We are at the dawn of a new age

We are at the dawn of a new age.

Five years ago there was a term thrown around a lot by marketing people to describe those who were liable to pick up on new technology as soon as it arrived, that term was "early adopters" As with most things on the rapidly changing face of the web this term is already out of date. I believe there are so many emerging new fields that a blanket term like "early adopters" simply can't be applied.

Look at the rapidly changing tech behind blogging. This is a field that 2 years ago didn't exist. Blogging was something us geeks did in the privacy of our own homes, throwing ideas and concepts out into the virtual ether as fast as we could develop them. Fast forward 24 months and the parts of the 'Net that deal with Blogs and Bloggers even has its own name, the blogosphere. Politicians take it seriously, News organizations discuss the death of the Newspaper and both the political sphere and professional News organizations are debating whether Bloggers are Journalists and should their activities be protected by law?. All this because a couple of Geeks liked to tell the world how they were feeling via the medium of HTML.

Back to "early adopters" and the evolution of gaming. Currently we are eagerly awaiting what is generally accepted as being the 3rd generation of the Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game. 3rd generation?, in Europe that's barely time to claim you have started a successful business, in genetics you haven't even started to see any sort of true variation, even in the development of something as new as the automobile, the third generation would only put us in the 1930's. As gamers and game developers we are only just beginning to explore the very edges of the massive virtual worlds that well eventually explode out of the development studios.

Men like Raph Koster, Peter Garriot (Lord British) and Brad McQuaid (Aradune) we will some day look back on as contributing to the foundations of the worlds of the future, both virtual and RL. Thanks to the efforts of these men and others like them in the last 5 years we have experienced an evolution of the English language the like of which hasn't been seen since the Angles ran into the Saxons a thousand years ago. The Leet of hackers became multiplayer FPS jargon, became MMO speak and has moved into the world as TXT language. The makers of games like Quake and Half-life forced a massive and rapid evolution of 3D video cards, the MMO makers took the expanded graphics capabilities and ran with them to create worlds that became more and more immersive.

People said there was no more space in the MMO market for another player, that the MMO genre was a limited one, there were even articles about the death of Massively Multiplayer gaming and then came Blizzard and the World of Warcraft. In the space of one day Blizzard blew all previous business models out of the water when they claimed a sell through of 600,000 units in the first 24 hours. A year earlier nobody would ever have believed that such a thing was possible. Within a year they were claiming 2,000,000 players in the Western world and talking about another 2,500,000 in China, within 3 years they are talking in terms of 10 million players.

Suddenly the MMO wasn't just an American phenomenon, the bulk of the cash flow was coming from outside the continental USA, people all over the world, mothers, fathers, grandparents, bankers, mechanics were switching on to this new thing called massively multiplayer and they were having an absolute blast. Those of us who had already played through Ultima On-line and Everquest watched this sudden eruption of new players with a wary eye. Would they stay?, would they change the genre? would all the carefully built social norms we had evolved from our previous gaming experiences disappear?.

The answer to all of these questions appears to be Yes. They have stayed, the genre is changing and so are the social models we had evolved. And yet we are only just starting, even Blizzards massive player base of a claimed 10 million accounts is minuscule compare to the largest selling games of all time. Biggest selling game of all time is Super Mario Brothers with sales of 40.24 million boxes. Final Fantasy (series) 32,000,000 Gran Turismo 17,000,000 Legend of Zelda (series) 36,000,000 The Sims (series) 100,000,000

More information can be found at: http://www.video-games-survey.com/software.htm and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best_selling_video_games

Suddenly we are talking about serious money. When you consider the current business model of buy and then pay to play, executives at companies like Sony and Microsoft look at game sales like that and probably start to dribble. Imagine everyone who purchased Halo and Halo 2 signing up to pay Microsoft 10US$ a month to play on-line. The growth and decade long dominance of Sony as a player in the world of electronics was started with the Walkman but was continued with the Playstation. Its only in the last few years with the emergence of Microsoft into the console market that a true competition has evolved, something which is all good for gamers.

Once the big boys start playing, things tend to get moving fast, competition brings development (second only to war) throw the gaming toys into the mix with the world of the on-line warrior; fighting to keep the corporations out of your hard drive and TV, the fighters for digital freedom and open source , the communities of players itching to get their hands on the tools to modify gaming platforms and take them to places the original engineers simply could never have conceived of. Mix all of that into the emergence of broad band, into a world were data and money moves faster than anyone would have believed a decade ago.

The world wide web, once a place for freaks to download porn and share small programs they had written with their friends, has now broken into the homes and businesses of everyman, the modern business world would virtually collapse without the ability to push huge amounts of data around across international boundaries at high speeds. When all of those things come together in the heads of people who are programmers, bean counters, hardware and network engineers, artists and writers, all of whom are fundamentally Gamers, the future is unleashed. Give these teams access to faster CPU and GPU's, more and faster RAM and FSB, bigger and faster drive space and the bandwidth to push all this data around and the possibilities of what can be done with this tech become limitless.

Seamless, immersive living worlds become a reality. Gaming goes beyond simply being a "Game" and becomes a way of life. I think we will look back in 20 years and from our comfortable force feedback seats, wearing our 3D display cups over our eyes and we will remember that there was a time Before Warcraft (BW) and time Post Warcraft (PW) and that the time Post Warcraft evolved in ways we couldn't even begin to imagine as we sat in front of our desktop monitors and read actual text on a 2D flat screen.

We will come to a time where we are always on-line in our virtual worlds from our personal mobile networks. Software will flow from us like expelled breath, businesses will fight wars across binary battlefields of data and people once regarded as freaks and geeks, people who once proudly wore the tag "Gamer" will stride across the digital medium as Warriors and Wizards of the new reality, only now they will be working for countries, intelligence agencies and Corporations.

We are at the Dawn of a new age...

Welcome to the Internet

This is incredibly True.
This should flash up on every copy of internet explorer as soon as you access the internet.

This is a mirror of the original, posted at Deeplight.Net. It was written by Robert "redpaw" Jung, Webmaster, managing editor, chief techmonkey of Deeplight.

Welcome to the Internet.
No one here likes you. We're going to offend, insult, abuse, and belittle the living hell out of you. And when you rail against us with "FUCK YOU YOU GEEK WIMP SKATER GOTH LOSER PUNK FAG BITCH!1!!", we smile to ourselves. We laugh at you because you don't get it. Then we turn up the heat, hoping to draw more entertainment from your irrational fuming. We will judge you, and we will find you unworthy. It is a trial by fire, and we won't even think about turning down the flames until you finally understand.

Some of you are smart enough to realize that, when you go online, it's like entering a foreign country ... and you know better than to ignorantly fuck with the locals. You take the time to listen and think before speaking. You learn, and by learning are gladly welcomed. For some of you, it takes a while, then one day it all dawns on you - you get it, and are welcomed into the fold. Some of you give up, and we breathe a sigh of relief - we didn't want you here anyway. And some of you just never get it.

The offensively clueless have a special place in our hearts - as objects of ridicule. We don't like you, but we do love you. You will get mad. You will tell us to go to hell, and call us "nerds" and "geeks". Don't bother ... we already know exactly what we are. And, much like the way hardcore rap has co-opted the word "nigger", turning an insult around on itself to become a semiserious badge of honor, so have we done.

"How dare you! I used to beat the crap out of punks like you in high school/college!" You may have owned the playing field because you were an athlete. You may have owned the student council because you were more popular. You may have owned the hallways and sidewalks because you were big and intimidating. Well, welcome to our world. Things like athleticism, popularity, and physical prowess mean nothing here. We place no value on them ... or what car you drive, the size of your bank account, what you do for a living or where you went to school.

Allow us to introduce you to the concept of a "meritocracy" - the closest thing to a form of self-government we have. In The United Meritocratic nation-states of the Internet, those who can do, rule. Those who wish to rule, learn. Everyone else watches from the stands. You may posses everything in the off-line world. We don't care. You come to the Internet penniless, lacking the only thing of real value here: knowledge.

"Who cares? The Internet isn't real anyway!" This attitude is universally unacceptable. The Internet is real. Real people live behind those handles and screen names. Real machines allow it to exist. It's real enough to change government policy, real enough to feed the world's hungry, and even, for some of us, real enough to earn us a paycheck. Using your own definition, how "real" is your job? Your stock portfolio? Your political party? What is the meaning of "real", anyway?

Do I sound arrogant? Sure ... to you. Because you probably don't get it yet. If you insist on staying, then, at the very least, follow this advice:
1) No one, ESPECIALLY YOU, will make any law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

2) Use your brain before ever putting fingers to keys.

3) Do you want a picture of you getting anally raped by Bill Clinton while you're performing oral sex on a cow saved to hundreds of thousands of people's hard drives? No? Then don't put your fucking picture on the Internet. We can, will, and probably already HAVE altered it in awful ways. Expect it to show up on an equally offensive website.

4) Realize that you are never, EVER going to get that, or any other, offensive web page taken down. Those of us who run those sites LIVE to piss off people like you. Those of us who don't run those sites sometimes visit them just to read the hatemail from fools like you.

5) Oh, you say you're going to a lawyer? Be prepared for us to giggle with girlish delight, and for your lawyer to laugh in your face after he explains current copyright and parody law.

6) The Web is not the Internet. Stop referring to it that way.

7) We have already received the e-mail you are about to forward to us. Shut up.

8) Don't reply to spam. You are not going to be "unsubscribed".

9) Don't ever use the term "cyberspace" (only William Gibson gets to say that, and even he hasn't really used it for two or three books now). Likewise, you prove yourself a marketing-hype victim if you ever use the term "surfing".

10) With one or two notable exceptions, chat rooms will not get you laid.

11) It's a hoax, not a virus warning.

12) The internet is made up of thousands of computers, all connected but owned by different people. Learn how to use *your* computer before attempting to connect it to someone else's.

13) The first person who offers to help you is really just trying to fuck with you for entertainment. So is the second. And the third. And me.

14) Never insult someone who's been active in any group longer than you have. You may as well paint a damn target on your back.

15) Never get comfortable and arrogant behind your supposed mask of anonymity. Don't be surprised when your name, address, and home phone number get thrown back in your smug face. Hell, some of us will snail-mail you a printed satellite photograph of your house to drive the point home. Realize that you are powerless if this happens ... it's all public information, and information is our stock and trade.

16) No one thinks you are as cool as you think you are.

17) You aren\'t going to win any argument that you start.

18) If you're on AOL, don't worry about anything I've said here. You're already a fucking laughing stock, and there's no hope for you.

19) If you can't take a joke, immediately sell your computer to someone who can. RIGHT NOW.
Pissed off? It's the TRUTH, not these words, that hurts your feelings. Don't ever even pretend like I've gone & hurt them.

We don't like you. We don't want you here. We never will. Save us all the trouble and go away.