I got sent the following link by a good friend, Richard Sewell, who is a mobile app developer:

http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3170411 which is commenting on the following youttube video:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiRgYBHoAoU

What is incredible really, is not that someone has made an electronic calculator in the virtual “sandbox” game (Game? Maybe “toy” is a better word for it) that is “Little Big Planet” coming soon to the PS3 (That’s Playstation 3, a game console, your honour). The amazing fact is that the simulations that have been possible on cheap hardware for several years now – decades even if you consider some titles as being complex enough – are no longer the creations of the developers, but of ourselves. All the developers do is provide tools, some case studies and a few resources. Then it’s “light the blue touch paper and retire!”

Herman Hesse wrote “The Glass Bead Game” as a futuristic look at the obsession that such a simulation can have; the reality that the simulation is mimicing takes second place to the cleverness of what the simulation can do that goes beyond reality, forging a newer reality that cannot exist in Reality. I wonder if (or should that be when?) Little Big Planet 2 (or 3 or 4…) will achieve such “realitence” (reality + sentience) or if we will fall foul of “virtality” by placing greater store on a simulation than the thing that inspired it?