If you’ve read my blogging for a long time, whether my own blogs (including this one) or even at the long-defunct, much-missed games studies blog Terra Nova, what I’m about to write will be familiar. Even if not, I am not the only person to have the thoughts I’m about to share. Nevertheless, it’s important to say: virtual reality as it is frequently imagined in mainstream public culture and commercial hype is never going to happen. There is a materially real problem with the common imagination of virtual reality that it cannot overcome, much as there is a basic problem with some visions of simulation more generally.
For about sixty years, we have lived with a technologically-inflected version of a longer-running Cartesian-inspired musing about whether our material lives are real and how we might know that they are real. The basic story has been as follows: at some point in the near-term future, we will have the technological capacity to allow people to experience a fictional, simulated, unreal representation of the world as if were seamlessly real. The specifics have varied: “jacking in” our minds into a simulated environment, moving our bodies into a holodeck or other virtual reality-dedicated space, wearing suits, headsets, teledildonics etc. that provide a complete sensory reproduction of a virtual experience. Sometimes the narration of virtual reality in various fictions is just a metaphorical extension of older and deeper conceptualizations of immersion, as Gordon Calleja has noted. William Gibson had no direct experience with computers when he coined some of the most powerful early descriptions of virtuality and had no intent to specifically predict its imminence. But more often than not, virtuality has been prophecy, and it has quickly become part of the staple package of tropes used to represent futurity—the flying car or jetpack of the digital age.
A durable trope of futurity in modernity is like catnip for inventors, businesses, policy-makers and conmen alike. Sometimes that compulsive attraction produces brute-force results, especially once there’s enough money sunk into the proposition that it becomes a kind of event horizon that pulls us all in. We passed a point a while back where a future without self-driving vehicles became nearly impermissible whatever difficulties that technology may run into. Sometimes on the other hand the practical problems are so considerable that even building working prototypes is just not going to cut it. We’re not getting jetpacks that do everything they do in The Jetsons no matter how much research and design goes into making the technology workable and affordable. Imagine a world where everybody actually launches off from their front door into the air multiple times a day and you have imagined a world of carnage that would make us nostalgic for car accidents.
Virtuality’s constant return to being heralded as the dominant technology of the near-term future despite its many failures is not quite a case of jetpack dreaming. There is a real technology of virtuality that has in fact improved considerably in its capabilities over time and will continue to improve. It’s going to be a durable representational technology used for entertainment and digitally-mediated communication for some time to come. We may even get those haptic suits with sex toys, those booth-sized home holodecks, and so on.
What we won’t get is a virtual-reality future where we routinely slip in a seamless way between virtuality and materiality, between simulation and reality, without an awareness of mediating technologies and interfaces. That’s what the hucksters, entrepreneurs and techno-optimists keep promising. It’s what Mark Zuckerberg is now pinning his company’s future on. The problem here is that most technologists don’t understand culture-producing at all. They don’t have any vision of representation as something that is as real and material as the visor you put over your eyes or the control devices you grip in your hands. They figure that if you build the technology, the culture will always inevitably follow.
There are simple ways that this expectation crashes and burns. Why didn’t anyone follow the films Avatar and Coraline into a fully-realized mode of 3d film-making? Because interesting as those films were (Coraline more so) they were less the advent of sound or color in film and more something like Smell-O-Vision: an unnecessary novelty. Watching Avatar in 3D was as much exhausting as it was enthralling precisely because Cameron used the technology to defy the need for using focal depth to draw the viewer’s attention. In many scenes, you could see characters in the distant background with the same visual acuity as those in the foreground. That was interesting, but interesting only in the same sense as Andy Warhol’s “anti-films” showed us that we did not want to be the fly on the wall, watching time go by over hours and hours. It’s not what we look for in representation, because we are here in our skulls watching time go by already. We want time to go by differently in stories, in novels, in performances, in art, in film, in video games. A projective technology that makes us experience culture without ellipses (of sight or narrative or sensation) is not escapism; it is prison.
Perhaps more importantly, to make culture in 3d—or any other virtual-leaning media form to date—is much harder. This is an old problem with Big Tech generally: they only think much later about what it’s like to actually make culture on a platform, and only flourish when they’re free-riding on very old representational technologies that most of us are trained to use as authors and creators through the existing educational institutions that Big Tech views with such contempt. If it were for writing, reading, and already-established technologies of visualization like photography and conventional film-making, Big Tech would be shit out of luck. Gaming platforms that provide fully-realized authoring tools usable by your average imaginative user to create experiences, content or stories for others are nearly non-existent, even if some devotees of certain platforms believe otherwise. (No, Second Life is not and never was a good platform for most people to make content in. Sorry, guys.)
Try another avenue of approach to virtuality’s history rather than its future. We’ve been told for thirty years now that virtuality will eliminate the need for interfaces, control schemes, for any kind of mediation at all. Our media will not be media; it will be instinct, intuition, a thing we don’t have to think about at all but merely do. The Wii with its controllers was greeted breathlessly in this spirit. The current generation of VR headsets was similarly lauded. The next generation, we’re always told, will take us closer always to that point where we experience culture seamlessly as if it were were interacting with the world without intervening technology.
But of course there are in the world many intervening technologies that we use. We do not walk out our doors naked to join meetings. (Even nudists need laptops or legal pads to take notes.) We do not graze grass or unfurl our leaves to the sun when we are hungry or tired. Most of the things we do in the world are learned actions, not autonomic functions of our brain stems. Many require conscious reflection and adjustment. No one dreams of a world without mediating technologies that amplify, transform and confine our embodied materiality except for those who dream of ascending beyond the world spiritually, which is very much not what VR is selling to us. (Though it’s an interesting alternative use to contemplate, an experience that VR might in fact be able to provide: not an alternative materiality but projection into no-place, a visceral experience of total disembodiment and sensory deprivation.)
VR will always need mediating technologies and complex interfaces to accomplish its best possible uses. The pandemic convinced some of the usual suspects to start selling virtuality in more mundane terms, as a replacement technology for Zoom. It’s true that a meeting—or a classroom—in a virtual environment that allowed you to look left and right at everyone, that embodied people in a three-dimensional space would have some attractions as a successor to a conferencing system like Zoom. The attractions are modest, however. It’s true that doing surgery remotely would have some benefits. The benefits are specific. There are, as we now know with greater force than ever, many things that we do both socially and economically that require material presence. My garbage is not going to be picked up in Meta. It might be picked up by robots, but that’s a different conversation about the technological future. Meta is not going to feed my body unless the haptic suit has an IV drip along with its butt plugs and genital stimulators. Moreover, all the mundane substitutive uses of virtuality we can imagine are just extensions of everything we already hate about our neoliberal present, a further intensification of the drive for efficiency and the reclamation of all private time in favor of the production of value for our owners and employers. Collapse space, eliminate distance, and you collapse time as well. Work in Meta and soon enough Meta will be working you over, watching you from pervasive cameras and measuring your body’s every twitch. Everyone knows that now, with emails dinging away at us all night and day and Zooms calling us to the meeting table even if we are sick or hungry or desperate for a moment to ourselves. The managers who today believe they must watch over employees in order to get full value for the bare sustenance they provision will some day demand that mundane virtuality follow us to the toilet and into sleep. No wonder no one wants to strap on an Oculus 24/7: we’re all getting wise to what might follow.
So the best possible uses of virtuality, in its present instantiation or any future one, are not mundanity. They are as another imaginative medium that lets us be more, other, different from what we are. Both to consume stories and to be part of them. And here the problem is not just with how authoring tools are always an afterthought (at best). It is that using virtuality for these purposes requires it have more seams, not less; more interfaces and control devices, not fewer.
I’ll use my favorite example once again here. You cannot invite me to strap on a helmet and some gloves and invite me to be a Jedi Knight without providing me a mediating control device and a complex set of interface conventions, because I am not a Jedi Knight. I cannot just move through space as I would and be a Jedi Knight in a virtual environment. You have to tell me what to do if I want to run five times as fast I normally do, what to do if I want to jump thirty feet straight upwards, what to do if I want to force-choke a Stormtrooper or intuitively counter a lightsaber thrust. Those all have to be done in a mediating physical language that I have to painstakingly learn while playing the game. (Or even simply being at a department meeting while having the powers of a Jedi Knight.) And the better the representational technology is at showing me my alt-Jedi life and even making me feel it somehow—ouch! my haptics are mildly pressing my neck while Darth Vader chokes me!—the more the disjuncture between the body that I am and the virtuality I am enjoying is the same problem as in any other representation. I don’t need haptics or 3d projection technology to weep when Little Nell dies, nor do I need to stuff ice cubes down my shirt and pants to feel a visceral chill on reading London’s “To Build a Fire”. But neither do any of those other media forms make me want to puke because my body is mostly moving in place in reality while I hurtle along at Force-enabled speeds during a Jedi-training exercise.
The more we think of virtuality as a dream state, the more we incur the problems of dreams. The more virtuality is an alternative materiality, the more we have to be always aware of our real materiality in enjoying it as a representational medium. The more we think of virtuality as a one-to-one mimetic replacement for our real world, a comprehensive simulation that cannot be distinguished from reality, the more we miss the point of simulation. A simulation that’s indistinguishable from the complex world of our everyday lives is pointless. We already have the complex world; why make another one? A simulation is only useful if it compresses, simplifies or changes the world enough that we can learn from it, that we can iterate it a million times to see what might happen. If that simulation is identical to the world as it is, we won’t know any better why something happened in response to an action than we do already.
These aren’t technological problems to overcome with a new helmet or some haptics, and they ensure we will never want to spend most of our time in virtuality. If we end up there all the time, it will not because we live in the land of dreams but because we have been imprisoned in nightmares. Virtuality is a fine addition to our technologies for experiencing and making culture, but it’s not a killer app or the future that we will all live within.
Image credit: Photo by Martin Sanchez on Unsplash
We already have a complex world that includes complex feats of imagination over materiality (as anyone who was ever engrossed in a novel and forgot about dinner can attest), so why try to force-build another one? I think you nailed it, Tim: to make our every breath “productive” in an economic sense. Why? So Elon Musk can ride a giant phallus to the edge of space? So Jeff Bezos can build a stately pleasure dome in New Zealand and never have to leave it at all? I don’t own an Apple Watch for a reason.