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| Credit: Pixabay.com |
Ever since Ready Player One released in theatres last year,
the film adaptation of Ernest Cline’s novel of the same name,
there’s no doubt that virtual reality (VR) has become hotter than
ever. This is especially so with VR games. And who wouldn’t want to
own their own VR system where they can go on fantastic simulated
adventures of their choosing, adventures such as battling dragons and
hordes of demon warriors, battling an alien squadron in space or
fighting off zombies in a graveyard? I know I would like the thrill
of those. I would like the thrill of
those to the point of never wanting to take off the VR headset.
Mobile
device addiction in our
society has been bad enough.
Two-dimensional video game addiction has
been bad enough. I know I’ve
been addicted to it. And
I’ve been addicted to VR experiences using the Google Cardboard
which is the cheapest and so lowest form of a
VR headset on the market!
There’s nothing wrong with
VR experiences. VR is
a new pop art,
a new form of entertainment.
2019 is likely
to be the year of the VR game revolution. But
if we’re not careful it
will also be
the new “drug” that we can too
easily get addicted to, a
drug
that won’t only cost us
big bucks for the latest headset or system but also cost us literacy,
creativity
and even life.
Mobile Phone Addiction
It
seems like whenever
you walk out into public, every other person you come across is
looking at
their mobile phone.
And that might not be an
exaggeration. Alice Bonasio,
in her article at The Next Web says, “Think
about the last time you looked around and noticed . . . all the
people around you checking their phones? The ones that weren’t were
probably just done checking or just about to. We
have become thoroughly dependent upon the stream of digital
information that plugs into our daily lives through those mobile
devices.” When you think about it,
more time is spent
in the digital world than in the real one
and so more time is spent
looking at a video or
computer screen than looking at the real world around you.
It’s similar to what
TV had already become back in the 1950s when it became popular on the
market. There was a concern that kids and, in some cases, even adults
wanted to do nothing but watch it when they weren’t in school or at
work. But mobile device addiction is even a worse case because the
average hand-held device is a smart phone which is basically
a television, besides a computer and
phone, that you can take
anywhere
and therefore watch
anywhere. Society has become
zombified, or entranced,
with this gadget.
And
so
the
mobile phone
is the
new
drug addiction.
VR: The Next “Drug” Addiction
If
television and mobile devices have been addictions,
don’t be surprised that VR will be the next “drug” addiction.
Think about it—VR is full
immersion into a digital environment.
Or at least it’s as
fully immersive as you can get but will probably become truly fully
immersive soon enough. It’s a simulated environment that can make a
person feel like they are really and so physically in it. So
like hallucinogenic drugs, it is, in a sense, mind altering: it makes
you think you are in another place and situation other than your
everyday life. This is an addiction that, like what television and
hand-held devices have already done, cuts
a user off from real life. This means if a person is so into the VR
world
that they connect with it
everywhere he/she goes, it
makes them miss out on what is going on around them in the real
world. This kind of
addiction will probably make
people more illiterate than television already has. This would
especially be the case with teens and children. Why would they want
to read anything and imagine being in the world of a book when they
can be in an imaginary world in
a computer program,
especially one
as realistic and interactive
as a VR
game?
At TechCrunch.com, technology
backer Marc Andreesen says
that to most people VR is going
to be far
more interesting than AR
(augmented reality), a
form of digital media
that already imposes over the more thought-provoking experience of
reading and working with real-life objects.
The Next Form of Escapism
2019
may be the year that VR begins
to trigger these
problems as much as it will bring a lot of good to users. After all,
the last three years have been ones of turmoil for society especially
here in the U.S. with a, basically, corrupt president who many
(myself included)
think should not have received the majority vote and with
a plague of racially
targeted shootings as well
as random shooting sprees.
Well, it’s extremely
threatening situations like these that would make anybody want to
escape the real world’s problems. People
often escape them by turning to art and entertainment. I
know I do,
that’s why I write science fiction and horror. (But then guess what
real horror is? Didn’t I
just mention three examples
of it
four sentences back?)
Bonasio says that “.
. . In
times of crisis there’s always a surge in demand for novels,
blockbuster movies, video games, and anything else that offers a way
out from a reality that’s become too painful to face on a regular
basis.”
She says that VR will be the
next form of such escapism that
will be in that demand. Even
though she doesn’t believe it will happen within this year, 2019
has already definitely seen its share of
crisis.
Only a little over a week
ago a sniper fired his gun at random near U.C. Davis and the
government shut-down continued into the new year. So
VR as the new trend in escapism could easily occur this year. It
may not be at the same total immersive level
as that in
Ready Player One
but more people will turn to it which will eventually
bring more of a demand for
that total immersive level.
What VR Is Useful For and What It’s Not
VR,
like the many other
electronic mediums that have
come before it, has its use both in education and entertainment. It
enhances what we learn in books and the classroom. It enhances our
participation in gameplay and creates a more realistic and convincing
experience like all art should do, including pop art. It’s one more
innovation in technology and art which both
of these should
always aim for innovation.
What
VR isn’t
useful for is dependency. To depend on it would mean to replace all
other experiences with it, to ignore the real world’s problems and
even its benefits and therefore
to live in a fool’s
illusion. In doing so we
would think we are living life but we would
really be living
in our heads and not contributing to
progress in the real world.
We would not only so
easily be ignoring our
family and friends as they
really are rather than as
digital masks
of avatars,
but we would also be
neglecting our own talents, creativity and critical thinking skills
in order to escape
into an illusion. It could even
get to the point that
hallucinogenic drugs have gotten to. That
point is not just addiction
itself but the blurring
of the
line between reality and fantasy—a
type of hallucination that
has driven people to do some
very dangerous things to either themselves or others.
Can We Enjoy VR Without Sacrificing Ourselves and Real Life?
So
can we enjoy VR
without having to sacrifice
our own thinking, creativity
and lives
in the real world? Of
course we can. To do that we look
to history, particularly the
history of other electronic media such as television and two
dimensional
video games. We look at how
the addiction problems to that
earlier media have been
dealt with. They’ve been
dealt with mainly by
having limited
our engagement with those types of media to a certain time of day or
to so
many hours a week. We can do the same with VR
entertainment. We need to also
remember the value in other types of activity and see how we can both
benefit from them
as well as benefit others with them. And
as writers and artists, we
have to remember that
inspiration for myth and storytelling started at one time in the
natural, and so real, world. And if we trace it’s history back far
enough, the same goes for VR storytelling.
Do you think we’ll see a rise in VR games in this year of 2019? Are
you ready to play these games with limitation so you can easily step
back out into the real world when you have to?
Until next time . . .
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