Episode 102 - Solid State games like it's 1994...

Several years ago, a now-long-forgotten false start of a gadget in the VR / AR space made the lofty claim that they were going to “hack the GPU of the human brain”… that their technology would be so advanced as to not need display trickery, but instead leverage our minds to create digital elements and worlds around us. If that sounds like the premise to a bad Science Fiction movie… well, you did hear me say “false start of a gadget” a moment ago, right? 

Funny enough, as I was considering that ill-fated device a few days ago, it occurred to me that while their implementation didn’t exactly work out… there have been wildly successful games played, worlds built, and stories told by doing exactly that for literally decades… that generated right there in our own brains, massive armies have clashed, new worlds explored, and lasting friendships made, all in vivid detail in front of our very “eyes”…

No, I’m not talking about some super-secret VR project pulled right from the pages of a never-produced Star Trek script… I’m talking about the power of story, leveraged on the processing power of imagination, and expressed in one of the most polarizing mediums around… 

Yep, I’m talking about reams of paper, bags of dice in every shape, size, and count, and more painted chunks of plastic than you can shake an Orc at…

Gaming is certainly not a new topic to this show, but taking a look back at the last five decades of table top games we realized… some very talented creatives, story tellers, and mostly-sober DM’s have been hacking the GPU of our brains this entire time…