Cyberspace has barely begun to evolve as a medium, and of course no one can hope to understand it fully until it has fully matured. Yet we can try to imagine what it might become, and try to make it as grand as we can imagine. Sport is an ideal area in which to sharpen our vision. Sport is related to theater in that both are refined forms of play. Whereas theater evolved out of the human impulse to pretend, and thus to plan, sport evolved from the human impulse to assert one's self, and thus to survive.
Actors perform in order to be someone else.
If one were to dissect the elements of cyberspace technology it might appear that cyberspace offers nothing really new. Indeed, many of the key elements, most notably computer graphics, have been around a long time. What is new about cyberspace is not so much the technologies that underly it, but the way the technologies are packaged and applied. Cyberspace is a medium that is emerging out of a new way of thinking about computers and their relationship to human experience. Under the old way of looking at things computers were regarded as tools for the mind, where the mind was regarded as a disembodied intellect.