DANTE, LARA CROFT & ETERNITY: "dear, what do we do tonight?"

"Virtual life survives multiple deaths until the arrival of absolute death: the end of the game. This can be deferred by means of additional life won during the course of the game. The artificial death encountered in video games is characterized by manifold stages and multiple forms of death. Moreover, the players can repeatedly resurrect the dead in a physically intact form; they possess a sublime body.
Artificial death creates a tabula rasa each time, and everything can restart again from the beginning."
Birgit Richard, Arts Electronica '98.

Any consciousness or life emerging within the digital medium will become perpetual as long as the medium itself won't be cease to exist, and as long as the informative content identified as "life" or consciousness won't be corrupted by some form of internally/externally generated noise. The digital medium is eternal and infinite only if considered within itself, as an abstraction. Any physical support cannot escape physical decay, yet perpetual life could be achieved by transferring the digital information from one support to another. This is an endless solution as long as the conditions necessary to the manufacturing of such supports will be preserved.

Entering the realm of eternity and life leads us to some peculiar considerations; for instance, the fact that a sentient being would have to keep itself busy for an infinite amount of time. It is not easy to fill eternity with something to do.
My Italian heritage makes me automatically think about Dante's LA DIVINA COMMEDIA. Dante's journey is a journey through eternity. The first eternity is INFERNO. Hell is filled with pain and despair, violence, cries and horror of the damned souls. Demons, on their side, more or less willingly spend their time torturing and tormenting the damned souls. Then follows PURGATORIO. Purgatory is an anomalous place, where the time is finite. It is a place of passage where the souls come clean of their sins. It has a start and an end; it is in a sense a linear process inevitably ending in purification.
The poet's journey ends in PARADISO. Paradise is somehow less physically defined but still geographically divided in Spheres. Here souls are filled with God's grace and light. Beatitude it's all they know; praising the Lord is all they do. INFERNO and PARADISO are two opposite extremes that bring us to the same problem: eternal repetition and, possibly, boredom. By virtue of logic, we should suppose that the suffering of the damned souls in hell implies some sort of consciousness about their condition and therefore about their individuality and state of misery. It also implies the knowledge about possible alternative states. Souls know they are in hell. Demons must possess consciousness about themselves and their role too; they need it in order to willingly act upon the damned souls but also in order to respect the military-like organization of the "infernal army", which according to Christian tradition was organized in strict hierarchies. Moreover the demons of Christianity are fallen angels, angels that rebelled to God, and rebellion is an extreme act of self-consciousness.
Eternity is a very long time. Will they ever get tired of torturing souls? Will they ever decide to newly rebel against God, refusing to fulfill their punishing role? Without demons the function and structure of hell would crumble. Angels and souls in Paradise have even less to do. An eternal state of grace it is not necessarily a desirable conditions. Furthermore angels haven't even got the chance to torture someone to keep themselves busy. To sing and pray forever is a hellish prospective.
Let us dare more, until the ultimate consideration: will God himself ever get bored of sitting there listening to all this songs?
The point here is not to question Christianity. These are only light-hearted considerations arising from the implications of eternity. They intend to show how paradoxical implications arise from reflecting on such extreme concepts in any kind of context. Eternity as such is an extremely naïve concept; its profundity is only apparent, as all minimally serious thinking about it brings to grotesque paradoxes. Let's be clear: I am far from saying that Dante was naïve, and certainly were everything but naïve the people that created the dogmas of Christianity. The ingenuity was rather in the cultural background that these ideas created, in the unquestioned faith in them.

For the above reasons, when talking about eternal life in these scripts we only refer to something that has got the potential to be sustained for an undetermined amount of time. When we say eternal, we mean that the time is not expressed in ordinary human scales. It is a poetic term rather than an ontological one.
In this sense video games posses a sort of eternity too. Lara Croft is trapped in an eternal world of infernal violence. She is being shot, torn apart by beasts, burnt, poisoned, smashed by falling rocks… and so on, for endless times. Video games are a sort of man-made virtual hell. The actions can be reiterated endlessly by virtue of the capacity of coming back to life endlessly, and if the game finishes a new one can be started.
The eternity in which Lara is trapped is obviously of a different nature of the one experienced by immortal souls, as from the one of a hypothetical "cyber-mind". The difference resides in the fact that the heroin of the game does not possess self-consciousness. The eternity it is not implicit as an internally perceived time continuum: in video games it is expressed as a potential of eternal reiteration of cycles, rather than eternal existence. The game, after all, ceases to exist when the console is switched off. This bring us back to what said above about the fact that a cyber-mind could perpetually exist only if its supporting medium is perpetual, and if its informational arrangement it is not disrupted by noise - as in the case of a scratch CD-ROM or a corrupted file. Above a certain threshold of noise the coherence of structures will inevitably collapse. Long live silence.