Thursday, June 6, 2002 |
09:38 - Eww!
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-933245.html
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Yeah, I knew the Brits were squeamish about violent video games and stuff (remember what they did to Carmageddon? "You're running over... uh, zombies! Yeah, that's right!")... but I must admit I'd be a bit shaken too if they were playing this Xbox ad here:
The ad begins with a newborn child flying through a window before aging decades in seconds--then crashing and screaming into a grave as an elderly man. It was designed to illustrate the phrase: "Life is short. Play more."
Of course, what makes me shudder isn't even so much the content as the exhortation to take the best advantage of our limited time on Earth, with all the things we have here to do and see, by... uh, playing more video games.
I have friends who have lost years of their lives to MMORPGs and MUCKs and the like. They don't even consider those years "lost", either-- and while I'm not about to go pushing my values on these guys, it seems unbearably tragic to me that the headlong rush toward everybody being perpetually plugged into virtual-reality environments with head cables, with food and drink piped in, growing bulbous and hairy and losing any lingering interest in interacting with real people or accomplishing anything of material merit, is being embraced with such gusto.
Good job, Microsoft. Let's encourage it even more, hmm?
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