- I just had to share this bit of disturbing fascinatingness from Japan (tomorrow the world?)
LovePlus+ is a “virtual girlfriend” game/program for the Nintendo DS/iPhone, etc. It’s a lot like Tamagochi (if any of you remember that), but instead of simulating the upkeep of a caring relationship between a person and a virtual baby chicken, it’s a virtual 17-year-old human female.
One fellow even married his. Publicly!
And now holiday resorts are offering themed vacations to fellows and their LovePlus+ virtual girlfriends, which of course travel easier because they live in their Nintendo DS. Some of the guys pay double, for both themselves and “her”.
This of course means at least 100 things, but I can’t get my head around just what they are. ‘Which is why, of course, I’m posting this and provoking responses.
(One thing this reminds me of: In artificial intelligence, we have the “Turing Test”, named after Alan Turning, inventor of the modern electric computer. It goes like this: If a person is interacting in a screen-and-keyboard chat session with Entity X, and the person can’t tell whether he’s chatting with a person or a program, then the Turing Test has been passed and true AI has been achieved. In the case of LovePlus+, though, the person knows it’s a program, and doesn’t care.)
I’m sure we have plenty of analogues to this here in the US and A, but I can’t quite put my finger on them.
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