IT IS a Tuesday evening in Mesquite, Texas. Four young men are crowded into a darkened room, each clutching a computer game console hooked up to monitors. The consoles are linked so that the gamers can play against each other in the same virtual world. Inside this world, the gamers control robots moving through an arid landscape under cloudless blue skies. Each gamer sees this world through the eyes of the character he controls.
The scene could be a regular gaming party but inside the game nobody is playing. Instead of charging around the virtual world blowing each other’s virtual…
