39,327
edits
Inside a Computer System: Difference between revisions
m
Mass update links
prefix>Import Bot (Import from TV Tropes TVT:Main.InsideAComputerSystem 2012-07-01, editor history TVTH:Main.InsideAComputerSystem, CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported license) |
m (Mass update links) |
||
Line 4:
This is a relatively new branch of [[Science Fiction]], it deals with the aspects of people being either partially or completely attached to, and part of a computer system. Virtual Reality taken to the next step, or perhaps, Virtual Reality ''as'' reality.
Being partially attached means that you "jack in" or otherwise connect, and you then experience whatever the computer system shows you, typically providing audio and visual quality at the maximum of human perception. It might go further and give you taste, touch, smell and more, or as [[Dennis Miller]] once put it, "If some unemployed punk in Trenton, New Jersey can buy a plug-in for $29.95 to let him make love to [[Cindy Crawford]], virtual reality is going to make [[Crack
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.
Line 12:
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).
The ''real'' [[Deep
{{examples
== Anime & Manga ==
Line 66:
* ''[[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 "[[
* 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 universes -- all of [[No Endor Holocaust|which keep running]] [[Dream Apocalypse|after they're gone.]]
* ''[[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.
| |||