QOTD: Magic

When we started playing Everquest all those years ago, just being able to run around in a three-dimensional image talking to actual people on the other side of the world seemed more like magic than any of the spells we were learning in the game. Like anything, we got used to it and began to take it for granted.

~Bhagpuss, Talking a Good Game

Arthur C Clarke postulated that any sufficiently advanced technology will seem like magic. But after a while, both the most advanced technology and the most advanced magic become mundane. My lovely bride and I were talking today at lunch about technical advances in the past hundred years, and how things we take for granted today didn't even really exist when we were teenagers, nor did anybody back then realize what the second decade of the 21st century would be like. I carry in my pocket a computer more powerful than the ones used to get people to the moon and back, but I use it to slingshot explosive birds into pig shanties, and chat with people I've never met—most of whom I probably never will. But . . .

But we come together each night in worlds of our collective imagination; communicating across continents and oceans; and casting spells, swinging broadswords—or flying spaceships into the Black. No longer isolated, no longer alone in our adventures, with only pixels and AI to keep us company. There are real people behind those avatars, real people who love the same activities we love.

And that, my friend Bhagpuss, really is magic.