Living in a fantasy world

I'm a big fan of Michael Crichton's daft 1970s science-fiction movie Westworld, in which Yul Brynner stole the show as a sinister robot cowboy gone bad. He turns into an early Terminator, terrorising the residents of a high-tech entertainment resort called Delos, in which fat cats live out their fantasies in a theme park manned by beautiful (and sexually compliant) androids. It includes a variety of themed spaces: the cowboy-themed world of the title, a medieval world and a Roman world. I thought of this when I heard that Roma Victor, an online world set in 180 AD, is set to throw opens its virtual doors on 16 July.

The man behind Roma Victor, Kerry Fraser-Robinson, says that since the age of 12 he's been telling anybody who would listen that virtual worlds were going to be the next big thing in entertainment. Nobody listened then, but now they have to: the incredible success of the online game World of Warcraft has brought Mr Fraser-Robinson's obsession out of his bedroom and into Business Week, New Scientist and Newsnight, as mainstream media grapple with the idea of virtual worlds. These online universes have their own populations, currencies and labour markets -- and they're absorbing an increasing amount of the world's finite and ever-so-precious attention reserves.

For Mr Fraser-Robinson, who is president of Redbedlam, the British company that's building the Roma Victor empire, this venture addresses one of his major issues with current virtual worlds. They fund themselves through monthly subscriptions, meaning that players sign up, get bored and forget to cancel their subscriptions. This creates a great revenue stream for the company, but leaves a bad taste in the mouth -- like health clubs and gyms that rely on the people who don't show up. In Roma Victor there will be an initial £20 charge for your account, but that's all you need to pay. From then on you need to generate wealth within the world in order to buy objects and resources you need, or buy the in-game currency, sesterces (as any fule who read Asterix kno). This take-it-or-leave-it approach lowers the barrier to entry, and given that it can take hours to discover if a world is to your taste, should make it easier to attract new customers.

Building an entire world is a daunting task: first you need the right tools, then you need to do the actual building, then you need to find people who want to live in it. Redbedlam has managed to do that, and its founder hopes to re-use its software tools to create other worlds in the future (rather like Slartibartfast in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, another serial world-builder). An American company called Multiverse is focusing even more directly on giving developers the tools to build their own worlds, and as its name suggests, its founders imagine thousands of different virtual worlds, creating not so much a single, united metaverse or matrix, but many universes or matrices. Swords and sorcery? Choose World of Warcraft. Swords and sandals? Choose Roma Victor. Sex and saris? Choose Jewel of Indra.

The essence of virtual worlds can be hard to define, but as with pornographic materials I generally feel like I know them when I see them. For me the defining characteristic of a virtual space is a kind of digital vertigo. If I show you a Monopoly board or a chess game, your imagination may be captured by the intricate beauty of the game and the mental pattern its rules create, but the game space itself isn't overwhelming. The sense of space you get in virtual worlds, whether Tolkien-themed like World of Warcraft, military-themed like Battlefield 2 or Roman-themed liked Roma Victor, is unnerving. These are huge and intricate virtual realms, designed to give even the most fanatical and obsessed user a huge number of things to do, places to go and people to meet. This reckless sense of scale is what makes these worlds so exciting, and so addictive.

In affluent, crowded urban environments, these virtual worlds may be the holiday we all need to escape the rat-race, a seductive offer the makers of Westworld understood. "If there's anyone who doesn't know what Delos is, well, as we've always said: Delos is the vacation of the future, today. At Delos, you get your choice of the vacation you want. There's Medieval World, Roman World and, of course, Westworld."

Cinema, like television, comic books and reading itself, was also despised by those across the generational divide who thought it was a waste of time that encouraged fantasy, distracted people from work and led to various forms of moral and sexual corruption. If you find the idea of spending hours in a virtual world completely daft and unappealing and also a bit silly, then you may be right. Or you may just belong to a different generation.

"It's still a minority sport," Mr Frazer-Robinson says, "but cinema used to be a minority sport: you had to know someone who had a projector and go around to their house." He thinks that we in the UK have a culture of denial about the seductive power of these worlds. Comfortably dismissing them as games for children, we don't realise how much of our lives are now digital, virtual and imaginary, taking place online in worlds our grandparents would have found as peculiar and improbable as the fantasy robots of Westworld, in which, according to the Internet Movie Database, "a futuristic amusement park becomes a deathtrap when the androids and computer systems used in it begin to murderously run amok." Let's hope Roma Victor ends more happily.