.Hack//Probability...

*Yawn* It's 3.30am in the morning, and here I am, wide awake after a marathon of .Hack//Sign... And while waiting for my laundry to finish, I thought that I could kill the time blogging on my thoughts...

You know, it hit me while I was watching .Hack... The line between reality and virtual is getting blurrer by the second... Right now, we have numerous MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Play Game) titles available... Ragnarok, Fung Wan Online, etc... People are using the virtual world as their escape from the harsh reality... Then again, reality itself is something subjective... But that's for another discussion... Using the virtual world as their escape, users try to do things they can't do offline... Looking for friendship, love, place to belong to (something like Maslow's hierarchy of need, but I forgot which part :p)... But as they get familiar with the virtual world, they find it difficult to differentiate between the reality and virtual life... For instance, look at how many offline Player Killing cases happening across the globe... And we're not even close to the technology featured in .Hack...

Imagine if we have that kind of gaming technology... Visor-like control terminal, or even a more elaborated terminals like in Full Metal Panic (the one on the submarine)... You log in, stay in the game until you lost track of time, and can never log out without having trouble figuring out whether you are still in the game or are you offline... And then there's the problem of your input receptors going bonkers, which can be deadly... We all know that the mind tells you what you believe... Imagine you are playing Ragnarok using a VR terminal, and in the game you're being bashed to death by some monsters... To make it even better, the graphic is good enough to make you believe that you ARE being beaten to death... I wonder what'll happen?... Would you really die if your brain tells you that you are dead?...

But still, we ought to ponder whether the virtual world is good or not... Those who are my age would remember how they spend their childhood... Play tag, climbing trees, cycling around the village/housing estate, etc... But the younger generation spend their time in the virtual world... Nanka sabishii...