The Game Within the Game

In essence, it was classic libel against video games: That they encourage isolation, with each player staring glassy-eyed at the evil, hypnotic screen. The irony here, of course, is that these complaints were coming from players who themselves were spending hours staring at their own computer screens while they played Second Life. Dig it: People were complaining that a game was ruining the quality of virtual life inside a game. —Clive Thompson —The Game Within the Game (Wired)

How interesting… a game that a Second Life subscriber created in order to give people something to do while visiting the virtual world has migrated into a Game Boy Advance product. “The virtual has taken on flesh, and now thousands of kids worldwide will replicate the Second Life libel — their parents will accuse them of staring, in isolation, at the screen, just as they did with Tetris so many years ago. History doesn’t just repeat itself, apparently: It remixes like a DJ.”