I was going through old text archives of mine, and I came across an IRC log of a conversation I had with my friend Kevin Ho. We were discussing network gaming and how we might eventually be able to live out our lives in a virtual world. We decided that this would have its own set of problems even more annoying than those currently present in the universe. Here is a sample -- I'm sure others can add to this list:

  • Ping timeouts. The burger gets halfway to your mouth and you see "NFS server BurgerKing not responding, still trying..." scroll up, with the burger sort of sitting there suspended in your field of view. How annoying.
  • Packet collision and/or bad routing. Go to hug your girlfriend and you get a papercut.
  • The traffic on the morning commute is not only worse, it lasts all day.
  • Whenever you are indulging in an activity that requires a high amount of bandwidth to transmit the force-feedback impuses (like sex, or swimming, or some other such thing), the network bogs down. On the other hand, this could lead to some interesting situations... mmm, network latency during orgasm...
  • Log in or register to write something here or to contact authors.