What’s better: petting the dog, or entering cyberspace?
Petting the dog
Once, we ached to flush toilets.
Maybe you’ll simply hear a happy little noise.
Either way, you’ll know a dog has been petted.
Which means lots of developers have put more effort into petting.
Which means more people like petting.
I consider all of these to be ‘petting the dog’.
I’m always here for games adopting new verbs as standard, and especially affectionate verbs.
We’re basically there.
I appreciate the games which let us enter a fictional cyberspace while we wait for reality to catch up.
It looks like animated GIFs bouncing around a Litestep desktop wallpaper circa 2001, which is perfect.
just do tell me about more of your favourite cyberspaces in other games!
I was always impressed by hacking inDystopia, a multiplayer cyberpunk FPS mod built on Valve’s Source engine.
Meatspace and cyberspace worked together wonderfully, each bringing new opportunities and threats to the other.
Saints Row IV is more simulation than cyberspace but ah gwan, I’ll let you squeeze it in.
The in-fiction veneer of entering cyberspace certainly can encourage video games to abandon reality and go wild.
Its cyberstreets are still places of adventure, exploration, potential, and self-discovery.
Cyberspace remains a dream of a wild frontier we lost long ago.
And I’d rather meet a low-poly chrome cherub in cyberspace thanMark Zuckerberg’s dead-eyed digidoublein his metaverse.
But which is better?
While petting the dog is cute, I’d still rather flush the toilet.
Look, we all knew I would say entering cyberspace.
And I don’t even like dogs.
But what do you think?
