In the real-world setting that gave birth to the game eXistenZ, the bioports do not get infected, and when Ted asks Allegra about this, she laughs him off and opens her mouth as if to show that the bioport is hardly the only opening one has directly into the body.
Of course, in our world, one can be infected via the mouth, the nose, the eyes, an open wound: Germs are remarkably inventive at finding a way into the body. Hence the spread of Staph infections through hospitals, or the common cold through offices, homes, and classrooms. This is why even with all our fancy medical technology, doctors still scrub up throughly before and after surgery, or why TB patients still wear masks in public-- it's very easy to pass along an infection. Even an ear piercing, which Allegra compares the bioport to, can get infected if not looked after properly.
For this reason, I doubt that a bioport would be exempt from infection in our society. The best current-day analogy I can think of to the bioport is a central line, which patients who have to take an IV regimen can have placed in their chest (probably elsewhere, too, but my experience has only been with patients who have it in the chest) instead of getting a new IV stick every day. The central line is extremely susceptible to infection; it has to be flushed regularly, and the bandaging over it changed daily.
So, maybe in Allegra's world it's ludicrous to think that a bioport can get infected, but in ours, it's a real concern. When you add the medical complications to the other technical details that would need to be addressed before we could have game play attached to the nervous system, it sounds (blessedly) a long way off indeed. For which I am thankful; real life presents enough challenges for me without having to invite whole new ones in for the sake of gaming.
On the other hand, it seems that even without a physical connection, gaming addiction is seen by many as a medical problem already. Games have developed to the point where they promote the formation of a separate reality (can't really do that with pacman or tetris). Isn't this potential psychological problem a harder medical problem to deal with (vs infection) and one with implications today?
ReplyDeleteWhen I was watching the movie I couldn't help but wonder how something like the bio-port would go over in real life. Would it really be something that was taken as lightly as getting your ears pierced, and so common you could get it implanted in the mall. Personally I couldn't imagine being okay with something being inserted into my spinal chord in the middle of the mall. But even taken out of the mall setting and making it a surgical procedure still seems too strange for me.
ReplyDelete@Chinchin: Yeah, we're definitely already there.
ReplyDelete@Megan: Getting my ears pierced at the mall wasn't that fun, actually. I'm not at all wild about getting something implanted in my spine, complete with epidural. Yikes.
I really wish they had given us more information in regards to why they didn't seem to have infection in the world of the movie. You bring up a good point that we can get infected through our orifices, but they specifically indicate in the movie that they don't seem to. Maybe that's just something they overlooked when they were putting the movie together, or maybe I'm just missing something, but it seems like they never explained how none of this stuff gets infected. I feel like there would have to be some risk of infection no matter how routine a procedure it was, but maybe in this future they have fixed that problem in some way.
ReplyDelete