Lockdown is a dark time. We were separated from our friends, our family, even our workplace. The usual activities we do to escape our homes are unusable and real illegal. It was a strange time, a strange point in time and space where the things we say and do now feel like they belong to a Black Mirror era.
I spent August to December 2020 alone. I’ve seen a few friends a few times, but 99.9% of the months are spent without a partner in a small apartment in Bath. As a mostly lonely person, I don’t think much about it every day. If you had asked me if I was alone, I wouldn’t have. Of course not. I can call anyone I need on my phone and I have Discord friends with whom I talk almost every night. I also stream, three or four times a week to a community that loves me. I’m fine, aren’t I? Am I not?
I started a new job in September 2020 at a different site and got into the job. Between streaming and my normal job, most days are taken up writing or entertaining. I was eventually asked to review a VR game and sent a headset in December. The only VR game I’ve done before is Beat Saber on my brother’s PSVR, so it’s interesting.
I took the toy out of its box over the weekend. I let the system update in the morning as I walked (as I usually do) around my apartment picking up glasses, pouring pillows and vacuuming-cleaning for the room to play. And then I sat down and put on the headset, adjusted it for comfort and specified the area I was free to move, making the settings myself.
When it finally brought me to the home screen, the toy, it took my breath away. I sighed, a long, steady sigh that I had been holding back longer than I knew. I was somewhere else. In the end, I was “out” in my apartment.
Oculus Quest 2 (or Meta Quest as it is now) has a splash screen where you can sit in a lounge high above the Crimson Valley. It is inspired by tropical retreats, even if completely impossible as a realistic scenario. But I could almost smell the trees. Almost.
I’m halfway to the Caribbean and forever etched in my brain is the view from my grandparents ’house in Grenada, overlooking the island’s coastline. It’s as close to how I feel about it, as I feel about nature and elsewhere, Anywhere else the moon. I breathed air that I pretended to be from another continent for a while. So I sat looking at that pixelated sky for maybe 30 minutes.
Shocked and a bit embarrassed by my emotionality, I decided to take a look at the other simple features the search provided. The game I was about to check out refused to download, so being familiar with the technology was the next priority until I could email someone on Monday.
I realized that YouTube has travel videos. Be careful! I can take revenge far away away from my apartment. I mean the viewing from the home screen is nice and all, but it lacks a little bit of realism. I spotted one walking the streets of Tokyo, a town I was lucky to have visited before. Excited, I sat down and smiled when I discovered a new road, busy with people in the middle of the night. YouTube doesn’t disappoint and, oh, what is it? Adam Savage has a series specifically designed for exploration, let’s check that out.
Savage’s show Tried is adapted to the VR headset so you can look around while Mythbuster works on their plans. If you’ve watched Tested before knowing how smart the host is, then what better way to sit back and enjoy his genius little VR moments? So I loaded it up, ready to learn about a drill I had never seen before.
And then Adam Savage did something that no one had done in a long time. Adam Savage stared me in the eye. Mythbuster smiled as he happily explained what he had built and I loved it. Not by exceptional skills but by someone who spoke to me. Someone spoke and looked into my eyes and smiled.
And then I cried.
That was the most bizarre thing. I was crying. My tears were soaked in the foam that clung to my face because I couldn’t wipe them away. This requires removing the headset and cutting off contact with the other person. Savage was there, human and talking. Very well this meant that he was clearly absent real in my apartment. He is not real Talk to me. But for that moment, for that second time, it was the closest thing I had to someone. No one else.
When the video ended, I sighed again. I enjoyed my association with everyone except for a few seconds before feeling a little sick. Even though I hadn’t seen the movie yet, I had read Ready Player One years before and felt it unclean proved to me the possibility of a world like that. A ridiculous dystopia where we all prefer helmets over real people, for a while, as is possible for us. I took off the helmet.
The sun had set. I was in the dark room, alone again. If you are able to look out the window at this point, you will see a young woman with bloody eyes and hair disturbed by the pressure of a headband, sitting quietly on a chair in the dining-room. anan. I sat in the darkness for a moment, surprised to know that the brightest light I could see was coming from the glowing helmet in my hands. Downstairs, I heard cars pass by. In my apartment there was only my breathing and the harmless sounding melody coming from Quest. Everything was very quiet and dark.
I realized then that the metaverse seemed possible. If you catch someone in a position like me, with no real human interaction and give them an escape, they will accept it. All away from themselves. Despite the joy of being alone most of the time, months away from my friends and family shook me more than I could admit. I was alone. I’m ashamed to admit but I am.
I can never review this game. Myself and PR never knew what was wrong with the download, it never worked. So I kept Quest, transformed by the power of those two little screens that held me that night. I have Obtained what it feels like to be in a virtual world. And I’m afraid to feel that way again.