Did pied piper basically pivot to chatroulette?
Rachael: Yep. I mean, it's such an interesting question, and I think it's a really great question to ask, because I think that the history of chatroulette is actually a bit of a narrative of the history of the internet. It's been said that the internet was born in a garage in Kenya. In that garage was a tape deck, and on that tape were two cassette decks of the same type that you'd hear in a car radio, but this time with live, unabridged sex talk on in between takes. The joke on the kids, and I'm paraphrasing here, is that they thought, Hey, we can have live sex chats with our neighbors. They never carried the software, and they never heard about it. But then, of course, in 10 years, this would be available as a package to every web browser user in the world. So it would be available to every adult who wanted to experiment with interactive video. And immediately, the kids turned on by this changed their lives. They were experimenting in the privacy of their own bedrooms, with the security of their own bank accounts. And immediately, the whole world was awash with this kind of experimentation. It was happening almost instantly on YouTube, and it would happen again, and again, and again. And the important thing is that in the space of a year or two, live sex chat moved from the basement of my parents' basement into the most private bedroom in the house.
Obviously, it was a scary time. I certainly wasn't old enough to drive, let alone buy a car, let alone fly solo, so I was terrified of everything, but I also thought, This is what the internet looks like. I thought, This is what celebrity is like. And I was absolutely right. And I think what happened is that by the time the video went viral, which it did, and then millions of people saw it, and then the real internet went bananas, and we got a little sort of a let's play of sorts with all the viral content.
But anyway, that's the whole story. That's the whole thing. Except that the whole thing has a happy ending.
The joy of video games is that we humans are incredibly social. We like to socialize, and video games are an excellent way of doing just that. Video games make us feel like animals, like we belong anywhere, anytime, and that's just not true. We don't belong at home, at work, at any point in time. Games make us feel like toys, often unnecessarily so.
Games make us feel like animals, especially to children, because the AI's are often so intelligent and subtle. In Moby-Dick, the AI protagonist, well, I don't know if you've heard, but very few people would have thought that the AI would actually
