"You think so?" He laughed, scratching the side of his head without realizing it. "I dunno about that, but the thought of being a designer one day was part of the reason I started drawing and writing as much as I did, even though I never thought I'd get the chance to actually do something like that." Claude smiled a little. "Maybe I really just wanted to tell a good science fiction story and didn't realize it."
As for how games like that worked, he hadn't been able to study all of the finer details of it like an actual game designer or engineer would have, but he at least understood how they functioned.
"Well, in simple terms, there's a room with a grid and a set of omnidirectional diodes that are capable of projecting images that completely surround you," Claude explained. "By using force fields to go along with these images, you have the illusion that the scenery around you is real. Depending on the coding you use for the images, you can really program just about anything -- a beach at sunset, a misty valley, a nice field with a picnic for you to enjoy, different events during history, an obstacle course for training, and even people for you to interact with."
Before he'd come to Expel, that had really been his only exposure to unspoiled nature -- which, when he thought about it, wasn't really much of an exposure at all. Still, he had to admit it was a really neat device that had a lot of purposes.
"As you can imagine, a lot of video game designers took advantage of that and created games that literally immerse you in a new world," he continued. "It took 'role playing games' to a whole new level. You weren't just playing as someone else on a screen -- you really were someone else, if only for a little while."
In retrospect, he had to wonder if that was partly why they'd appealed to him so much back then. The freedom and control those kinds of games gave the player were really something. Of course, people did things like curl up with a good story or watch holovids to unwind and forget about life for awhile, so maybe it wasn't so different from that.
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As for how games like that worked, he hadn't been able to study all of the finer details of it like an actual game designer or engineer would have, but he at least understood how they functioned.
"Well, in simple terms, there's a room with a grid and a set of omnidirectional diodes that are capable of projecting images that completely surround you," Claude explained. "By using force fields to go along with these images, you have the illusion that the scenery around you is real. Depending on the coding you use for the images, you can really program just about anything -- a beach at sunset, a misty valley, a nice field with a picnic for you to enjoy, different events during history, an obstacle course for training, and even people for you to interact with."
Before he'd come to Expel, that had really been his only exposure to unspoiled nature -- which, when he thought about it, wasn't really much of an exposure at all. Still, he had to admit it was a really neat device that had a lot of purposes.
"As you can imagine, a lot of video game designers took advantage of that and created games that literally immerse you in a new world," he continued. "It took 'role playing games' to a whole new level. You weren't just playing as someone else on a screen -- you really were someone else, if only for a little while."
In retrospect, he had to wonder if that was partly why they'd appealed to him so much back then. The freedom and control those kinds of games gave the player were really something. Of course, people did things like curl up with a good story or watch holovids to unwind and forget about life for awhile, so maybe it wasn't so different from that.