FEATURE
W
hen I was much younger, I loved playing video games. I am not much of a huge gamer now but growing up in the 90s, I loved a good game of NBA Jam, Mario Brothers, Crash Bandicoot, or even Sonic the Hedgehog, just to name a few. Wait… I can’t forget the ultimate favorite Mike Tyson Punch-Out! The thrill I would get from playing the game and winning games and the idea that I could become a character in another whole new world fascinated me. I would leave my personal human world for a few moments and enter a digital on-screen space that allowed me to travel through the television screen. When the game was done, I would often sit wondering how in the world was I able to play in a different digital on-screen world? Were those characters real? Were they part of another reality, a virtual reality, perhaps? Were those characters stuck in some type of distant parallel universe? As a teen growing up back then, when you think of
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Alberta Adventist News
those particular questions of simulated reality, it would be considered more of a type of science fiction or something, but in actuality, those were not farfetched ideas by any standards today. In 2021, they have games that mirror or replicate a type of simulated reality or augmented reality that appears real lifelike, as if you are actually in the game. Why do I bring all this talk about gaming, augmented reality, and virtual reality? Are we still not in a global pandemic? Well, that’s the point; the pandemic has escalated and sped up the engagement and acceptance, and advancement of normalizing virtual reality.
DECEMBER 2021
Philosopher and author Nick Bostrom coined the term "Simulation Hypothesis." He asked the question, are we living in a computer simulation? This question seems almost absurd but just think for a moment, are we all living in a giant computer game where our minds are the processing unit, where we are all interconnected to the universe, a type of subjective reality from a metaphysical perspective. Well, even if you don't believe that right now, a more technologically advanced reality is coming a new way of life. It’s called the metaverse. The metaverse is "a collective of
