Cyberspace: Difference between revisions

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The idea of a [[Another Dimension|dimension]] having mystical effect on our own dimension is quite old. Sometimes the dimensional gateway would be a mirror or book. A computer screen is both of these.

== Anime & Manga ==

* The Wired in ''[[Serial Experiments Lain]]''. It plays fast and loose with its concept of geography, and we never really find out what the characters are using to control their avatars, though there are [[Mind Screw|implications]].

** The anime series ''[[Stand Alone Complex]]'' goes even further and implies that every person in East Asia receives such an interface in their early teens. The only exceptions seem to be young children under the age of 10. It also shows civilian chat rooms that use life-like three dimensional avatars, in addition to the very simple icons that represent a person in military and security software.

* ''[[Corrector Yui]]'' is a [[Magical Girl]] in Cyberspace

* The Digital Worlds in the [[Anime]] ''[[Digimon Adventure]]'' and ''[[Digimon Tamers]]'' were [[Alternate Universe|Alternate Universes]] created when the first computer was made, according to the [[All There in the Manual|Official Backstory.]]

** Besides the coma victims, however, none of the players are physically in the network. It's just very immersive.

* Masamune Shirow's ''[[Real Drive]]'' is all about this.

* The fictional town in ''[[Dennou Coil]]'' has a virtual reality accessible via glasses that's more or less this.

* The central plot of ''[[Summer Wars]]'' revolves around Oz, a cyberspace communications network.

* In ''[[Transformers Armada]]'' episode "Chase", Sideways attempted to steal three of the Mini-Cons by dragging them and the kids into cybserspace. This episode also gave us our first glimpse of Unicron.

 

 

* The plot of the third ''[[Spy Kids]]'' film featured the title characters traveling inside a video game.

* ''[[Inception]]'' turns this trope on its head by using nearly every single trope related to Cyberspace that it can ''without any computers'', because the characters are ''dream''-hackers. You still have a dimension that can affect people's minds. There are dangerous security "systems" that can hurt people in the real world. You need a team of experts to pull of a typical hackers' [[Impossible Mission]] plot, part of which is getting to the "target system" in the first place. The environment can be "programmed" and cheated, and the setting straddles the line between [[Cyberpunk]] and [[Post Cyber Punk]]. Oh, and there's a {{spoiler|[[Haunted Technology]]}} subplot too.

 

 

== Live-Action TV ==

* The show ''[[Andromeda]]'', gives you brightly-lighted tubes, electronic sounds, all sorts of crap zooming around, and a Godzilla-sized avatar.

* The ''[[Doctor Who]]'' story ''The Deadly Assassin'', set on the Doctor's home planet, Gallifrey, had the Doctor venturing into a cyber dreamscape called the Matrix.

** The Matrix of "The Deadly Assassin" is unique in that it's not meant for a living person to go into AT ALL. It's basically a library of dead Time Lords' neural impulses, which are used to forecast future events and figure out how to deal with them. It only serves the "alternate dimension" function because the Master has tampered with it big-time.

* ''[[Fat Guy Stuck in Internet]]'' portrays cyberspace as the [[Another Dimension|other dimension]] form of this trope.

* Although we never see it from his perspective, [[Monster of the Week|Moloch]] in ''[[Buffy the Vampire Slayer]]'' deliberately mixes cyberspace with this trope's pre-digital roots. A demon imprisoned in the pages of a [[Tome of Eldritch Lore|cursed book]], Moloch is accidentally transferred into cyberspace when the book's pages are scanned. Though he's technically still not free, the demon finds being "trapped" in the Internet to be far more [[A God Am I|empowering]].

* ''[[Shadowrun]]'' has the Matrix, which plays this to its conclusion as nerds obviously would. Systems can use the default [[Tron]]-inspired iconography, but can be programmed to be anything; libraries with books for files and librarians for security to overgrown jungle ruins with treasures for files and angry natives for security. Deckers in turn can be anything from underage wizards with wands and glasses to BFG-toting commandos. Which leads to the awesome possibilities of [[Rambo]] clones getting their asses kicked by librarians or teenage wizards disabling angry natives with butterscotch syrup.

* ''Server Crash'', a 4chan-made pen and paper game, is about all of humanity being trapped in cyberspace forever.

* ''Cyber Hero'' by Hero Games. Travel and combat in cyberspace used almost the same game mechanics as in the real world.

* ''Cyberspace'' by Iron Crown Enterprises (I.C.E.).

 

== Video Games ==

* The levels in ''[[Shadow the Hedgehog]]'' that are set in the Internet and the computer network in Eggman's base.

** The Techno Base Zone in ''Sonic Advance 2'', and its equivalent Cyber Track Zone in ''Sonic Advance 3'' also fit this. Though the former is Tron-ish, while the latter feels more like the physical insides of a giant computer.

* ''[[System Shock]]'' frequently requires the player to log into a cyberspace representation of the Citadel Station network in order to retrieve passwords and disable door locks.

** Roxas is trapped in a [[Lotus Eater Machine|digital copy of Twilight Town]] where he can live as a normal teenager. He and everyone else enter the data-world physically though, not mentally, and apparently everything in that world can be brought into the real world, solid and everything. As the journal says that Ansem used ENCOM technology to build the virtual Twilight Town, and the movie ''[[Tron]]'' used a laser scanner to physically teleport Flynn in and out of cyberspace, this does make sense.

** Later, Sora enters a copy of the virtual world from ''TRON'' (the only case in the series where a Disney world is explicitly stated to be an alternate universe from that of the movie), which functions in a similar manner as the movie. However, like in the Data Twilight Town, items made in the computer world can be removed. The MCP even manages to use Hollow Bastion's Heartless Factory to materialize [[The Heartless]] from Cyberspace.

* In the ''[[Sly Cooper]]'' series, Bentley "hacks" miscellaneous devices by playing a retro-style shoot 'em up.

* The ''[[Virtua Fighter]]'' spinoff ''Virtua Quest'' takes place in a virtual world called "Nexus". The player character, Sei, goes galavanting around in the abandoned corners of Nexus, looking for lost data. The cast of the fourth ''Virtua Fighter'' appear as ghost data called Virtua Souls, and bestow Sei with knowledge of their fighting techniques.

** Your Commander during the tutorial justifies the techy-ness by saying:

{{quote| "Your cyberdeck implant renders the network archive in a visual form, easier for your brain to interpret."}}

* Never a gameplay element but the Nod ending of ''[[Command and Conquer|Tiberian Dawn]]'' has Nod's Netwarriors infiltrate the GDI Ion Cannon control and [[Monumental Damage|destroy a major landmark of the player's choice]].

* The video game ''Ripper'' makes heavy use of a VR-type Cyberspace; they even call it as such, and it's a major plot point throughout the game.

== Web Comics ==

* ''[[The Non-Adventures of Wonderella]]'': [http://nonadventures.com/2007/11/17/melanin-colleague-and-the-infinite-sadness/ "If I know my pseudo-science, this VR helmet will let me enter the Internet to see what's up."]

 

 

== Web Original ==

* In the ''[[Whateley Universe]]'', being able to dive into cyberspace is Merry's best power. It turns out she's not the only one who can do it, though, and one of the others is trying to kill everyone...

* [[DC Nation]] used this during the "J" plot. Jericho had been trapped in there for a decade with a crazy [[Technopath]]. When Jericho tried to get help. Oracle mistook him for a hacker. Queue Joey's powers misfiring and bringing Barbara into cyberspace. And ''then'' Babs realizes that there's no interface to bother with ''and'' that she's no longer in a wheelchair, making her twice as scary as she was as either Batgirl or Oracle...Babs describes it as a cross of [[Tron]] and [[The Matrix]].

 

 

== Western Animation ==

 

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