“What if we’re all just brains in a vat?”

Before becoming the premise of the (increasingly disappointing) Matrix Trilogy, this was one of the more popular Epistemological essay questions for undergrad Philsophy students the world over. “If we got ourselves put in a situation where all of our experiences were simulated, would they be real?” and then “If you could arrange to put yourself into such a simulation, would you want to?”

There is a lot of hand-wringing in Epistemological circles about whether or not certain experiences or knowledge are ‘genuine’. This involves a lot of strange thought experiments with painted albino zebras and twins sitting in front of complex arrangements of mirrors. Being a dedicated gamer by the time all of this came to my attention, I had a lot of trouble understanding what the fuss was about. There are already millions of humans choosing to spend a large chunk of their leisure time having crudely simulated experiences. The first company to patent the Holodeck is going to clean up.

The media and our disapproving parents and friends also already know the answer to the first question: No the simulated experiences are not real, get outside and read a book. The latest warrior to toss her hat in the ring on the side of all that is good and genuine is Susan Greenfield.

She sets out a catalogue of repercussions: the substitution of virtual experience for real encounters; the impact of spoon-fed menu options as opposed to free-ranging inquiry; a decline in linguistic and visual imagination; an atrophy of creativity; contracted, brutalised text-messaging, lacking the verbs and conditional structures essential for complex thinking. Her principal concern is how computer games could be emphasising what she calls “process” over “content” – method over meaning – in mental activity.

Greenfield is an actual scientist and so enlightened by her argument, I humbly apologize to all the world for the part that I played in the imagination holocaust that is game development. I promise to turn my back on the simple spoon-fed menu options of The Sims, Grand Theft Auto and Fallout and devote myself to the genuine free-ranging inquiry of Independence Day, Sex and the City and anything by Danielle Steele.