I need a new term.

Or perhaps, the term already exists and I need someone to tell me about it.

What I want to describe, using the conceptual shorthand of a single term, is a fairly simple idea—that there is a point where simulated life is undifferentiated from real life.

More specifically, I want a name for that (possibly imaginary point) at which you can’t tell whether you are participating in a computational experience programmed on digital computers or whether you are living your nominal life.

In the past I’ve approached this concept by talking about “The Matrix”. But there are two issues with that as a metaphor. One is that it the Matrix has all these distopian connotations that I don’t like. The other is that people always make fun of me when I bring up the Matrix in serious conversion.

So, what do we call this reality-blurring point and why do I care?

First, what to call it.

There are so many good antecedents that we could use coin a new term: the Matrix point, the Holodeck line, the Cartesian Demarcation. Likewise, we could describe the point as Dickian on Lemesque. But I am inclined to refer to it as the Turing Event. This combines two perfectly combatable concepts into one. First, it recognizes that Alan Turing came up with the first general test of computer intellegence and real life blending—the Turing Test. So, it seems fair to extend his insight to describe a point at which artificial reality becomes indistinguishable from what passes as our present reality. Second, the term reaches into the science of black holes to point out than when approaching certain events you reach a point of no return. Once you cross over, the rules change. Life in a black hole isn’t like life on this side.

Inside a Turing Event, you can’t tell whether you are inside or outside the event.

Why does this matter?

For one thing, it allows us to talk about the notion of “immersion” in more practical terms. As it is used today, immersion doesn’t mean much. Or maybe it means too much. I stood in front of a room of game scholars once and boldly claimed: “Saying a game is immersive is the same thing as saying it is cool.” Both terms are vague signs indicating that you really like something but don’t say anything as to why. Since the room of academics didn’t beat me to death later, I think there must be a nut of truth in there.

If I defined a game’s immersiveness as a function of the Turing Event, then at least we know what we are talking about. We could say that immersion is fractional measure of the Turing Event. Or put it his way:

I=T/If

where I is the level of immersion, T is the Turing Event and If is the “immersion function”, or the specific method for measuring immersion.

The closer the immersion function is to 1, the harder it is to distinguish the real from the simulated. When I=T, then you can’t tell whether or not you are in reality or in a simulation.

(And as special implication of this proposed measure of immersion, there is a point where the Turing Event is more real than reality. No, I don’t know what that means. But if the immersion function calculates a value greater than 1, then you are hyper-immersed. And this, I suspect, is something that the guys who made the Matrix would get a kick out of.)

This equation begs the question of how you calculate the immersion function. But at this point I am less worried about proposing a formula for that function than I am interested in pointing out that you can’t calculate immersion without a Turing event.

Mathematical descriptions aside, I also want a the Turing Event term so I can talk about the difference between playing a game and not being able to tell you are playing a game. I want a nice, packaged concept for arguing with people about things like how “real” games are. When someone says, “Oh, this game is the most realistic game yet,” I want to be able to put that into a conceptual context, one that lets me think of these advances in game technology as orbiting some distance from the Turing Event.

To use a specific example, when someone tells me that “World of Warcraft” is more realistic than the old Atari 2600 game “Adventure”, I want to be able to rebut that both are roughly the same distance from the Turing Event. That is, neither game really fools you for a second that you are inside a real place. They are just two types of fantasy. Structurally, they might have very different messages encoded in them. But it’s silly to think that people fall for either one as a real place.

On the other hand, I’ve glanced at a television running a current version of Madden or NFL Y2K and thought for a moment it was real. The levels of mediated of reality aside, I think these examples are much closer to a Turing Event. Not close at all. But closer. They give you a sudden sense of reality that you have to tear yourself away from.

As a conclusion of sorts, I want to define a Turing Event so we can stop pretending that we are loosing our grip on reality and start talking about how this new form of media is cooperating in our evolution, how videogames are as much a part of the post-digital human as the humans are a part of the games. Videogames, I think it is clear, are just a part of our reality, not replacing it, as the censors and violence Cassandaras worry.

But this is not to say that we are not creeping closer to the Turing Event. While no chatter bot has passed the Turng Test, we have come close enough that it’s not hard to imagine that one day soon we will. We are close enough to a simulacrum of human intelligence that we cannot always reliably sort spam from earnest correspondence. Artists have fabricated images that have passed for real for hundreds of years. So, in the fine arts, we have reached the edge of the Turing Event. For now, I’m not worried about probing into the unreality of the black hole of a Turing Event. I just want to recognize that this point exists as a landmark we can use while charting this new media territory.

So, can we call it a Turing Even? Or did someone already give it a better name?