Virtual reality is escapism with no way out
I’m standing in a snowy gorge. I look down at my body, but there’s nothing there. Next to me stands a hooded figure, my companion, his eyes glowing red. Below me, muscled figures are running towards us, brandishing huge weapons. I take up a bow, draw a glowing, blue arrow from my quiver, and start shooting.
Next, I’m in the Himalayas. I look down at a sheer, icy slope, and feel a surge of vertigo. I fly, with a sickening lurch, to the next, jagged ridge and look up at the sky, blue except for a tiny, dazzling, white sun, and, moving my arm, I watch it shift to dusk, nighttime and back again.
Then suddenly I’m in a desert. Behind me are the ruins of an Egyptian temple. My companion, a chunky, all-american hero in sunglasses, starts firing. Huge, grey crab monsters and menacing warriors are rushing towards us, multiplying in number. A warrior gets closer and closer, towering over me, running straight at me, getting bigger and bigger. My heart races. It’s going to kill me.
I hear an “Aah!” followed by an “Oof!” My husband, in the booth next door, has fallen over. His headset falls off.
We’re in a basement in Holloway, trying out virtual reality for the first time. The return to reality is disorientating. I stagger, as if stepping off a ship. My body has reappeared and it’s where I left it, in a dark, padded booth where everything is glowing bluish from the UV light. Our half an hour is over quickly. As we lurch up the stairs and out onto the street, it feels as if we’ve been dreaming and we’re still only half-awake.
We return home and I have a strange sense of having only just been here. I had visited my street in Google Earth’s VR programme, between my trip to Everest and the Saudi Arabian desert. But that version of home was from a few years ago. It had been daytime and my old bicycle, its wheel missing, had still been locked up outside my house.
It can’t be long before this technology is as commonplace as a Playstation. It makes me wonder what kind of world we are building. VR gaming was much more intense than the violent, first-person shooters or supercar races that usually fill up gaming screens. It felt like disappearing, escaping and uploading your consciousness into another plane. It’s still a fairly limited plane, since you can’t walk around, feel, smell or taste anything. But the story played out in so many dystopian Hollywood movies, in which the characters get so lost in fantastical, created worlds that they can no longer tell what’s real, now seems to be in sight. It’s a kind of escapism from which there’s no escape.
I hope, at least, that there will be virtual realities to suit all tastes, even the arcane. Perhaps, then, we can allow Jacob Rees-mogg to play games as one of his heroes, Alfred the Great, to whom he obliquely compared himself this week. Speaking at an event hosted by Open Europe, Mr Reesmogg noted that Alfred had rallied the troops of Wessex against the invading Danes while hiding in the swamps of Somerset, in his own constituency.
“Alfred the Great is the founder of our great nation,” the MP noted, perhaps in an attempt to educate the gathered journalists. “We’re now back to that. We’ve been paying Danegeld to the EU for far too long.”
Alfred is known for successfully repelling the Vikings, uniting Wessex and Mercia and, perhaps most famously, burning a peasant woman’s cakes. But there’s another apocryphal story about him that Brexiteers would do well to learn from. During his time in hiding, he is said to have disguised himself as a harp-player and wandered into a Danish encampment, where he spent a few days playing tunes for the Danish leader Guthrum. He emerged armed with a newfound understanding of his enemies, which he put to good use in defeating them.
No good thing lasts for ever, of course. Just over a century later, England fell fully under the foreign rule of King Canute. The Anglo-saxon monarchy never recovered.
Alfred was a great leader no doubt in part because of his staunch faith. But at other times, certainty is the last quality you should seek in a wise man. The play Pressure, by David Haig, which I saw this week, retells the story of the D-day landings through the tale of Britain’s most senior meteorologist, James Stagg.
Dr Stagg was charged with predicting whether or not the weather would be good enough to land troops in Normandy on June 5, the original date planned for the invasion. Dr Stagg thought that the fast-moving, high-altitude Jet Stream, whose existence was back then still in dispute, might drag several Atlantic storms into the Channel on the appointed date. But the play shows him, during a baking-hot June week, struggling to convince General Eisenhower to go against the rosy predictions made by his regular American forecaster, Irving Krick.
Ever the rigorous scientist, Dr Stagg couldn’t be certain – unlike Dr Krick, who happily predicted sunny weather with great confidence. Eisenhower was convinced by Dr Stagg in the end, as we know, and the pessimistic Scotsman was right. But, at least according to the play, he never pretended he was certain about uncertain events. Many modern forecasters of all types could learn a thing or two from that.