So, the nature of player characters in sci-fi games is sometimes a little...interesting...In Eve Online, for example, PCs are not technically human - they're brain-scan copies of real people who have been uploaded into cloned bodies. When your pod gets breached, the brain is immediately scanned just before the body dies, and the data uploaded into another cloned body - so, you actually do die, its just that someone else who thinks the same as you do continues on your "life" (they have a little aside to this that when your character dies, you get a mail message saying "enjoy your afterlife!").
Thinking about it recently, I've come to wonder on the nature of our own Commanders:
- For one, we never die - when our ship explodes, even through Siri tells to eject, we wake up in the cockpit of a copied ship with all our knowledge, and an "insurance" bill. I think it was Outside XBox who questioned the financial capabilities of this "insurance" company, since they can't make enough back to cover their outlays.
- We seem to have the ability to tele-control other ships no matter where we are in the galaxy - from the Arena, to multi-crew to launched fighters, we just appear in the pilot's seat and away we go.
- Our ability to alter our appearance - at any time, we can change how we look, and even our gender. In fact, its even more strange, since the actual avatar is referred to in-game as a "holo-me".
So, how the heck does this work? Are we actually alive? Are we actually sitting in our cockpits or are we just figments of some computer's imagination?
The way I see it, there are fourpossibilities for the nature of our existence:
1. The Cloned Body - much like Eve Online, we are simply cloned bodies that have our brain patterns uploaded everytime we die. We have the ability to change our appearance since we're effectively chunks of biomatter in a suit and only the face is visible, so it won't take much to change that around, if that face actually does exist and isn't just a holo-projection.
2. The Singularity - we are not human, but in fact either post-human, or true AI - our brain patterns are simply extremely complicated computer programs. Our physical bodies are not actually bodies, but just holographic projections tailored to as we like.
3. The Surrogate - we are not actually in our ships, but instead tele-operating sophisticated biological surrogates through quantum entanglement communication systems, whilst we either lie a bed in our homes on various worlds, or in an isolation chamber some where.
4. The Matrix - none of what we are actually exists. The entire world as we know it is actually one big computer simulation and we're just "dreaming" our way through it. Who knows? Maybe the Thargoids won the last war, but we haven't realised it yet...
Although, items 2 and 4 does not explain why we have to activate emergency life support if we have a canopy breach...
Either way...its interesting speculation.
Your thoughts?