diabetic player who are both trapped in a virtual reality game by a hacker and in danger of dying in reality.
* The majority of the storyline of ''Realtime Interrupt'' by James Hogan is
* ''[[Permutation City]]'' is a remarkably hard scifi look at this trope, with some strange philosophical added in.
** [[Greg Egan]] is quite good at this. Diaspora features a relatively in-depth look at the Polises, underground supercomputers simulating posthuman intelligences several times faster than real time.
* The subject of any number of philosophical papers from the classic "[[Brain In a Jar]]" introduction to epistemology, to Robert Nozick's ''Experience Machine'', which raises the question of whether or not it would be ethical to plug into one.
* Three of [[Jack Chalker]] 's better novels (the ''Wonderland Gambit'' trilogy) feature people who have been inside the machine so long they've created thousands of alternate
* ''[[Altered Carbon]]'' and the Takeshi Kovacs series features this trope put toward particularly gruesome ends. Torture victims could be implanted into a computer world, where they would be tortured for hours of subjective time every minute, for as long as the computer stays running. In theory, a person's consciousness could experience millennia of agony without the mercy of death.
* Timothy Zahn's ''Conqueror'''s Trilogy: The Copperhead fighter pilots have implants that allow them to jack into their fightercrafts: the pilots become the craft. They have expanded fields of vision, data from the ship's status comes in as taste, smell and touch. It is an extremely addictive feeling, leading to some pilots remaining jacked in between missions. Recently the Commonwealth military had set up better screening processes to avoid this. Reception to these new tests is varied.
Line 106:
** In the add on ''Operation: Anchorage'' The player character can enter a military training simulation, it is obviously not real from the players perceptive but the computer generated characters see it as totally real.
*** McGraw also mentions that the sim had it's safety protocols turned off, meaning that getting killed in the sim results in your character going into cardiac arrest in the "real" world.
* Star Ocean: Till the End of Time {{spoiler|All of the [[Player Characters]] were actually [[NPC
* The ''[[Mega Man Battle Network]]'' series for the GBA integrates this into gameplay. The player controls Mega Man's human counterpart who can "Jack In" Megaman into various computer systems to solve various puzzles and progress through the plot.
* ''[[Kingdom Hearts II]]'' gives us Space Paranoids, the [[Tron]] level. That's without mentioning {{spoiler|the virtual Twilight Town Diz and Riku trap Roxas in, which Sora and the gang later visit. Weirdly, you have to be go through the latter to unlock the final dungeon - the heroes enter a portal in the virtual mansion's basement, pass through Betwixt & Between and end up at the Organization's home, apparently flesh and blood again.}}
| |||