rationalizing cyberspace?

[6800d845d98danotaavatar]

So I am a person that works alot with technology and artisan skills, and I always had a problem with cyberspace in games.. at some level I never could imagine it outside of a fancy GUI

now having a pessimistic outlook like this is not fun because you are left with the hacking system of SS2, which is just basically a scratch ticket game.... which on some level is really janky.

But I have seen so many totally incompetent people in positions of power managing technology  that it almost started to seem like whining that human resources hires idiots is pointless, and that maybe its possible to accommodate them. I imagine once you have space stations ran by AI being managed by the equivalent of a building superintendent, and the probability of idiotic leadership is so high, that the educators that conventionally teach these subjects in classes are instead asked to develop a COMPLEX 3d analogy that suits the technologically uneducated and portrays a complex digital problem (like switching a datapath between two circuits to a different circuit) as some kind of video game friendly physics puzzle things, and then literary your 'security guards' would be guys sitting at workstations essentially playing a FPS game, or AI baddies, with hardware overrides being available to management positions to make sure the trioptimum employees feel entitled, useful, and have some kind of powers.

I almost see cyberspace being some kind of manifestation of extremely universally compatible corporate lingo and 'workspace logic' being a common communication system. Think of "Jen" and the "Reynholm bosses" from "The IT Crowd" being tasked with managing AI in outer space... that is eventually guaranteed to happen when there is enough space stations out there.

[6800d845d9cabKolya]

If you simply looked up the word cyberspace and did a bit of reading (instead of disappearing up your own arsehole about people being stupid) you would learn that cyberspace was invented and popularized as a metaphor for a world that existed only within a worldwide communication network - not the internet, but a fictional forerunner - by the author William Gibson, whose influence is felt throughout the System Shock series, but particularly in SS1.

Gibson famously described cyberspace before he or most of us ever had access to the internet in the early 1980s as follows:

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...

It were his descriptions of cyberspace that prompted Looking Glass to create the cyberspace sections of SS1. Well that and early computer animations.
The term was increasingly used during the internet boom of the late 1990s and then morphed into a metaphor for the internet, although it actually encompasses a lot more.

Gibson imagined cyberspace as a "graphic representation of data" - in other words as a user interface to a worldwide communication network. In reality this was way too elaborate and instead in 1993 the first version of the Mosaic browser was released.
The timeline is important: Cyberspace was an idea for a GUI that existed before the net existed (as we know it). And while Gibson's ideas were very influential this part went a different way.

But in a game world like SS1 that is not bound by real world limitations the cyberspace GUI exists. Not as a "3d analogy that suits the technologically uneducated" but as a normal interface for everyone.

[6800d845d9e4eZylonBane]

Most importantly, cyberspace was originally conceptualized not by a computer scientist, but rather by some guy with a typewriter whose life goal at one point was to "sample every narcotic substance in existence". *

[6800d845d9f94notaavatar]

Damn, did I just ruffle executive feathers IRL?

The newest Deus Ex game did a kinda OK job with cyberspace too, but it feels nonidentical. It still felt like uber b grade cheese.

The closest place I can think of anything like a video game being remotely useful would be maybe in a assembly line with tons of moving parts and people so you can see everything in real time, but I dunno.

[6800d845da076notaavatar]

Its like putting bad-guys in lab view.

[6800d845da1adicemann]

Do you have my stapler?

[6800d845da2a2ZylonBane]

I suppose we shouldn't pick on him too much. English isn't his native language after all.

[6800d845da814sarge945]

As a programmer I just see cyberspace as inefficient

I'd rather just have a basic browser or a terminal I can use while I lean back in my chair with a drink or whatever in my other hand. I don't think this idea is unique to programmers either, most normal people I know generally don't mind the current interfaces on their technology, and any gripes are usually about implementation issues or small bugs or annoyances rather than issues with the concept of the modern GUI itself. It's been largely the same since early PCs and I don't see it changing in major ways for the foreseeable future.

Modern VR reminds me of cyberspace, at least the way cyberspace is depicted in a lot of media, and while it's definitely cool, I can never ever see anyone switching to a VR-based setup for any real serious workflow. There are only a small number of advantages to a VR based work flow, and a significant number of disadvantages, so it's really not worth it for anyone as an interface replacement.

Cyberspace is the same. Accessing a computer system through a cyberspace type interface would add nothing in terms of usability and would make a significant number of tasks more difficult.

Even in SS1, in the opening cutscene the hacker is still using a keyboard and a screen. I think that's how it'll be until we find something more efficient, which I doubt we will.

The only rationalization for cyberspace is "damn, that's cool!"

Just don't think about it any further than that, or the whole concept will fall apart. It's a cool story element that makes things more interesting, but considering it's real world implications will always end badly.

As for "stupid HR departments hiring idiots", while I'm yet to see a HR department at any company I've worked for that hasn't been completely incompetent and just gotten in the way, and while I've had my fair share of extremely stupid bosses (who ironically always manage to fail upwards), that's more of an issue of the toxic culture currently infecting virtually every large company now, and has nothing to do with cyberspace or the human condition in general. Cyberspace fails as an idea on it's own merits.

[6800d845daa31notaavatar]

Well I have seen a great improvement in usability of things when they were given a nicer gui that is more intuitive. When you get someone that played some games or used some CAD softwares if you make the UI right they kinda fall right into it and are able to do things like align complex systems.
I have had seen people not considered for a position because they were not capable of orienting themselves in a GUI quickly enough.. but the thing is.. if the bosses I knew, knew that you can get something like a repaired/intelligent version of MS Clippy to dance around the screen telling them where to click.. they woulda just used it, because the time was already wasted on the interview and screening process, so when they finally got something close to what they wanted in terms of social skills, if there was any method.. it would be used to employ that individual.. particularly like getting contractors to do advanced stuff for short periods of time. 

If you are dealing with complex machinery I could also see the benefit of 'beaming over' some engineers on AR glasses and 3d scanning to have them show you how to interact with stuff they built (it is often tricky)

[6800d845dab39notaavatar]

it would  be the logical extension of hiring someone to watch a bunch of things on videos and replicate them