Hoo boy! Things are certainly weird right now! Or, depending on you, they might be great! In which case, wonderful. Congrats. Or terrible! Not congrats! I don’t know anymore. What even is reality at this point? We all seem to have different versions. I’m not saying that on some moral, thoughtful level – that time is past, buddy! A lot of folks are worried, upset, and hurt. And that’s just players who wanted their choices to matter in Dragon Age: The Veilguard.
Hey-yooooo! But, with so many emotions in the air, and with so many people angry and scared, I’ve decided that the best solution is for virtual reality companies to make a headset that lets me eat so I selfishly don’t have to face every day.
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Virtual reality has come a long way in the last few decades, hasn’t it? What was once a massively expensive novelty is now a somewhat expensive novelty. But it is far more accessible and the games available for it can transport you – and more importantly me – far away. To anywhere that doesn’t involve personal introspection or the ability to think.
Batman fighting his Shadow personality in Batman: Arkham Shadow
With Tower Unite, I can live inside a theme park and arcade with some of my closest friends, meaning nobody but myself and sometimes my brother. With Batman: Arkham Shadow, I can pretend to be a crime fighter in a version of Gotham City that doesn’t feel so bad anymore. And with passthrough features in headsets like the Meta Quest 3, I can also use the bathroom. But what I still can’t do is successfully eat food or drink something without a straw.
Think about it. Even the most advanced virtual reality helmets have a big bulbous front end where they store the screens and components and processors. These are all important, but they make it extremely hard to eat anything other than a slice of bread that you’ve gotta still be careful with aiming that. Trust me, I’ve tried. This isn’t my ride on the ‘I don’t wanna be here’ rodeo.
Eating popcorn while watching a movie takes some practice because you’ll bump your hand against your face every time you try to grab a few kernels. Yes, you could live off smoothies and milkshakes, but that only takes you so far. And just because I want to spend the rest of my life in the pleasant-by-comparison world of Resident Evil 4 VR shouldn’t mean that I have to blend all sustenance in a Vitamix.
In fact, if Meta really wanted my business, it’d stop trying to sell me apps and start trying to sell a VR headset with a flat front that isn’t ruined if pizza grease gets on one of the outward-facing cameras. And handsets that also don’t get ruined if pizza grease on one of the front cameras. A headset that doesn’t steam up when you cry, it just hides those tears in the world. Maybe it collects them like a suit in Dune and gives it back as moisture.
I’d even pay a subscription for someone to come over to my apartment and put food on a special plate so I didn’t even have to take off the headset and face a world which I am both a part of and – through action and inaction – contribute to the problems of. They can have the keys to my home and they can steal whatever they want as long as I don’t have to see the outside world any longer than it takes to use a toilet.
While we’re on the topic, here’s a few other things they need to implement into the helmet: the ability to brush my teeth, sleep, and not make eye contact with any human being ever again. The last one is already a feature in a lot of headsets, so it shouldn’t be too hard to keep in there. If they want to throw in a program that plays comforting imagery while my body shrivels from malnutrition, all the better. A calm voice that regularly tells me “all glory is fleeting” and “you don’t exist and you’ve never mattered” would be nice, too.
I want the helmet to turn me into a husk like the Sloth guy in the movie Se7en. And even in passthrough mode, it should just cover up any reflective surface so I can’t see the person I’ve become or remember I’ve still got responsibilities to other human beings. The point is I both want and deserve to be wiped from this Earth like a live service game that nobody wanted.
Look, I know the virtual reality industry is a small one. And even the biggest mover – the Meta Quest – still hasn’t been a massive boon to its parent company. Redesigning an entire headset to allow me to just eat burrito after burrito while I pretend I now have a home in PowerWash Simulator is financially stupid. But so am I! I’m stupid, too! So, why not lock away that stupidity like I’m in The Matrix? Why not turn my life into a less cool version of Inception? I’m already halfway to looking like the vampire Pearl from the movie Blade. Let’s make it official. Set me aside like an extra chess piece that came with the set.
If you think this is me abandoning everybody just because I’m not happy with the world, you’d be right. If you think I should face reality and work to be the change I want, you’d be right. If you think this is a cowardly way to exist, you’d be right. If you think that I care what you think, you’d… still be right. I really do care.
But, if we’re all getting that fun cyberpunk world we’ve been itching for, I want to be able to shove a burger in my mouth while I braindance and don’t even find out when relatives die. And, not for nothing, if I’m glued into virtual reality for the rest of my natural life, people won’t have to hear me whine about things.
