In MMO land, if your visual attention wanders, you can fail to notice that you are on fire. Almost all information arrives through vision, and the little bit arriving through hearing is usually duplicated visually.
MMO environments break with the old tradition of “off-screen,” in which objects clearly visible to the character are invisible to the player. For years, we came upon castles and dragons that hid by being straight in front of us but just beyond our myopic vision. Meanwhile, our characters had the impressive ability to see anything on-screen, even if it was down three levels, behind a wall, and under a giant turtle.
In an MMO, when looking at yourself, you mostly see a cloak and the back of a helmet. Checking whether you spilled something on your shirt requires rotating an incorporeal camera. In real life, people would find other uses for incorporeal cameras.
Video game characters’ optic nerves are linked to that camera, rather than their eyes, although some games habitually park the camera in-skull except for dramatic moments. This can cause great problems around walls and corners, as the camera might poke into a wall or torso, or else flee the solid objects in search of some strange angle. It is from this that we learn (1) everything is hollow, including your torso, and (2) the camera is trying to kill you. Why you linked your optic nerve to such a hostile entity, I will never know, although maybe it was not hostile until you enslaved it.
: Zubon
