[GreenLantern]

I liked the homage to MMO's and how he felt he could actually build a connection with people even though he had never met them (even fall in love). Art3mis is adamant that he doesn't really know her, just her avatar or persona.. but having played a lot of online games myself I feel that no matter how hard you try to be someone else your true personality will always filter through, especially the more time you spend around someone. However you can't substitute online connections or avatar connections for the real thing.

I started playing MMO's when I was 14, Ultima Online by Richard Garriot (who he gives credit to in the podcast, and props in the book, but he mentions WOW and EQ as the trend setters for MMOs, that bugged me. They may have helped popularize it, but UO created the genre!) I made a lot of friends in that game that I still talk to (some daily) 18 years later. We formed a "guild" and still hang out in the same IRC room while at work and chat about RL, help each other with work problems, beak each other etc.. it is as far as I am concerned a circle of friends. So I was able to relate to his relationship with these avatars except the love part, I can honestly say that never happened to me. Hell even look at this board, we form relationships on here. We've all got posters we like and are liked by, and we've all got posters we don't like and that don't like us. Some of us hang out in the same threads a lot and find ourselves discussing mutual interests on a daily basis. So the author did a really good job of bringing all of that home and projecting how it could be in the future, or at least this future, as people immerse themselves even deeper in these worlds.

I can also relate to the addiction side of it. I definitely was addicted at one point to UO. My grades went from advanced classes to some modified in a matter of years. Part of that can be attributed to alcohol, chasing girls and partying (usually all 3 at once), but a good chunk of my time went into that game. I would come home early from parties as a teenager just so I could log in and kill people with my online friends. So that part to me was very interesting and something I was paying close attention to. I did find it all comes together a little fast at the end, especially with that last sentence about not wanting to plug in that seemed really rushed. But again, Cline did a good job of emphasizing how addictive this world or search can be and how much can affect your real life, or lack of it.

At the end the point I got from is that you can hide or escape as long as you want but there really is no substitute for the real thing. And at our core in the deepest parts of our emotion we will always crave the human connection, and connecting through a computer screen only gets you so far.


Edit: Yes I also agree that being born in the 80s did hurt a bit on the references. A lot of them I recognized but lacked context, so his descriptions were helpful. Looking stuff up as I went though was a lot of fun and opened my eyes to some areas of sci-fi that I hadn't realized were there before.