Entertainment hasn't changed a massive amount, at least in terms of function, since the Week of Sorrows. You watch or read or play or listen all for much the same reasons, though the main one has shifted since then. At first we did so to try and forget the world around us, to bury ourselves in less painful possibilities. Then, as our culture began to recover from the nearly fatal blows struck against it by the Shiplords, it was to remember. Those left behind created simulations and memories of what had once been, to let us know what the Shiplords had taken. Those are still widely used to this day, though their use is more historical than recreational in most cases.
It was only after those of my generation, the children who grew into an empty world, reached young adulthood that we started to reclaim what had been taken from us. Where before everything had been records of the past, or what had once existed then, we began to create again. I remember when new songs entered popular consensus, I was even part of a few compositions myself. The way that changed the world…it's hard to describe to those who weren't alive then.
There's a reason that art and culture became such a huge part of the new world, and this one had nothing to do with the Elder First, or the Circles. Simply the result of the desire of three billion children to have something new. And once we saw that that was possible, we just didn't stop. In a way, I don't think we could.
To those few who'd survived the Shiplords, it was a return to normality. To all the rest of us, those who'd grown up with nothing but a struggle for survival? It's impossible to explain how much it changed our world.
And that was where changes in the form of entertainment really started to take off. Games like Stardust were invented, and entire new art forms started to develop off of holographic technology, the most well-known today being artistic holosculpting. I think there was something like it before the Sorrows, but it never had time to really evolve into what it is today. And, of course, there were the games. Though they started out more restricted, an extension on Prologue allowed for the creation of proper 'full-dive' virtual reality systems and an explosion of creativity as modelling tools propagated.
Those games didn't stay bound to Prologue for long, though, with the restriction that made against Potentials being seen as utterly unreasonable. And to be fair, we were all quite young, and several groups from the Second Awakening couldn't think of a better idea than to work out a way to let us enjoy the same gaming experience as our fellows. I didn't have much time for those after graduation and to be honest, I never quite understood some of the interest. But being part of the Circles meant being part of a truly enormous family, and families play games together. So I learned.
What exists now is so much more than we had back then, in every way. Our programmers and creators were still learning the tricks that are so commonplace today, tricks they had to reinvent or produce from whole cloth given the new medium. The ability to dive completely into a virtual world allowed people to enjoy possibilities that until then had been the realm of fantasy, and the first productions were almost solely within that genre, too. It should surprise no one that I ended up playing custom-modded healers, courtesy of Mary.
And by the time the next generation of humanity was born…the world was very different to that which had been left to us. We'd reclaimed the culture that had almost died, and built our own atop it. We'd started to experiment with our own forms of media, our own brands of creation, and the bright young children of the Third's generations only took them further. We had recovered from the shadows of the Week of Sorrows. They surpassed them.
Today, human entertainment and culture are deeply powerful forces, and most greatly ones of defiant creation. Although all genres are present, in all the different flavours that someone from the pre-Sorrows world would expect, that central concept is rarely missing on some level. As a species, as a culture, we rose from the Week of Sorrows and the Second Battle of Sol, unbowed by the horrors that each delivered to us. That is reflected in no place better than human culture.
And in no small part due to the Circles, most gaming experiences are communal affairs, even when pitting groups against each other. Full dive systems and the steady advance of computing technology has allowed for the creation of worlds far more living and vibrant than anything pre-Sorrows humanity might have ever imagined. It was certainly beyond anything my family had seen, but there are limits to even the most intricate of human creations.
Iris…is not conventionally human.
Our daughter had been aware of the gaming sphere from very early in her life, but it wasn't until her embodiment that she started to really pay attention to it. I'd like to say that she showed restraint in diving into that world, that she took her cues from the closest friends she made during that time…but I'd be lying. It took Iris all of a month to blaze her way to the top of some of the most challenging competitive experiences in existence, but when you consider the nature of those games, it shouldn't be surprising.
Iris has all of the enthusiasm and passion of a teenager, an easy precision the match of any master and an 'apm' as it's apparently called that's literally inhuman. Her position in those communities remains unchallenged, but she also deliberately stepped away from the more directly competitive side of those games. It's no fun when it's impossible to lose, she said; we were very proud of her for realising that entirely on her own. But that isn't to say that she stopped playing, either, and her constant desire for a challenge caught the attention of developers.
The first Innocent Apocalypse took place five years ago, a month after Iris was asked if she would be interested in creating and leading a NPC faction invasion of an entire game world. There have been more than a score of them since, with each one part of a much larger storyline that has brought numerous different games and their communities together to drive back the character that Iris calls The Innocent from their reality. Iris can often spend days or even weeks setting up a new invasion, working with developers to work out what she's there for, and why.
Her victories have reshaped entire worlds, though usually only in ways that can eventually be reverted with some effort by the community, and several of them have simply accepted their failure with a cheerful defiance of the odds and sought to overcome what now is instead of return to what was. In her own way, Iris herself has become a vehicle for that same culture, and all because she was just looking for a proper challenge.
I'm still not quite sure how fighting what is at times a literal small army in a sword-and-sorcery fantasy setting qualifies as a proper challenge. But it's clear to see in both the runup and conclusion that she loves it. And so long as it doesn't hurt anyone, which it certainly doesn't, then I'll never see a reason to object. Those games assaulted by the Innocent have never been anything but positive about it, at least after the fact, and the way in which those events have bound different communities together are a microcosm of the Circles themselves. Even if they've only ever managed to 'kill' the Innocent twice.
