Top Highlights

• If the technology truly existed as described, economics clearly predicts that all crew members would program the holodeck to produce their most desired fantasy existence, and then disappear into it.
• More than any other feeling, fun is the mental state that games produce. Games are environments that quickly translate survival criteria into easily observed win-loss states, enabling fun to happen much more quickly. Games cut down the complexity of survival, reducing the situation to bare bones: The orc is bad, the Silver Chalice of Freeport is go...
• fungineers create social environments where people have fun. Fungineers are the applied guys; the ivory-tower types in this science would be known as hedonic game theorists. They use psychology and game theory to explore the theoretical connections between society, choice, and happiness. The ideas that fungineers come up with are called fun policy:
• How could virtual environments give everyone the experience of being at the top of a social hierarchy? The answer is straightforward: artificial intelligence.
• While the poor AI characters lose again and again, all of the people are winners. We don't have that in real life. But it is possible in synthetic worlds.