Video Games and The Transhuman Inclinati
Video Games and The Transhuman Inclinati
Video Games and The Transhuman Inclinati
by Robert M. Geraci
735
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In the absence of a real Tlön, one character recommends that he and his
companions write the history of it; and so a group of conspirators compose
Tlön’s history, sciences, literature, et cetera. Their collected works, The
First Encyclopedia of Tlön, are then released on Earth, whose inhabitants
begin reshaping the planet and its culture in the image of the imaginary
Tlön. Borges writes:
The contact and habit of Tlön have disintegrated this world. Enchanted by its
rigor, humanity forgets over and again that it is a rigor of chess masters, not angels.
Already the schools have been invaded by the (conjectural) “primitive language” of
Tlön; already the teaching of its harmonious history (filled with moving episodes)
has wiped out the one which governed my childhood; already a fictitious past
occupies in our memories the place of another, a past of which we know nothing
with certainty—not even that it is false. Numismatology, pharmacology and
archeology have been reformed. I understand that biology and mathematics also
await their avatars . . . . A scattered dynasty of solitary men has changed the face of
the world. (ibid ., 18)
I shall argue throughout this paper that Borges’s fantasy can help us
understand how many transhumanists use and perceive video games and
virtual worlds. I am not going to offer any conspiracy theories, but rather
a suggestion that a few individuals’ technological fantasies (hope that
technology will permit human transcendence) borrow from twentieth-
century technofantasies (popular science promises that we shall become
cyborgs or upload our minds into virtual reality) and are rapidly becoming
one of the foci of transhumanism’s eschatological hopes. That is, some
transhumanists hope to rework reality in accordance with a vision—played
out in video games—of a fantastic realm of the imagination.
While in Borges’s fantasy, the reworking of the world comes through
literature, transhumanists aspire to use technology, especially digital
technologies, to accomplish this end. By its very nature, technology is about
transcending our limits, but video games work much better than other
technologies as an illustration of our human potential. Consider nuclear
power: while Spider-Man might be an enviable apocalyptic outcome of
nuclear power, mostly we just expect death from exposure to radiation. In
games, however, we always come back to life, and thanks to what we learn
in the process, we come back better than before.
Almost every virtual world is, by definition, an opportunity to transcend
our biological limits. Thanks to Internet connections, they allow human
beings to join one another across great distances. Because entrants
desire something beyond the pale of the ordinary, programmers provide
superhuman abilities: flight, teleportation, extraordinary tools for creating,
and magical fighting prowess. Virtual world residents live in a magical place
infused with meaning and power; rather than waiting for a traditional
religious afterlife to acquire such transcendence, they can log on to
their computers. Long before the video game explosion, mid-twentieth-
century advocates had already infused the earliest visions of computer
technology with utopian promises (Turner 2006), and these promises
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were eagerly adopted by both designers and users who craved a modern
version of “sacred space” (Wertheim 1999). This digital soteriology depends
upon the treatment of information and materiality in the development
of cybernetics and has undergone several decades of interpretation and
engagement in literature (Hayles 1999); to a great extent, then, video games
and virtual worlds thus provide the latest—and the most compelling—
instantiation of the search for technological transcendence through
computers.
Video games, thanks to the transcendent benefits accrued in them
(including the simple fact that they are fun), provide eminently desirable
spaces. In a survey of EverQuest players, Edward Castronova found
that 22 percent would choose to live in its fictional world if possible
(Castronova 2005, 59). Sociologist William Bainbridge notes, “I would
consider a continued existence for my main [World of Warcraft] character,
behaving as I would behave if I still lived, as a realistic form of
immortality” (Bainbridge 2010, 62). While Bainbridge acknowledges
his own transhumanist leanings, World of Warcraft players who are not
committed to transhumanist groups also see the appeal of living on in it.
In interviews conducted among World of Warcraft players, even skeptics
told me, “It is attractive, sure” (Dallben 2011) and “If one could have
confidence in the system, it could be tempting” (Teleria 2011). Among
actual transhumanists, the numbers of those who would like to upload
their minds into World of Warcraft or a similar game are even higher:
51 percent of transhumanists in a recent survey would find it appealing.2
The combination of cyberpunk science fiction and popular science
robotics in the 1980s and 1990s brought mind uploading and transhuman-
ist salvation to a broad audience. Science fiction books—such as Vernor
Vinge’s True Names ([1981] 2001), William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984),
and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992)—created enormous enthusiasm
for computer technologies, especially virtual reality. Pop science books—
beginning with Hans Moravec’s Mind Children (1988) and Robot (1999),
but culminating in the widely read Age of Spiritual Machines (1999) and
The Singularity Is Near (2005) by Ray Kurzweil—provided a scientific
explanation for how it might one day be possible to copy human minds into
virtual reality environments, where we would become immortal software
entities. The combination of pop science and science fiction in the spread
of transhumanism was persistent throughout most of the twentieth century
(see Geraci 2011), and it has been critical to the belief that we might one
day upload our minds into virtual worlds, perhaps even environments such
as World of Warcraft or Second Life.
Whether digital technologies can live up to their utopian promises is
an open question, and not one subject to empirical analysis. Although
advocates of mind uploading and other technologies rely upon what they
see as unassailable guarantors, such as evolution or a law of accelerating
returns (see Kurzweil 1999, 33; Kurzweil 2005, 7–21; Moravec 1999,
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165–7), the only actual test for the hope that technology can eradicate
human finitude will be for that event to actually come about. As such,
this paper is emphatically not about whether transhumanists are right or
wrong, whether their fantasies are grounded in reality or delusion. Rather,
this paper is a cultural study, an attempt to understand what is at stake in
the modern world: how it is that video games are part of transhumanist
thought and practice.
Increasingly, in order to understand transhumanism one must under-
stand transhumanists’ influence upon and through virtual worlds and video
games. Through specific design features and the intent of some designers,
games engage transhumanist promises and hopes. As a consequence, many
transhumanists have adopted video games and virtual worlds as spaces for
preparation, participation, and evangelization.
DATA COLLECTION
In order to appreciate how transhumanism and game design intertwine,
I have tracked gamers and transhumanists through web forums and
e-mail listservs; conducted interviews with game designers, transhumanists,
and players; and conducted a small survey of opinions held by avowed
transhumanists with an interest in virtual worlds and video games.3
As a consequence, the data contained in this essay result from several
years of working with transhumanist groups. The survey, which was
distributed through two transhumanist e-mail listservs, also included space
for commentary. Throughout this paper, quotations taken from survey
comments and some of the interviewees will be given pseudonyms from
a once-popular children’s fantasy series to maintain anonymity while also
distinguishing among different individuals. Other interviewees agreed to
have their names published, and so will be cited by their names.
Only a few specific video games and virtual worlds will be described here,
but there are literally hundreds of video games that take on transhumanist
themes. Obviously, any game involving space or time travel does so, as do
games that involve heroes enhanced through exoskeletons, cybernetics, or
genetic enhancement. When heroes, villains, or friends upload their minds
into machines or were intelligent machines to begin with, games mirror
promises transhumanists have made for decades. From Space Invaders
(1978) and Metroid (1986) to Final Fantasy VII (2007) and Singularity
(2010), games play with transhumanist technologies and outcomes. There
will not be room to discuss every possible transhumanist intervention in
game design, however, so a few key games will take pride of place.
TRANSCENDENCE BY DESIGN
Transcendent design takes place through three primary paths: (1) the
presence of explicitly religious ideas in games, (2) the use of transhumanism
in games, and (3) transhumanist beliefs held or interrogated by designers.
Robert M. Geraci 739
acquire tremendous powers and raise ourselves up from the dead at those
moments where our powers or our skills are inadequate to the task at hand.
One transhumanist not only sees a connection between transhumanism
and gaming, but even equates them:
In a sense transhumanism is gaming. It is the same idea that you can become
something more than yourself. Thus, anytime you build a character and go
“in-world” you have created an idealized or specialized extension of your own
being . . . . Video gaming most closely mirrors [transhumanism] because of the
added technological elements that allow one to change the self easily and quickly.
Much like the freedom one might have if you could delve one’s mind into the
computer. (Gwydion 2012)
Likewise, when I asked Sheldon Pacotti, the lead writer on Deus Ex
(2000) and Deus Ex: Invisible War (2003), if video games were inherently
transhumanist, he told me, “Transhumanism is just another expression of
power, like magic in a fantasy story or a double-jump in Mario. Games
give players the power to do things—sometimes extraordinary things—
they would not do in ordinary life. I think it’s pretty savvy to realize
that all games share this same mechanism . . . and it all could be called
transhumanism, since it takes the audience beyond their mundane lives”
(Pacotti 2012). Joshua Ortega, writer for Gears of War 2, agrees, averring
that “all virtual life is essentially a step towards joining ‘the Matrix,’ or
giving up the physical world for the virtual” (Ortega 2012).
Games provide transhuman experiences: they empower players and
provide an arena in which transhuman growth becomes possible. Although
winning is, of course, a key goal in gaming, growth and development
are actually more important to their appeal. Players have either magic or
powerful technologies (or both) at their disposal within video game worlds,
and both are consistent with transhumanist outcomes of surpassing the
limits of human life. But the presence of powers is, itself, less reflective of
transhumanism than the possibility of ongoing self-improvement. It is the
process that matters, rather than the acquisition. In games, players evolve.
They gain access to new, often more glamorous equipment, and they earn
achievements and accolades, which are often maintained in lists visible to
other players and rewarded with moments when the player sees a banner
on the screen announcing the achievement.
An opportunity to become more powerful, to grow beyond ourselves,
is something that all human beings desire, and it is at the core of
transhumanism. Consider, for example, comments made in a recent
compilation of essays about transhumanism: (1) “Utopia is not so much
a place as a direction, a good direction” (Rothblatt 2011, 113); (2) The
movie Gattica’s protagonist is a transhuman hero—despite lacking any
typical transhuman augmentations—because he overcomes his limits using
technology (Marson 2011, 91); and (3) “Transhumanists maintain that we
can legitimately reform ourselves and our natures” (Bostrom 2011, 57).
Such attitudes have been common, even emphasized, among transhumanist
Robert M. Geraci 741
over to the machine world, merging with the Helios AI into a god-like machine
intelligence, imposing order on the planet. Or he might recoil from the command
of the transhumanists, who created augmentations as a means of control, and
plunge the world into a dark age incapable of such magic. My goal as a writer for
the game was to put both ideas and many viewpoints into “play,” so that players
could decide for themselves what to make of this possible future. (Pacotti 2012)
While they may be a minority among the hundreds of games that depict
transhuman technologies, explicitly transhumanist games are an important
subset of the game world. The original Deus Ex won literally dozens of
“Game of the Year” awards and is on several significant lists of the “Greatest
Games of All Time” (see Wikipedia 2012). It spawned two sequels, and
the franchise may have more to come. Meanwhile, the Deus Ex franchise is
not the only one to work through transhumanist themes; quite a few other
games include human enhancement, cyborgs, and artificial intelligence.
Perhaps the most financially successful of these is the Mass Effect franchise,
which reflects a real social pattern in the way the human race gradually
accepts transhumanist outcomes over the course of several games.
The Mass Effect sequence mirrors the adoption of biotechnologies
during the twentieth century, and perhaps beyond. Over the course of
three Mass Effect games, from 2007 to 2012, players fight against aliens
using technologies opposed in most of their forms by the government.
Political resistance to AIs and human augmentation gives way to cyborg
resurrection of the hero after the character’s death in between the first
and second installments of the game, and by the third game, the player
relies upon an AI companion to help her fight and explore. Although
the game world description reveals that human leaders object to most
forms of genetic engineering, the player is always augmented, even prior
to his or her techno-resurrection. By the final game, a ban on AIs
carries little weight, and the player depends upon one . . . and may even
form an emotional attachment to it. What was once anathema becomes
permissible. Mass Effect is, of course, a game, but just as augmentation
seems increasingly acceptable in the series, we have adopted technologies
that we once felt unacceptably amoral or unnatural. Bioethicist Leon Kass
defines the “wisdom of repugnance,” more commonly called the “yuck
factor,” as our innate disapproval of certain biotechnologies (Kass 1997)
and believes that we should forego any “repugnant” technologies. Yet,
without doubt the twentieth century shows that what was once repugnant
(e.g., in vitro fertilization) can easily become routine. Kass himself vilified
Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe in the 1970s and now accepts IVF as
a legitimate reproductive technology. Likewise, the technologies outlawed
early in Mass Effect become commonplace by the third installment.
Many players follow the progress from repugnance to acceptability
and appreciate how transhumanism is thereby normalized in Mass Effect.
Comparing the role of transhumanism in console games and massively
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In the process, I’ve seen the potential and the incredible allure of human
augmentation . . . . I think augmentation can be both a positive and a negative
thing . . . . Individuals should be able to decide what is good for them as individuals
(so long as their choice doesn’t harm others), and if the technology progresses
enough, it may very well make sense for people to choose to replace a fully
functional natural limb with a cybernetic one. I, however, would probably choose
not to. (in Munkittrick 2011)
Thus, commitment to transhumanist outcomes is not an essential
ingredient to writing games that engage it but a healthy appreciation for
the possibility that such futures can be integrated into the story and design
options.
Not all designers of games that employ transhumanist themes are
sympathetic to the movement, however. By reducing the question of
transhumanism to immortality, indie game developer Jason Rohrer created
a binary opposition between death and life. In his game Immortality (2007),
players can choose immortality and then build with blocks until they grow
so bored that they quit voluntarily by choosing death. If they choose
neither, they can build until five minutes have elapsed, at which point the
character collapses dead, having used up its allotted lifespan. “I am a total
transhuman skeptic . . . . It’s the same old snake oil,” Rohrer told me, but
Immortality plays with such faith (Rohrer 2012). In his description of the
game, Rohrer writes, “We generally assume that immortality is good, just
as we assume that death is bad. Of course, universal immortality (all six
billion of us) would be physically impractical. But what about individual
immortality? What about for you? If you could become immortal, would
you?” (Rohrer 2008). His game, rather than advocacy or policy exploration,
is a “thought experiment. . .it was challenging some of those people who
would want to live forever, or think they’re going to, about whether they
really would want to and what that would really mean” (Rohrer 2012).
Immortality spawned discussion and debate on the Internet site, The
Escapist, where it was released; and despite Rohrer’s own distaste for
transhumanism, many of the players approve of the movement. One
person even believes that the game itself “strongly supports the decision
of immortality,” and suggests that the game’s mechanic—through which
blocks are stacked and a vine can climb up them—provides a sense
of purpose that encourages players to stick with it (JJ10DMAN 2008,
emphasis original). Most commentators, however, found that Immortality
failed to fully illustrate the many options that might be available to those
with eternal youth, and a considerable majority declared that as their
preference. Among the 38 posts in which a position on immortality was
taken, 28 favored it (The Escapist 2008).
Whether or not mind uploading or transhumanist immortality is a
realistic possibility, transhumanist aspirations do appear to have been at
the core of at least one game-like environment: the virtual world Second
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Life (2003).4 Second Life designer Philip Rosedale has asserted that “to be
stuck in a skeleton . . . it’s not a good outcome, not a good situation” (in Au
2008, 233), and while demurring on whether mind uploading might be
possible he also suggested that “all we have to do now is figure out how to
escape death” (ibid., 232). With reservations, he appears to accept the basic
premise of mind uploading when he acknowledges that “regardless of what
we build with technology, it seems hard to imagine that each of our living
physical bodies will not die at some point—at least those of us alive today”
(Rosedale 2011). His implication that in the future it might be possible to
radically extend human life spans and his hope that we might overcome
death reflect Rosedale’s willingness to believe that some transhumanist
dreams might come true. At some point, we might reach an end to this
world of mortality, and enter a new realm of glorious potential. In keeping
with this, in an interview with the journalist Tim Guest, Rosedale claimed,
“There’s a reasonable argument that we’ll be able to leave our bodies
behind by uploading into virtual reality” (in Guest 2007, 273). We should
not, then, be surprised that Rosedale appeared in Kurzweil’s biographical
documentary Transcendent Man (2009) or that Kurzweil was the keynote
speaker for the 2009 SL Community Convention.
Former employees at Linden Lab, which produces Second Life, confirm
that transhumanism filtered through the company’s environment. John
Lester, known as “Pathfinder Linden” when he worked on Second
Life, reports that the employees “really did think about things like
transhumanism and everyone had read Kurzweil and really thought about
how this technology was something that was not just going to improve the
way human beings did things in one particular fashion, but how it was going
to change how people did things, how it would change lives . . . . There
were lots of conversations about transhumanism and . . . where this would
go” (Lester 2011). Likewise, Wagner James Au, Linden Lab’s ‘‘embedded
journalist,” told me, “When I was at Linden Lab, 2003–2006, the topic of
uploading our consciousness into SL definitely came up on occasion” (Au
2011). It is not a far leap from such conversations to Linden Lab’s eventual
mission statement: “To connect everyone to an online world that improves
the human condition.”5
There is a rich variety in the transcendent design of video games, from
religious stories, themes, or images to the presence of transhumanism in
games through empowerment and explicitly transhumanist storylines and
even, occasionally, the transhumanist interests of the developers. All by
themselves, the latter two considerations make game design an integral
part of the transhumanist world. After all, in my survey of transhumanists
with an interest in gaming, approximately half of the respondents indicated
their belief that transhumanist ideas about humanity and technology
influence the design and play of video games. But by taking the analysis
one step further, we can see how transhumanists themselves welcome
Robert M. Geraci 747
TRANSCENDENCE BY DESIRE
Transhumanists recognize the connection between gaming and transhu-
manism, and actively pursue opportunities to realize their eschatological
hopes through games. Games are playgrounds for the imagination, and as
we have already seen, they can fruitfully engage transhumanist ideas and
aspirations—by their very nature, they are attuned to the transcendent
imagination. There is, as one transhumanist puts it, a “very clear and
positive relationship” between video games and transhumanism (Rhun
2012).6 As a result, many avowed transhumanists see video games and
virtual worlds as ideal locations to prepare for transhuman futures and to
evangelize for them.
It is precisely because the design of games and game-like environments
enable transhuman experiences that the games provide such efficient
preparation for a transhuman future. As one Second Life transhumanist
says, “SL and other efforts are in part the foundation for eventual
upload existence” (Seraph 2010). Second Life provides new ways of
communicating, new ways of shaping the body, and powerful tools to shape
one’s environment. These combine to make it a particularly compelling
location for transhumanism. Natasha Vita-More, longtime advocate and
current president of Humanity+, the world’s largest transhumanist
organization, believes that “there is an interdependent relationship between
the metaverse and the field of human enhancement in that both incite
plasticity” (Vita-More 2010, 71).
The tools for building, for example, allow residents to shape SL as they
see fit, and thus perhaps foretell what the future might be like if nanotech
cheerleaders are correct in their predictions of forthcoming “utility fog”
technology (see Hall 1993). The very idea that the world can be remade
into something wondrous can pass from Second Life into the conventional
world. As Colin Milburn explains, “In living their ‘second lives,’ residents
inhabit the virtual dimension of nanotechnology, playing out its core
concepts and conforming to its dreams, enfleshing it, adopting its modes
of operation as a durable habitus, and thereby bringing it forth into the
world, into real life, contained inside themselves—whether they know it
or not” (Milburn 2008, 71). By residing in SL, living its ways and using
its capacities, players gain a sense of being that aligns with the nanotech
dreams of transhumanism—they can then log off, potentially keeping that
sense of action in the world and thus participating in the transhumanist
dream.
Likewise, SL’s freedom in avatar design means that residents can become
the people (or animals or robots or whatever else) that they’ve always
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CONCLUSION
Over the course of this paper, I have argued that video games are now
influential technologies in transhumanist communities. Designers, though
not always transhumanist, produce games with transhumanist features, and
transhumanists themselves actively desire to use video games in evangelical
contexts. Video games are by their nature implicitly transhumanist, but
there are explicitly transhumanist enterprises flowing through and of them;
indeed, as video gaming is on the leading edge of technological progress,
it might even be that video games are actually moving society forward
toward explicitly transhumanist technologies. The transhumanist design
features of video games operate on two levels. The first, implicit way
in which games are the product of a transhumanist design ethic is that
they empower users and provide them opportunities for growth, new
senses of self, wondrous new capacities, and a general transcendence
over daily living. The second element of transhumanist design is explicit,
when designers give players transhumanist themes and storylines to work
through and contemplate as they determine their own positions. Running
in parallel with these design intentions are the evangelical hopes of
transhumanists themselves. Many transhumanists appreciate video games
as places for community building and for inspiring young people to commit
to transhumanist thought and practice; as a result, they see the games as
efficient platforms that can be helpful to them through both accident and
intent.
Particularly, but not exclusively, due to the relationship between video
gaming and transhumanism, we cannot ignore the importance of video
games in the study of religion and science. Video games have proliferated
rapidly, overtaking all other media in the entertainment industry. As the
games have evolved over the past few decades, they have expanded their
narrative and symbolic reach, which now extends across the religious
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NOTES
I am deeply indebted to Dr. Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, who invited me to present this paper
at the Arizona State University workshop, “The Transhumanist Imagination: Innovation,
Secularization, and Eschatology,” on April 9, 2012. Likewise, I am grateful to those who joined the
workshop and commented on my presentation there, especially Colin Milburn, who graciously
read a draft version of the paper and provided thoughtful comments for my revisions. Although
this paper was not specifically funded as part of my National Science Foundation EAGER grant
(Virtually Meaningful: The Power and Presence of Meaning in Virtual Worlds), I am grateful
to the NSF for its support of my research in video games and virtual worlds. Finally, I am
profoundly thankful that Joshua Ortega, Sheldon Pacotti, Jason Rohrer, Philip Rosedale, and
John Lester all took time from their schedules to discuss their games with me.
1. Another key figure worth mentioning in this context is E. Gary Gygax, the creator
of Dungeons & Dragons. The game has not only occupied many hours of players’ leisure and
thought for decades, but directly inspired video game culture (e.g., see Bartle [2003] 2004,
71–3; Cortinas 2010; King and Borland 2003, 21, 27; Rolston 2009, 119). One of Gygax’s most
important contributions was to synthesize ancient myths and modern fiction into a system of
play. Among contemporary authors who clearly influenced Gygax’s work, we must include Fritz
Leiber, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Jack Vance, among others.
Robert M. Geraci 753
2. It is important to remember that there are many different kinds of transhumanism, and
not all transhumanists desire to upload their minds. For example, Gregory Stock argues that
people will prefer cybernetic enhancements to their biological bodies over uploading their minds
(Stock 2003).
3. Actually, two respondents to the survey declared themselves to be not at all
transhumanist, and thus their data were excised from the totals. Overall, thirty-five respondents
took the survey, of which 33 acknowledged considering themselves “definitely” or “somewhat”
transhumanist. I am grateful to all respondents, and to the operators of the Order of Cosmic
Engineers and Turing Church listservs, on which the survey was posted.
4. Whether or not to consider Second Life a game is the subject of considerable debate.
Many residents and scholars of SL roundly reject the game label, preferring the term virtual
world (e.g., see Boellstorff 2008, 16–24). I include SL in this analysis not because I wish to take
a position on its status as game or not-game, but simply because it is unquestionably a part of the
game design world. Boellstorff also sees virtual world research as integrally tied to game studies,
even though SL is not, strictly speaking, a game (ibid.).
5. Linden Lab’s mission statement has gone through several iterations after this one, which
was discarded as the company sought to broaden its offerings beyond Second Life.
6. It is important to note that some transhumanists do have reservations about video games,
though these never constitute rejections. One respondent to my online survey feels that despite
the potential of gaming, “at this moment most avid users of video games are motivated by a
wish to escape reality, which I do not consider as a good thing (though they often have valid
reasons)” (Rhun 2012), and another is concerned that a good game might be a “serious threat to
transhumanist goals, as people like me who are prone to playing [massively multiplayer online
games] won’t be doing anything useful when they’re engaged and possibly even addicted to such
gaming activities” (Kaw 2012).
7. For cogent criticisms of Left Behind, see Hayse 2010 and Newgren 2010.
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