Real life our harness in cyberspace
• Isolation shows us someone must hear you scream or laugh or chatter
Of all the professional sports affected by bans on spectators, sumo feels to me the strangest without its crowds.
In theory, 1,400-year-old traditions and ritualised channelling of the warrior spirit should preserve the sport’s essence even without a roaring throng. As it turns out, loincloths and blubber lose a lot of their thrill without the cushionhurling grannies and half-cut salarymen who normally attend such events.
The tech world should take note. Asia’s various responses to the pandemic have tested received wisdom and future projections about the way we consume content and engage with technology.
Across the region, tens of millions of people have either been obliged or strongly encouraged to remain at home for periods stretching into weeks, with tech as their uninfected ally. Efforts to convince people to swap meetings and the daily commute for laptop telework and video conferencing have bolstered the hermit ranks. School closures and remotelearning software have further increased the population of people living even more than usually through their screens.
The circumstances are horrible but, on the thinly positive side, this is tech’s big moment to prove that it can step in and provide everything that normal life for the next few months at least cannot.
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Some early forecasts of that tech-life substitution have been accurate. Investors who bet, for example, that curfews and empty streets in China would trigger a surge in mobile-phone gaming and use of social media were correct. In the first two weeks of February, app downloads in China were running at a rate 40% higher than the average for the whole of 2019.
Meanwhile, as parents have turned laptops into learning tools while schools are closed, they have been forced into a tortured, rolling calculus of whether children should be rewarded for the stress of learning on one screen with time mucking about on another.
Tech is sitting astride this crisis with a convincing array of distractions. When it comes to offsetting restrictions of a lockdown, for example, we already know that the offerings of Netflix, Amazon and others are formidable. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok can effortlessly gobble hours.
But arguably the most ensnaring harpoons will be fired towards us by the $140bn games industry, which is becoming ever more efficient at fusing sophisticated gameplay with an appeal to non-playing spectators and the social media sphere that sits around both.
Earlier this month, the latest free-to-play multiplayer battle game launched itself into a climate where real-world fun is fettered. The timing could not have been better a big, brand new game that can engage tens of thousands of people at once, arriving at a moment where everyone is staying in.
The novelty value of the game, coupled with the virtual global communities that instantly formed around it, made for fascinating viewing through Twitch, the streaming
— site that allows you to eavesdrop on the nonstop exchanges between gamers as they go about the business of on-screen annihilation.
The conversations lurched between the dual-language maze of bedroom warriors.
( Did anyone get a sniper rifle to f**k that guy up,” to shooting the breeze with friends (“I heard the virus lives for 12 hours on metal surfaces.” All to a backdrop of automatic weapon fire and explosions.
It is tempting to suggest that the “social distancing” demanded by the coronavirus is just accelerating the inevitable. Weren’t we always destined to
“ end up lost in cyberspace, playing to a virtual audience, hypnotised by the illusion that we can be in hundreds of places at once? Well, perhaps not yet.
There are those who gaming has irretrievably consumed. But listen long enough to the conversations that tech is hosting and, with surprising speed, they quickly become litanies of regret for real life that has been constricted.
Tech’s capacity to immerse, it seems, draws power from the certainty of a real-life hinterland. Take that away and, like asking the sumo to perform in a vacuum, the fun evaporates. — /©