But that is NOT what the Snow Crash Metaverse is about, and there are countless science fiction stories that do directly approach this subject matter.
Stephenson's Metaverse is very much the WWW with 3d goggles and a semi-constrained semi-realistic physics. It has people playing games, like the web. It has people mingling socially, it has people mingling for business, and it has places where those lines blur, like the web. It has people telecommuting to work, even, and it looks a lot like using a VPN. It has spammy ads, like the web, and savvy clients have plugins that try to identify and block those ads, like the web. Except for the extrapolation that we'd want 3d intput for everything, and the extrapolation that we'd want computer-vision cameras converting the upper half of our bodies into input devices, it's basically a very conservative extrapolation of the web, with only minimal changes. It's the single least far-reaching speculation in that novel; nearly every page discussing something OTHER than the Metaverse is way-out-there stuff (franchise nation-states, the whole nam-shub thing, man-portable fusion power (for Reason), smartwheels and microradar as consumer-grade goods, rat-things, it just goes on and on).
As for stories that DO actually talk about this (unlike Snow Crash), my favorite is God Is An Iron, a short story by Spider Robinson, that he later expanded into the novel Mindkiller. And not that I'm the hugest fan of Niven, but Niven's Ringworld has, as a side point, the same thing going on (Ringworld is the book that Bungie basically lifted whole-cloth to write the plot for Halo, ha ha).
Oh, and for anyone still reading this a week later, I finally remember the name of the book I really wanted to give as an interesting in-depth commentary on all-consuming augmented reality (which is somewhat related to the topic of gaming as opiate):
But that is NOT what the Snow Crash Metaverse is about, and there are countless science fiction stories that do directly approach this subject matter.
Stephenson's Metaverse is very much the WWW with 3d goggles and a semi-constrained semi-realistic physics. It has people playing games, like the web. It has people mingling socially, it has people mingling for business, and it has places where those lines blur, like the web. It has people telecommuting to work, even, and it looks a lot like using a VPN. It has spammy ads, like the web, and savvy clients have plugins that try to identify and block those ads, like the web. Except for the extrapolation that we'd want 3d intput for everything, and the extrapolation that we'd want computer-vision cameras converting the upper half of our bodies into input devices, it's basically a very conservative extrapolation of the web, with only minimal changes. It's the single least far-reaching speculation in that novel; nearly every page discussing something OTHER than the Metaverse is way-out-there stuff (franchise nation-states, the whole nam-shub thing, man-portable fusion power (for Reason), smartwheels and microradar as consumer-grade goods, rat-things, it just goes on and on).
As for stories that DO actually talk about this (unlike Snow Crash), my favorite is God Is An Iron, a short story by Spider Robinson, that he later expanded into the novel Mindkiller. And not that I'm the hugest fan of Niven, but Niven's Ringworld has, as a side point, the same thing going on (Ringworld is the book that Bungie basically lifted whole-cloth to write the plot for Halo, ha ha).