The "Life Simulation" Sci-Fi Trope, Explained
Science fiction is the art of imagining what the distant future or the far reaches of space might be like if mankind ever survives to see those times and places. One uniquely common trope of the genre, however, does the opposite by suggesting that the banal everyday appearance one can expect on Earth is only a technological illusion.
When Neo woke up for the first time in the Wachowskis' groundbreaking 1999 sci-fi classic The Matrix, it was one of the best twists in modern film. That landmark moment in the history of science fiction is built on a mountain of previous material, and has informed everything that has come after it.
Company Patents Interactive Controller For Drinking Wine and Beer in VR
The easiest way to sum up the life simulation trope for most audiences today is to point at the premise of The Matrix and leave it at that. The trope suggests that someone or something has created a virtual reality that perfectly mimics the experience of real life. This could be marketed as a consumer product, granting the ability to enjoy reality from the safety of one's home. It could be a video game like The Sims, but much more advanced, which offers far too lifelike experiences through the power of some new hardware. But more often than not, it's a technological panoptic super-prison that traps its theoretically infinite victims in a fake reality that they don't know they're in.
The original philosophical grounding of simulated life comes from Ancient Greece. Plato's Allegory of the cave, first published as part of his early 6th-century work Republic, is the big idea behind concepts like The Matrix. The cave is a narrative thought experiment that describes a group of people chained to a wall for their entire life. The only
Read more on gamerant.com
