The Days of Perky Pat ...

The Days of Perky Pat is a fabulous story written by Philip K Dick.

Perky Pat details a post-apocalyptic world in which adults are obsessed with Perky Pat, a doll.

They project themselves into the playworld of Perky Pat, obtaining Perky Pat's material wants much like we provided stuff for our Barbies. Getting her new stuff provides pleasure to adults who have been placed in hideous conditions on another world: "For settlers on a howling, gale-swept moon, huddled at the bottom of a hovel against frozen methane crystals and things, it was something else again; Perky Pat and her layout were an entree back to the world they had been born to."

FROM THE STORY:

"Your parents playing Perky Pat?"

"Yeah."

Norman Schein gazed down at their combined layout, the swanky shops, the well-lit streets with the parked new-model cars, all of them shiny, the split-level house itself, where Perky Pat lived and where she entertained Leonard, her boy friend. It was the house that he perpetually yearned for; the house was the real focus of the layout -- of all the Perky Pat layouts, however much they might otherwise differ ...

We lived then, Norm Schein said to himself, like Perky Pat and Leonard do now. This is how it actually was ...

Playing this game ... it's like being back there, back in the world before the war. That's why we play it, I suppose. He felt shame, but only fleetingly; the same, almost at once, was replaced by the desire to play a little longer.


Some thoughts on the story from a blog called The Readaholic:

"In many ways [Perky Pat] is a low-tech version of Second Life, created 40 years later.

"It is sometimes hard to believe that Dick died in 1982. Many of his best works, written in the 1950s and 60s have been almost prophetic in nature, with aspects scarily familiar to those of us living in 2007.

"Another great science fiction writer Robert Silverberg last year wrote an article reflecting on how the world is becoming more 'Phildidickian' every year, with the 21st century now producing a high-tech version of Perky Pat, a virtual girlfriend Vivienne interacting on a mobile phone near you."

See: http://thereadaholic.blogspot.com/2007/07/days-of-perky-pat-philip-k-dick.html

See also “Virtual Worlds Research: Consumer Behavior in Virtual Worlds” in the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, November 2008.