This is an old { < }CompBlog post
The head of (the teaching of) ICT gave a very good talk a few days ago. It had no real direction to it, nor a real meaning [well, thats what I think], but what I believe he was doing was educating the ignorant about the extraordinary rate of change in the world: how “the powerful are powerless, and the powerless, powerful”. Just a bunch of various examples spliced together to create a beautifully succinct presentation with many interesting facts and images, capturing the attention of at least half the year which, for our standards, is pretty darn good! I will not go into all the details now; just touch upon one.
Then he showed us an image. This image was depicting a war scene, with bullets and explosions and soldiers and turrets and the like, but there was one fact of this image that struck me.
This image looked like a beautifully renditioned game screenshot. I do not know why, but everything about that image just looked computer generated! The way in which the explosions were rendered, the people presented and the guns facing, the whole thing looked surreal and fake.
But when he told us that it was actually a real image, taken by a real person in a real war zone, it took me by shock.
Yes, it was terrible that people have to deal with and live in such unimaginable circumstances and I do not wish to comment on or discredit their efforts at all, but simply make a tangental observation not related to this topic.
The fact that the whole year associated the picture with a rendered video game rather than reality was surprising to me.
Many have proposed and debated the fact that “computer games are becoming more and more like reality"; however, I believe the question we should be asking ourselves is much, much different and, when answered, will have an irreversible impact on the global community.
“When does reality become more like a game?”.
And with that, I leave you.
