SPAWN POINT: LUCID DREAMS

Lucid dreaming is an excellent model for understanding the future of video games. Consider a sample dream scenario: you’re running across a concrete, parapet-perimetered, rectangular rooftop of some nondescript multi-story building, the wind whistling over a sprawling New York City-like metropolis. Chasing you are dozens of (surprisingly athletic) street cops, perhaps with a parent or other Freudian cameo mixed in (no judgment), and they’re quickly gaining on you and your sloppy dream gait. Out of rooftop runway, you decide to leap, choosing the fall in lieu of interminable dream-jail for whatever nonsensical crimes you had committed pre-lucid-awareness.

Wincing, willing for a miraculous turn of events, you open your eyes and see the impossible: instead of plummeting toward your logical end as a visceral sidewalk puddle, you’re rising upward with accelerating force into a lush and vibrant environment of waterfalled cliffs and oversized prehistoric flora. Some idyllic rehashing of Avatar’s Pandora comes into focus, and as you glance backward, your pursuers transfigure into a now-dispersing gaggle of multicolored parakeets. You yourself have sprouted a pair of Pterodactyl-esque, iridescent wings, the powerful heaving of which rockets you deeper into the sky.