“I played a few games myself, back in the days before consoles were ousted by the PC Master Race, and I’ve thought more than once about how these virtual worlds are made of numbers. Ones and zeroes, unless I’m mistaken. But think about this for a moment: what about the unseen particles that make up the human body? The atoms that make up everything we see and feel? Is it not true that the closer we look, the less we see? It’s not the collection of atoms that matter, but the man, yet the atoms are the matter that make the man. Can the same logic not be applied to the world we’re in now? Shanawan is made of numbers, but it’s not the numbers that matter: it’s Shanawan. If my cells malfunction I get sick and die. If the numbers falter we get glitches and lag. When we look at a landscape we see a landscape, not atoms. When we look at Shanawan we see Shanawan, not numbers. The two aren’t on the same level, yet they aren’t entirely dissimilar. The game is both fantasy and reality. Not too different from man.”