Including any movie, TV show, video game, book, anime, whatever. What’s your favorite depiction of cyberspace?
Maybe Hackers?
Or Lawnmower Man?
Maybe Ready Player One?
Or the video game Rez?
Or, I don’t know, Tron?
Or maybe you prefer the “consensual hallucination” of Neuromancer? Or the Metaverse from Snow Crash?
Your avatar can look any way you want it to, up to the limitations of your equipment. If you’re ugly, you can make your avatar beautiful. If you’ve just gotten out of bed, your avatar can still be wearing beautiful clothes and professionally applied makeup. You can look like a gorilla or a dragon or a giant talking penis in the Metaverse. Spend five minutes walking down the Street and you will see all of these.
When I say “cyberspace” I’m thinking any computer-driven virtual world you can navigate through in the first person. And personally, I’m excluding any virtual worlds that look identical to the real world. So I’d exclude things like The Matrix and The Thirteenth Floor.
What do you think? Which cyberpunk work created the best cyberspace world?
More Tron and Ralph Breaks the Internet style. I know I’ve seen more cyberpunk things that have used a more realistic “avatar world” driven aesthetic, which is what actually exists in certain ways (mostly avatar chat systems like Second Life, VRchat, and, yes, Meta Horizons) but I’m having trouble recalling specifics. Even back when I would see these things as a kid, I thought that’s how it would turn out more than the silly abstract bullshit things like Johnny Mnemonic made it out to be (although the scene where he builds a machine to go online is still one of my favorites).
The best depiction by far was Ready Player One. The book, though, not the movie. Though it being written within the modern age doesn’t make it prophetic as much as just knowing what the Internet and VR are actually like.
Yeah, I think Ready Player One’s Oasis is the one that’d be the most fun to actually use. And I agree that’s probably because it was written after the internet, VR, and multiplayer games showed that “going online” isn’t enough, you’d actually want something to do online.