In the virtual world, you can be anyone and anything you want to be. You can look and smell and sound how you’ve always dreamed and no one will know the difference; but everyone will judge you according to it. Social norms from the real world translate into the virtual world in many ways. Males are viewed as the bruts while females as the soft soul. A person’s confidence is also drawn from how attractive they view themselves, even in virtual reality. In this aspect, what happens if we start meeting dates online? Confidence can be faked simply by choosing an attractive avatar. People can grow close and even fall in love with each other’s avatars but meet and realize it was all fake. This activity wastes time and is borderline creepy.
I don’t play any virtual reality games because quite frankly the real world is enough for me. Everything on the computer screen just seems a little too fake, too over the top, and too boring. What’s the fun in sitting in the same spot for hours just so you can go do some fake work, to earn fake money, to buy fake things, for your fake self?
This begs to question, do we as humans derive our happiness from making the representation of ourselves happy? Would the world be better if we all interacted virtually? Haven’t we all seen that movie? The one that ends up with us being batteries for machines, no thank you. For now I’ll make sure to stay in the real world, to make a life for myself here. Earning a living and buying real things, living life the way it was meant to be, in person not in a computer.
-Ty