Lockdown was a dark time. We were separated from our friends, our family, even our work environments. The usual activities we did to escape our homes were unavailable and in fact illegal† It was a strange time, a strange point in time and space where the things we said and did now felt like they belonged on an episode of Black Mirror.
From August to December 2020 I spent all alone. I’ve seen some friends a few times, but 99.9% of those months I’ve spent without a partner in a small apartment in Bath. As a normal lonely person I didn’t think about it much every day. If you had asked me if I was alone, I would have said no. Of course not. I can call whoever I need on my phone and I have friends on Discord that I talk to almost every night. I also stream three or four times a week to a community that loves me. I was fine, wasn’t I? Was not me?
I started a new job in a different location in September 2020 and dove into the job. Between streaming and my regular job, most days were taken up with writing or entertainment. I was eventually asked to review a VR game and was sent a headset in December. The only VR game I’d done before was Beat Saber on my brother’s PSVR, so that would be intriguing.
I took the toys from the weekend out of the box. I had the system updated in the morning while pacing around my apartment (as I usually do) picking up glasses, clearing pillows, and vacuuming—clean for room to play. And then I sat down and put the headset on, adjusted it for comfort and defined the space I could move in freely, and made the settings mine.
When it finally took me to the home screen, the gaming den, it was breathtaking. I sighed, a long, steady sigh that I’d held in longer than I knew. I was somewhere else. Finally I was “out of” my apartment.
The Oculus Quest 2 (or Meta Quest as it has now become) has a splash screen where you can sit in a lounge high above a Crimson Valley. It is inspired by tropical retreats, although it is totally impossible as a realistic setting. But I could almost smell the trees. Almost.
I am half Caribbean and forever etched in my mind is the view from my grandparents’ house in Grenada, overlooking the coast of the island. It’s as close as I felt to this, as close as I felt to nature and being somewhere else, Elsewhere month. For a while I breathed air that I could pretend to be from another continent. So I sat for maybe 30 minutes staring at that pixelated horizon.
Dazed and a little embarrassed at how emotional I had become, I decided to browse the quest’s other simple features. The game I was about to review refused to download, so getting familiar with the technology was the next priority until I could email someone on Monday.
I realized YouTube had travel videos. Greetings! I could take revenge further away away from my apartment. I mean, the view from the home screen was nice and all, but it lacked a bit of realism. I found one walking the streets of Tokyo, a city I had been allowed to visit before. Delighted, I sat down and smiled as I discovered a new street, full of people in the middle of the night. YouTube did not disappoint and, oh, what is it? Adam Savage has a series designed specifically for the quest, let’s take a look at that.
Savage’s Tested show was adapted to the VR headset so you could look around while Mythbuster worked on their plans. If you ever saw Tested before you knew how smart the host is, what better way to sit back and enjoy the genius little moments in VR? So I loaded it up, ready to learn about an exercise I’d never seen before.
And then Adam Savage did something no one else had done in a long time. Adam Savage looked me in the eye. The Mythbuster smiled as he gleefully explained what he was building and I was in love. Not by great skills, but by someone who talks to me. Someone is talking and looking into my eyes and smiling.
And then I started to cry.
It was the weirdest thing. I cried. My tears were absorbed by the foam that held my face because I couldn’t wipe them away. This requires removing the headset and breaking contact with another person. Savage was there, as a person and with a conversation. It meant so well that he clearly wasn’t real in my apartment. He was not real Talk to me. But for that moment, for that second in time, it came closest to anyone. Nobody.
When the video ended, I sighed again. I was happy with my interaction in front of everyone but a few seconds before I felt a little sick. Although I didn’t see the movie, I had read Ready Player One years before and felt like dirty which confirms to me the possibility of such a world. A laughable dystopia where we all preferred helmets over real people seemed entirely possible to us for a while. I took off the helmet.
The sun had set. I was in a dark room, all alone again. If you had managed to look out the window right now, you would have seen a young woman with bloodshot eyes and hair twisted by the pressure of a headband, sitting quietly in a dining room chair. I sat in the dark for a while longer, strangely aware that the brightest light I could see came from the glowing helmet in my hands. I hear a car drive past. In my apartment there is only my breathing and the innocent ringing melody emanating from the Quest. Everything was so quiet and dark.
I then realized that the metaverse seemed possible. If you somehow catch someone in a position like mine, completely devoid of any real human interaction and have given them an escape, they will accept it. Everything to be far from oneself. As fortunate as I was to be alone most of the time, the months away from my friends and family had shaken me up more than I’d admitted. I was alone. I was ashamed to admit it, but it was me.
I could never rate this game. Myself and the PR never really figured out what was wrong with the download, it never worked. So I put the Quest away, changed by the power those two little screens held above me that night. I had obtained what it felt like to prefer a virtual world. And I’m afraid to feel that way again.