Inside a Computer System: Difference between revisions

* ''[[Strange Days]]'' features video recordings that provide direct sensory stimulus when played back, like virtual reality home videos.

* In ''[[Virtuosity]]'', [[Denzel Washington]] is a cop, convicted of manslaughter, who gets time off from his sentence to fight Sid, an entity inside a computer who is an amalgam of the personality of dozens of serial killers and mass murderers. When Sid ends up getting himself released into the real world, Washington has to be let out of prison to stop him before Sid kills lots more people than his initial bloodbath takes out.

 

 

* ''In the Matter of: [[Instrument of God]]'' is about the Afterlife, set up inside a massive computer system, where the occupants are aware both that they are dead and that they are within a computer system.

* Vivian Van Velde's novel ''[[Heir Apparent (Literature)|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.

* The majority of the storyline of ''Realtime Interrupt'' by James Hogan is [[Inside a Computer System]]. The apparent strangeness of reality the character experiences is explained to him as mental illness.

* ''[[Permutation City]]'' is a remarkably hard scifi look at this trope, with some strange philosophical added in.

== Live Action TV ==

* ''[[Caprica]]'' has the holo-bands, your own personal Matrix. Portrayed somewhat realistically as a new user, who just got his own avatar, doesn't know how to move without moving his physical legs. Also, he spawns in a drab concrete room with a single door, along with his guide, who apologizes for the lack of décor.

* The ''[[Stargate SG-1]]'' episode "The Gamekeeper" featured a planet whose inhabitants deliberately plugged themselves into virtual reality pods after the planet was devastated. By the time SG-1 found it, [[New Eden|it got better]].

** The planet had definitely recovered into a near-paradise. Too bad that the "Gamekeeper" didn't bother to tell the inhabitants of the planet. Fortunately, SG-1 was there to save the day... again.

* In ''[[VR 5]]'', Syd can draw the subconscious mind of anyone she calls on a telephone into virtual reality. As in ''Brainstorm'', this involves an acoustic modem. Which was already about ten years out of date when the show aired.

** The half-dozen people who actually watched the whole series eventually discovered that the much-maligned "acoustic modem" was ''not'' off-the-shelf technology, but [[Applied Phlebotinum]] from a buried Secret Project.

* ''[[Red Dwarf (TV)|Red Dwarf]]'' had a slew of games and realities of this type, generally known as Total Immersion Gaming. The sims ranged from Better Than Life, a free-form fantasy enabler; to Streets of Laredo, a wild-west game that allowed players to play as one of three cowboys with their own unique skills; to Jane Austen World, which is [[Exactly What It Says On the Tin|exactly what it sounds like.]]

* ''[[Superhuman Samurai Syber Squad]].''

* [[Scooby-Doo]] and his buds did the ''[[Tron]]'' version of this trope, being disassembled in the real world and dropped into a video game in ''Scooby-Doo and the Cyber Chase''.

** Same with ''[[Courage the Cowardly Dog]]'': In the episode "Hard Drive Courage", Courage's computer catches a virus and kidnaps Muriel into its digital world in the hopes of curing its "illness" as Courage goes to rescue her. Things like computer mice, [[Visual Pun|a "RAM"]] and a hard drive named Bill [[Homicide Machines|are out to kill Courage as well.]]

* This was a common plot in [[Animated Series]] from [[The Eighties]]:

** ''[[Centurions (Animation)|Centurions]]'': "The Incredible Shrinking Centurions"

** A similar theory goes as follows: Assume the Universe is finite. If the Universe is finite, it can be perfectly recreated in a simulation, given sufficient resources. If we can perfectly simulate the Universe, our simulation will contain individuals who will attempt to perfectly simulate their universe. As their (simulated) Universe is finite, they will be able to do so. This recurses infinitely. Therefore, there are potentially an infinite number of simulated universes, each containing one or more simulated universes, with one (real) Universe at the top of the stack. It is therefore INFINITELY more likely that we exist within a simulated Universe than the real one.

*** I, for one, hope the Universe is infinite.

*** This idea is the subject of philosopher Nick Bostrom's "simulation hypothesis", described in detail at [http://www.simulation-argument.com Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?]. To an SF fan, the argument can be quite convincing, considering that the technical premises of the argument are very mild speculations in comparison to the kinds of tech described in SF, even the hard variety.

*** An important note about this concept that is often forgotten: there is no logically meaningful difference from our inside perspective whether the universe is a simulation or the stack-top. For some reason a lot of people seem to find the idea that the universe could suddenly be revealed as "not real" disturbing, when it really makes no difference at all ([[Video Game Cruelty Potential|as long as the programmers don't interfere]], anyway). And no, there is absolutely no way we could somehow cost more computation power in our reality by running our own simulated universes.<ref>Basically, unless given evidence to the contrary, the most reasonable assumption is that the computer isn't simulating complex, advanced constructs like "people" or "planets" at a high level, but rather building them out of simpler units that are subatomic particles. These would eat up the same amount of processing power whether embedded in the middle of a planet, forming part of your digestive system, or shaped into a complex machine such as a universe-simulating computer. Secondly, it doesn't actually matter how fast the supposed external computer is; since our perception of time is going to be tied to the way the computer completes each stage of the simulation, it could be paused for ten thousand years and then powered up again ''and we'd never notice'' because the universe was effectively frozen during that period, your thoughts included.</ref>

[[Category:Plots]]

[[Category:Inside A Computer System]]