by Philip Elmer-DeWitt

About the author: Philip Elmer-DeWitt is a writer for Time magazine.

It started, as the big ideas in technology often do, with a science-fiction writer. William Gibson, a young expatriate American living in Canada, was wandering past the video arcades on Vancouver’s Granville Street in the early 1980s when something about the way the players were hunched over their glowing screens struck him as odd. “I could see in the physical intensity of their postures how rapt the kids were,” he says. “It was like a feedback loop, with photons coming off the screens into the kids’ eyes, neurons moving through their bodies and electrons moving through the video game. These kids clearly believed in the space the games projected.”

That image haunted Gibson. He didn’t know...