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Digital Media of Caprica

Page history last edited by Brownie2 13 years, 12 months ago

 

Related to: Posthumanism in Modern Science Fiction

 

In addition to detailing the invention of the Cylon robots, Syfy Channel's top-notch drama Caprica presents a fascinating outgrowth of digital media technology in the realm of virtual reality. Caprica is set on the planet Caprica, one of the Twelve Colonies of Kobol. In what could be mistaken for the future but is actually the distant past, the people of the planet Kobol suffered a disaster that forced them to flee to another solar system, a star cluster with twelve inhabitable planets that they colonized. In the time of Caprica, the Colonials are progressing to the technological level of their ancestors, and one of the hottest inventions out there is the holoband. Users of the holoband experience the V-World as though it were physical reality. Your avatar's body is your body, and things look like real objects or people rather than computer game sprites. No uncanny valley is operative.

 

The first hacked world introduced to viewers is the V-Club, where teenagers go to indulge themselves. Group sex rooms (beyond which is the "really gross stuff"), shooting galleries ("shoot your friends, shoot the president, shoot yourself"), and even the simulated sacrifice of virgins to the goddess Hecate.

 

The episode "There Is Another Sky" introduces a game in the V-World called New Cap City. New Cap City is a recreation of Caprica City with a darker atmosphere. The streets are lawless and shootouts occur between fighter planes in the sky. Players take on mob-type personas. It's similar to a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, except for the afforementioned complete immersion and realism. Like a real world MMO, New Cap City is constantly updated, in this case to reflect current events in Caprica City such as the recent bombing of a Magnetic levitation train. The ultimate objective of New Cap City is unknown, with some players thinking that figuring out how to win is the point.

 

New Cap City has its own culture, with some players such as Vesta and Chiron being powerful mob bosses while others are underlings. The players of this game are a corrupt and hard-core bunch. Upon learning that Tamara Adama is unable to escape the V-World, Vesta blackmails Tamara into helping her gain an advantage in the game in exchange for help in getting out.

 

"There Is Another Sky" also introduces the concept of a holoband "sleeper", a rumored phenomenon where someone remains in the V-World, presumably because of a malfunction or holo-addiction, while their body in the real world is in a deep sleep or coma. This is what Vesta initially thinks has happened to Tamara (the real problem is that she's dead).

 

The Caprican newsletter (http://syfy.com/caprican) also mentions a V-game called Xodus, a combat game where players take on the personae of monsters

 

Places such as New Cap City and the den-of-sin V-Club aren't supposed to exist. They are the result of people hacking the holoband to create realms outside of the legitimate areas of the V-World. The band's inventor, Daniel Graystone, and his corporation are only beginning to realize how miserably they have failed to control the content of the V-World when the series begins. (Amusingly, the first officially approved licensors of the holoband technology were porn sites - "but those are for adults") .

 

Caprican TV personality Baxter Sarno believes that the technology is corrupting Caprica's youth, who are growing up in a "morally blank" V-World. In the episode "Gravedancing", Graystone announces during his guest appearance on Backtalk With Baxter Sarno that Graystone Corporation will no longer be making profits from the holobands, which will instead go to a fund for helping young people find the right values. He also asserts the idea that de-criminalizing hacking will improve things by removing the temptation to break the law and moving things from the seedy underbelly out into the open - which has already worked in Caprican society with the legalization of drugs.

 

The episode "Know Thy Enemy" shows how the band has affected the wonderful world of online dating. The program Caprica V-Match allows lonely hearts to send their profiles out into cyberspace and wait for a response. If they get a suitable match, the couple simply strap on their holobands and meet in the V-World for a date face-to-face regardless of their physical location.

 

In the episode "The Imperfections of Memory", a V-date between the characters Zoe and Philomon leads to an interesting discussion about the difference between digital and analog. Zoe complains about the fact that the palm trees on the simulated beach are all identical, which is to save the time and effort of creating each one from stratch. She says that this wouldn't be necessary if the designers used a generative algorithm to spontaneously create a whole bunch of unique trees.

 

Zoe believes that the V-World should be used to extend life, rather than as an outlet for people's illict fantasies.

 

 

 

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