A truly virtual world

I work in a world of bits and bytes, of digital representations of people, places and things, so I understand the differences between reality and virtual. At least I thought I did until I saw this video. I wasn’t even aware of the fact that there was such a thing as the “Air Guitar World Championships”, held for 2008 in Oulu Finland on August 22. Is this what the world is coming to? As a drummer (a ‘real’ drummer) it hurts to watch this almost as much as a guy playing with a set of drum tracks that were created by software. At least that is the creation of music, not just a set of actions set to pre-existing music as if to mimic it’s creation.

Imagine if the world had any of the following “air” contests:

• Software programming – sitting at a pretend keyboard for days, taking coffee and donut breaks, then sleeping under the invisible desk on pretend launch day (how do non existent bugs get fixed?)
• Extreme games – pretending to jump off a 40 ft. high ramp on an air skateboard with virtual broken bones
• Olympics – do you need to train for 4 years to compete in the air olympics?

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