[playing_colours]

I am thinking about it from the angle of video games vs. real world.

Be a hero, a revolutionary, a pirate, feel encouraged to work hard, explore more, improve yourself, rebel, but only there in a safe artificial illusion, virtual world they built for you. In real life, do stay a passive compliant consumer, a source of money (or energy like in Matrix).

This chasm seems to keep widening with the progress in technologies like VR, and this way of organizing a society is very convenient for businesses and people in power. Welcome to Coward New World!

Ingenious next steps in this direction would be to seamlessly integrate our jobs into artificial reality, so that people can sustain themselves, make money for corporations and people in power - do all this staying totally immersed in the illusionary world. Get exclusive game currency, bonuses to your stats from your employer for a good work. Mmmm, I want to write a book about it :)