created 2025-03-25, & modified, =this.modified
tags:y2025
Thinking of a virtual world, and the communities in it.
The premise of this world, and this game, is that it dies every day.1 It has no memory of anything other than what occurred since the last midnight.2 Maybe the virtual world here is an experiment to see what can persist despite. 3
What kind of world would this be, and who would go there? How could community exist here? It’s like if you went to bed one day, and woke up another person.
Can this virtual world that dies every day be related to the internet we experience?
Maybe there’s a connection in this world to a feed, or a world that is only current. On a timeline, something that was last week is so buried from activity it might as well not be. So many connections that you have none. The history is destroyed by the speed of accumulation and the need to keep up.
If the production of the present becomes so grossly in excess, does it destroy the possibilities of a history?
NOTE
In another sense, say I have a conversation with someone that goes on weekly for years. We skip a couple of weeks. For me, the catch up of all that occurs between the weeks becomes daunting. If we discuss the books we’ve read, I’ll have then a project to assemble the notes cohesively and maintain them, and know when to say them. Stuff will be left out because of the speed of the present. I might just be unable to speak. Our history together will be full of important gaps.
This will also happen with a large project. “Keeping up” with things, makes it manageable but once you start accumulating data, the project quickly can become insurmountable.
In contrast, can you deliberately control the flow of information so that groups live in the past only? Like these people who will only play games years later, when they are on sale. They get the weather from the last week. They get a summary of the news a week late.
Footnotes
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I know of Outer Wilds, but am thinking here of something that is networked. ↩
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People can speak outside of the game world, so that would defeat the lack of memory. But I am just seeing this idea of forgetting things, and pretending that isn’t possible or is guarded against. The only thing I will accept is a group of hackers that spawn consistent cities. The fixed eternal city of the hack. ↩
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There’s something of this transience to Omegle or any kind of anonymous video chat, where closing the window destroys the world. The two linked parties can become immediately lost in the noise of humanity. ↩