Virtual Reality

It's no coincidence that most of the blockbuster video games of the last two decades have been gorefests and war simulations. Their creators were single guys in their teens and 20s whose all-night coding sessions were fueled by Doritos and Mountain Dew. John Smedley was one of them. In the mid-1990s, he helped make the trailblazing online game EverQuest, a slash-'em-up fantasy world that only a Dungeons & Dragons-obsessed geek could love. But Smedley has grown up, and so has the industry.

Nirvana for the video game industry looks a lot like World of Warcraft, except without the arcane rules that mystify the average player. That vision is the driving force behind Lego Universe, a new online game that's based on the toy building bricks franchise and is scheduled for release in 2010. Developed by a San Mateo, Calif., firm called Gazillion Entertainment, the game is designed so that even a 5-year-old and his grandfather can play together.

For most of his career in the NBA, there have been two Kobe Bryants, each evolving in mirror universes. One is a 6-foot-6 Los Angeles Lakers guard who grew up playing Double Dribble, a video game released in the 1980s, with his cousins during summer visits to his grandmother's house. The other is also a basketball player, albeit a digital one created 10 years ago by Visual Concepts, a video game developer in Novato, Calif. If the real Kobe built up his shoulders, so would the virtual Kobe.

In the old days, Hollywood tried to make thrillers that got under your skin -- today it's more about films that get you out of your skin. In a sign of the times, audiences are now within a wave of sci-fi films that take the concepts of "second life" -- online avatars, virtual reality and video games -- into dark corners of the digital age. "Surrogates," a new Touchstone Pictures release starring Bruce Willis that opened at No. 2 at the box office this...

Imagine a place where people fear crime and obsess on airline shuttle schedules, a land of bonsai clubs and super-fast roller coasters, where churches and commercial sex flourish side by side. Don't recognize it? Welcome to the San Fernando Valley, as viewed from the Internet. It's the view you would get of the Virtual Valley if you lived in Finland, say, or Zaire or Iowa, and surfing the Internet's World Wide Web was your only source of information about the place.

In the epic struggle among city-states over who gets to be the Multimedia Capital of the Universe, there emerged last week a new pretender to the throne. New York. Yes, New York, symbol of all that is traditional, conservative, Old World. Disregarding all that, and armed with data from a new survey conducted by accounting firm Coopers & Lybrand, the Big Analog Apple has thrust itself into a rivalry that has thus far been safely contained on the West Coast.

Lunchtime at Sega City in the Irvine Entertainment Center. High Noon. No place for the faint of heart. It's a shirt-and-tie-and-beeper crowd, but, please, don't get in their way. "Gentlemen, start your engines." With that, the most popular game in this video arcade revs to action. I'm watching five grown men sitting in a row, about to steer their virtual reality racing cars on the computer screen in front of them. The five work together--their firm, Advantage Memory Corp.

Feature films based on virtual reality have a basic problem: Instead of presenting worlds intended to entertain people sitting in chairs, what you get are movies about people sitting in chairs that are supposed to entertain people sitting in chairs.

Tennis star Gabriela Sabatini slammed the ball toward her opponent and dashed across the hard court surface at La Costa Resort--over a huge logo for Toshiba digital videodiscs--to prepare for the return. At least, that's what you saw if you were watching the second round of last month's Toshiba Tennis Classic on the Prime Network cable TV channel.