Gibson

A detailed Summary of Gibson

In Gibson's Burning Chrome two worlds exist. There is the real world that we carry out our everyday business. We "live" in this world. We eat, sleep and breathe in this world. Then there is the cyber world. This is where we play and this is where we run our modern day functions such as banking and business. A person can be ruined just as easily as in the real world. Things might not be fatal, but in this modern world worse things than death can happen.

Gibson is viewed as a father of cyberpunk. He is the one who is credited with coming up with the word, cyberspace. [Dorsey] "I don't have an e-mail address. I don't go online with America..." "...because I don't want America to be online with me." - Gibson. [Dorsey] If a man feels so repulsed by the internet, how can he be one of the founding fathers of it? Regardless how he feels about the internet and cyber culture William Gibson is still interested in it.

The world that Gibson and created and the world we live in now is getting closer and closer with every day. We are becoming a technological society. We now live in a cyberpunk world. In this world we have created a reality much like the reality in which the characters in Burning Chrome

The question that ultimately arises is what is the effect of this new reality created by cyberspace on people? To some it remains always what it was made to play. It is a game that they eventually get bored with. The game might not end, but the attention spans of the players will end. There are the others where it becomes a secondary life. They get addicted to it, and they live lives through the game. They are either too shy or too lazy to do so in the real world. This can provide them with the social relationships that otherwise they wouldn't get. To them a game becomes just as real as real life.

According to Bartle, there were four different personalities a player could assume, Killers, Achievers, Socialisers, and Explorers. Achievers are those that play for the thrill of gaining levels or points. They want to be the best at the game. Online games are the only games that aren't able to be "beat." They keep going regardless if one plays or not. Explorers play the game to see where they can go. They have a realization that the game is just a game and a machine. They want to take things part from the inside and dissect it to see how it works. This is probably what Jack and Bobby were in Burning Chrome. They weren't in it for the money. They were in it for the fame, to do something no one else had ever done before. That is the goal of an explorer, to see everything. In a never-ending game, explorers can always find a new place to roam, or a new bug in to program to find. Killers are a group of players that play to be a hindrance to other players. They play to kill other players and their goal is to ruin the game for them. They use the cyber-reality to show their aggressive tendencies. The last group is the socialisers. They play for the friendships and relationships gained by this online game. Everything about the game comes second to them. They have thought out personalities for their characters, and they think of the game as a play of some sort. They act a role and rarely break character. It is this group that most often confuses the realities they are in. The socialisers tend to think of the gam

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1447
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Technology