Virtual Natives

2What Is Reality, Anyway?

Where older generations may make a distinction between digital worlds and the “real” world, meaning the physical world, VNs are much more likely to consider what happens in digital arenas to be just as real as that which happens in the physical world. After all, it's on digital platforms that they do most of their communication with friends and learn about the world. Whether a VN is talking to their friend in person or as an avatar in a virtual space, the relationship and the emotions are real, and that's what matters.

In 2021, ahead of the release of The Matrix Resurrections, which was coming out a full 22 years after the first appearance of The Matrix in 1999, star Keanu Reeves found himself explaining the plot to a group of teenagers who had been born after the original movie was made.

He outlined the basic plot, then got to the twist at the center of the Matrix franchise. “There's this guy who's in a kind of virtual world. And he finds out that there's a real world, and he's really questioning what's real and what's not real.”

For those of us who first saw the Matrix movies when they came out, we remember how horrifying and deeply unsettling it was to discover that everything the characters Neo and Trinity were experiencing as “the real world” was a simulation, an elaborate digital trick pulled on their sensory system by forces beyond their control.

Instead of being blown away, one girl just looked at him and asked him, “Why?” Reeves was unsettled. ...