The Metropolis MMO
Nov. 16th, 2010 10:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kent_allard_jrI've never seen Fritz Lang's Metropolis, but caught a few minutes of the restored print on TCM last week. The film quality was amazing, and the scene I saw -- a delirious vision of a Jazz Age Whore of Babylon -- was captivating. I hoped to watch the full movie later, but alas, our DVR screwed up the recording (damn you Time Warner Cable!) so I'll have to wait until after the holidays.
Metropolis has already occupied a corner of my subconscious, though. On Sunday I dreamed of being trapped in a Metropolis MMO. (I don't know why I have so many MMO dreams. Once I was in a distant WoW expansion, set on the Moon, where I wandered out of town and was killed by a 200th-level squirrel...) I don't think it would have much commercial appeal, since you had to toil in the factories at low levels, although you got to reset your genetic structure every time you died. (In my dream gene splicing was done with fuzzy virtual Legos.) I did get to drive through the high-level city: It was under a dome, where the city's elite lived in open-air compounds around a suburban street. Big Sister's televised messages, strident to the proles, were whining and pathetic when delivered to the elite, who jeered and laughed at them anyway. A lot like our own world, when you think of it.
Metropolis has already occupied a corner of my subconscious, though. On Sunday I dreamed of being trapped in a Metropolis MMO. (I don't know why I have so many MMO dreams. Once I was in a distant WoW expansion, set on the Moon, where I wandered out of town and was killed by a 200th-level squirrel...) I don't think it would have much commercial appeal, since you had to toil in the factories at low levels, although you got to reset your genetic structure every time you died. (In my dream gene splicing was done with fuzzy virtual Legos.) I did get to drive through the high-level city: It was under a dome, where the city's elite lived in open-air compounds around a suburban street. Big Sister's televised messages, strident to the proles, were whining and pathetic when delivered to the elite, who jeered and laughed at them anyway. A lot like our own world, when you think of it.
