The world has been changing. It has done so forever but in the last 100 years it changed faster than ever before. And I am not sure anymore if the changes are for the better. It started in the mid 1990s. That’s when home computing power reached a level where people could start to immerse themselves in what is called MMORPGs, massive multiplayer online role playing games. The player, among thousands of others, connected to a game world to play and develop their characters. And the worlds were persistent, which meant the progress of every player got saved when they left and they could come back to pick up where they left off. 

From then on video games became a staple of the entertainment industry. Of course there were the doomsayers, claiming games increased violent tendencies, negatively impacted social behavior and generally made gamers bad people. But there was money to be made and there were games to be played, so neither the industry nor the consumers paid too much attention. 

In 2004 World Of Warcraft was released and it broke all records. 15 million people paid $15 per month to play that game. And we saw the first impacts of highly immersive gameplay. People played for so long and so deeply immersed that they forgot to feed their pets or children or collapsed due to dehydration. With it we also saw the first real occurrence of large scale online ID theft in the west and the boom of the MMO services companies as they called themselves. They offered anything possible in the virtual world for the hard cash of the real world. Within a few years that industry soared to hundreds of billions of revenue.

I believe the day that sealed our fates was a Ted Talk given by a researcher and game designer. During that talk she said that: “If we want to solve problems like hunger, poverty, climate change, global conflict, obesity, I believe that we need to aspire to play games online for at least 21 billion hours a week, by the end of the next decade.” And she tried. Tapping into the collective intelligence of players in her own alternate reality games she prompted some clean energy inventions among other things. 

With population growth and increasingly frequent natural disasters, the landscape changed. After yet another oil spill it was discovered that throughout the mining operations highly toxic materials had been used. After this revelation, the population in Florida and Louisiana plummeted while in the Pacific Northwest population spiked and the Detroit area saw a second coming. Combine that with a few more really bad hurricanes, the flooding of Long Island and Manhattan, and the destruction of most of Los Angeles by the 2024 earthquake and the US’ main population centers are now the PNW sprawl stretching Vancouver BC down the west coast until Portland, The Bay Sprawl, The CENTEX area (Houston, San Antonio and Austin have all become one area) and finally the NTS or New Tri State now including Maryland, New Jersey and Pennsylvania

In all 4 areas the population went through the roof and now more than 40 million people lived in each one of them. This brought a whole new set of problems like unemployment, crime, food shortages, price spikes for living space, etc. The divide between poor and rich got bigger and bigger, and more people than ever before were on the side of the poor, most of them having too little to live and too much to die. And, as you can imagine, it just got worse from there. 

However, another change happened more gradually: In the mid 2020s the US military started using fully immersive virtual reality helmets for their drone pilots. This was only 15 years later followed by fully immersive VR pods for pilots and then extended to all drivers while the vehicles rolled over the battlefields of this planet. And there were many - Russia in the 2030s, the 10 year war with North Korea in the 2050s and finally the 3rd world war initiated by American Chinese conflict and joined by any country with a bone to pick.

Back to the games: In 2038 a company named Lirium Dream Soft produced the first fully immersive Video pod. Anybody joining into a virtual reality didn’t just experience full sight and sound but all other sensations were reported to be 100% real as well. Some of the players were actually unable to distinguish between reality and virtual reality. With rising healthcare costs they were treated the cheapest way possible: Back in the immersion pod.

Major game companies switched their development entirely to full immersion games and cornered their share of the market. EA, Blizzard-Activision, Maxxis, Squaresoft, Nintendo all made billions allowing people to immerse themselves fully into their virtual worlds. By that time more than half of the planet's population had at least logged a few hours of game time in the capsules. 

In 2056 a cooperation between Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple was struck to get the best minds together in the pursuit of actual artificial intelligence and only a year later the first AI was presented. To streamline communication during the programming phase, another invention was introduced: The neutral-link. It allowed programmers to directly plug the machine into their cerebral cortex and communicate with the machine in a way that was unthinkable before. 

While the AI was securely locked away in a lab and studied, the neural-link got out and by 2062 Lirium had become the largest manufacturer and distributor of links. The VR pods were pulled off the market and the neural-link VR took its place allowing quicker, deeper and more cost efficient immersion. 2 years later 90% of the world’s population had an n-link installed. 

With the emergence of neural-links another big shift occurred. People spent more time immersed in VR than they spent outside. Prisons were relocated to full immersion facilities, prisoners spent their sentence in VR working in money making schemes. Global markets transitioned to VR and The Hub was founded. It was a center of activity outside of all games but inside virtual reality. Imagine throwing together the biggest city of every country on the planet and you have an idea what the hub became. 

The world's currency markets shifted to online currency. All major game currencies could be exchanged to Yuan Credits or creds in short. These can be spent online or all across the globe in the real world. 

And then came the final shift. In 2071 Lirium Dream Soft merged with the Google AI conglomerate. They developed a new version of the neural-link and announced work on their new flagship program “Black Space”. No further info was given other than that it will be a combined effort and the biggest and most ambitious game project to date. Why companies that had never really bothered with game development suddenly switched track nobody knew but excitement had never been higher for a game announcement.