New breed of armchair tourists explore fantastic virtual worlds
I finally visited Stormwind Keep. I strolled the streets of Darnassus, another place I had wanted to see, and gazed from The Warrior's Terrace. After a time, I found my way to the rolling prairies and floating islands of Nagrand, which soothed me after my long flight.
Hours or weeks later, I left footprints in the Abyssal Sands as I walked across Tanaris. I entered the vast Caverns of Time. The tunnel spiraled down to a network of caves, some filled with sand, some lush with vegetation. Huge statues loomed, meteors streamed by, and purplish cosmic mist shrouded the scene.
It felt otherworldly, and for good reason - this was another world. Jetlagged after my flight on the back of a gryphon, I was a first-time tourist, lost in the pixel-scape of World of Warcraft, a richly-textured swords and sorcery milieu visited regularly by 10 million people worldwide.
More and more Americans are playing online games like Second Life, EVE Online, and Warcraft. The fantastic lands their developers conjure are compelling, filling a need we have for mystery, discovery, adventure - a need probably not being met now that tourists have pretty much overrun the best medieval towns and Mediterranean beaches. Unless they are brave enough to enter the receding jungles or cross the shrinking ice caps, it is hard for travelers to blaze trails through uncharted lands.
Hence the appeal of virtual worlds. For a while, fantasy and science fiction novels, Disneyland, even armchair travel books, sated our wanderlust. No longer. Now XBox,
By embracing technology to bring us these digitally-rendered worlds, we are redefining how we spend our leisure time, how we understand the world, and how we travel. Readers, moviegoers, and game players are being trained to straddle two worlds: the brick and mortar of sidewalks and bug-infested woods, and more shimmering realms, beckoning beyond our computer screens.
Where that leaves the 21st-century traveler is uncertain. If the average two-week vacation can't compare with these virtual experiences, a new generation of tourists may skip backpacking in India, let alone Europe. Why should they conquer the States by car or a rain forest by zipline when infinite pleasures can be had by tapping at keyboards? Even the guilty pleasures of outlet shopping or bar-hopping in tourist towns could be lost when younger generations find the malls and nightclubs of Second Life just as satisfying.
On the plus side, for us diehard travelers there could be fewer tourists to contend with. The downside: potential "curiosity illiteracy" about flesh-and-blood people who are not characters in a game. Readers might care more about Harry Potter's friends, not who lives on their Main Street. Computers and theme parks are even redefining what it means to explore, wander, to flex our muscles. Our little avatars tramp across acres and acres of digital playgrounds, and we forget how to use our feet for actual walking and to feel our body's responses to wind, rain, and gravity.
More cataclysmic - as special-effects wizards and video game developers grow more skilled, and technology leap-frogs each year so that digital landscapes throb with ever-more realistic detail and complexity - is the erosion of our sense of the "here and now." Who is "foreign" and what is "place"?
The research firm EMarketer predicts that by 2011, some 20 million children and teenagers will regularly interface with virtual worlds, up from 8.2 million in 2007. Will they be able to differentiate between a mediated experience on the screen, and an actual river or mountain? Will they care as trees are mowed down for subdivisions? Will Paris in the springtime matter anymore?
On a World of Warcraft online forum, someone posed this question to fellow gamers: "If you retired, where in WoW would you live?" Some said Dun Morogh, Naxxramas, or Dancing Troll Village. Another compared WoW to "living in Disneyland."
As for me, while I'd consider living on a floating island of Nagrand, I think I prefer my own imagination to all these prefab pixels. Yes, it can be thrilling to battle your enemies in a place called Warsong Gulch. But a hike in the White Mountains can also be a rush.
Ethan Gilsdorf, who is writing a book on fantasy escapist culture, can be reached at ethan@ethangilsdorf.com. 