/lit/ - Literature

>>9031626
Also, you have given me such a fucking brain-wave by bringing up this concept of touch I just wanted to come back and give you a salute for that.

This whole idea of virtual bodies is, and I will create an appropriately silly portmanteau for it, huge-normous. Everything, as you have said, is predicated on this centrality of the body. But what is so interesting about media and simulation today is this creation of virtual bodies that can affect the world in real ways. We have been virtualizing ourselves for years; simulating, replicating, prostheticizing, tele-everything-everythinging. It's extraordinary to think about. The indistinguishability of reality from illusion is what a huge amount of 20C philosophy is all about; I go again and again back to professional wrestling as this theatre of signs that is both less than real and at the same time completely hyperreal. Video games continue this process, because games become interesting to us right when they cease to be ideological; this is what icycalm has been saying for years: less gimmickry, less meaning, more physicality, more power.

What is an arcade but a meta-movie theatre? With coin-op quasi-cinematic experiences in miniature? Now, of course, the arcade comes into your living room, or is there in your Steam library...

Huge, huge stuff anon. Just wanted to say thanks for opening up a couple of trapdoors in my head that really needed to get opened.