VR Worlds We’d Like to See

My guess is that most of the VR worlds currently under construction are not the VR worlds I am looking for. Pretty soon, I imagine, we will be able to walk on the surface of Mars, live inside a Minecraft world of our making, and canter through Medieval landscapes full of carse topography and magic… the magic that allows disproportionate breasts to resist sagging despite the lack of yet-to-be-invented two-way-stretch elastic and underwire. I’m not interested in any of those places. These are the places I’d like to see:

[Please note: I’m starting with my most pro-social ideas and then will quickly descend into the profane and perverse. If you start to feel sick, you should stop reading.]

World 1: My Childhood Home

I understand that the chance a software company will fulfill my first proposal is less than zero, but I didn’t promise a practical list, I just said I would describe the virtual worlds I’d like to see. I would very much like to go back to my childhood home. I want to walk in and through it, the yard outside, and perhaps even the town in which it sat. I’d like to examine the Bozo-the-clown punch-back in the basement, see how thin the closet in the upstairs hallway was, and inspect the damage to my grandfather’s raccoon skin coat. Was it really that bad? Did it have to be thrown away? I want to walk around the edge of the yard in the springtime and see if the crocuses have bloomed. I want to see the stain created by mixing chemicals 10 and 17 on the formica table in the kitchen, and perhaps assess the font color of the warning “DO NOT MIX WITH CHEMICAL #10.”

I understand that the VR artists can’t bring back the dead, and if they did it would be creepy, but I’d like to stand in the space where my mother’s chair sat and see some dissipated cigarette smoke invoking the illusion of her recent presence.

For this VR world to work, the measurements would have to be exacting. I know the distance from the rock wall to the storage area, the circumference of the elm tree, and the height of the forgotten currant bush, though none of them now exist. I want very much like to look at these things again. I would like to walk among them in some place other than my dreams.

World Two: The Women’s Patio

Like I said, my wants get worse.

When I was a kid we belonged to a beach club. The club had places to change; a men’s patio and a women’s patio. The men’s patio was a large open space surrounded by changing rooms. It had a set of showers, a bathroom, and pegs along the walls to hang wet bathing suites and towels. As a boy it always seemed to be filled with giant fat men, suntanned and naked, sitting and talking with loud voices in the midday salt sun. These were the days of not being heard. You didn’t disturb the adults. Existence invited scrutiny. We were well practiced in the invisibility of obsequiousness. Once the patio was free of men we had license to goof around by doing things like splashing the complimentary aftershave on each other, or throwing soggy-woggies into the parking lot below. It was a pretty dull spot.

But there was another patio. One that I have never seen. The women’s patio. It must have been similar, except the people showering and standing around weren’t naked but nude. Nude women. It probably was different in other ways too; more pink, better smelling, dusted with talcum powder rather than splashed with aftershave, longer hair, better looking bathing suits, neater drying lines. I’ve imagined many things, but never even seen inside the door. I’d pay a lot for a VR helmet that could get me in there.

World Three: GarbageLand

We used to have dumps. Every town had a dump, and a dump is a fascinating place. It’s fun to walk around a dump and poke at things. You have to be mindful of both rats and dogs when you’re walking through a dump. Bad people hang out at the dump. Then there is this video:

Fascinating, right? Just watching where the garbage goes. So, what if there was a VR world that was just the Fresh Kills dump + the places in Mumbai + the EWaste mountains of Asia? Imagine an entire world of discarded crap. It’s not hard to imagine… you could do a Google Image Search, I guess… but I mean a world where there is nothing else… just garbage.

ShowWorld

You should get out now.

In the old days, before the Disneyfication of Times Square, that part of the city was the Lovecanal of toxic sexuality. There were X-rated movie theaters, peep shows, prostitutes, strip-clubs, porn shops, and places where you could buy a good knish. There was a place called ShowWorld. I think it was on 9th Avenue close to 42nd street, and it had a “green door” behind which were things that you can’t imagine, but I can, because at age 16 I paid $20 and went behind the green door. Sure what I saw was shocking, depraved, and disturbing, but, let’s face it, I had hoped for more.

I had a friend once who went to the Peter Luger’s, the famous Steak House in Brooklyn, and was disappointed by her meal “because,” she explained, “I didn’t feel sick at the end.” She continued, “If you pay that much money, I think you should feel sick when you are done. I’m pretty small, and I ate the salad, the steak, and my whole baked potato, and wasn’t close to hating myself.”

There is so much porn available now that for VR to “take it to the next level” will require some work. Imagine a world of nothing but flesh. One that makes you feel sick, in a good way. I’m not saying that at my age I would need to go there often, but during those times when the vaguely feminine outline of a tree is distracting (sorry for the hetero-normative, cis-gendered myopia of these thoughts; please feel free to imagine what you like) maybe a walk through the VR ShowWorld would be the proper tonic.

It would be a place where all the cylindrical objects really were phalluses, where every window and door was a bodily orifice, where the mountains were breasts, and the hills were rows of butts bordered by seas of strange, strong-smelling liquids. It would be a sexual Big Rock Candy Mountain, full of “birds and bees and vibrator trees”, with soft places to sleep, like lips, cheeks, and stomachs; clean, unblemished, and immune to the ravages of time.

Hell

Why are you still reading?

Western Civilization has spent thousands of years talking about the underworld, so it seems like a VR Hell really should be first on the list. Again, it can’t be too hard to create. You could do a Google image search, but I wouldn’t want to be to too literal with any one interpretation. I mean, I would like to be able to go down to the underworld and visit Teiresias, get a prophecy, talk to Agamemnon, eat some mayonnaise, check out the traitors in the ice, and then poke around and see if I could find the room where you drink tea standing waist deep in shit.

But, since I think that the “wages of sin” are death and that “death” is non-being, my vote would be to make it so that the longer you stay in VR Hell the brighter it gets until, eventually, there is nothing left to see. In other words, time spent in Hell would lead to a general washing out of the virtual world, and if you tarried to the point that the shades were all but about to disappear, then the VR headset, your entire home network, and every machine or device connected to it would get permanently bricked. Then there would be nothing to see. Your vontology would read “zero”, you would no longer be.

We all know that if you want to escape Hell you can’t keep looking at the underworld, and if we can program it so that you can’t make the same mistake as Orpheus, perhaps we should. It may be that Hell is other people, but other VIRTUAL people are worse, aren’t they? VR Hell is the super special Hell, because it will be the one we ourselves created and the one that we are certain exists.