For many of us, travel represents not only an opportunity to have new experiences and new adventures, but also a time when we temporarily have to sacrifice comforts from home. The hotel room is too hot or too cold or too noisy. The bed is not as comfortable as the bed at home. If it is travel in a foreign country, there are concerns about miscommunication when trying to make one’s wants and needs known in a foreign language. And as interesting as a new country is, sometimes the food doesn’t agree with us.
But a new hotel in Amsterdam has anticipated a new kind of discomfort for foreign travelers. The hotel is called the Arcade Hotel, and each room has a video console and a video screen for using video games that hotel guests can rent from the hotel. This is truly a gamer’s hotel, a hotel for people who experience separation anxiety being separated from their video games for too long. Forget about the museums, galleries, canals, and charming neighborhoods that one could see walking around Amsterdam. This new perk allows a hotel guest to engage in what would constitute for him the truly meaningful pleasures in life. Such a guest would never have to leave his hotel room. Room service could bring up his meals. At night, he could sleep on the bed provided to him.
Gamers are people whose mental functions have been reconfigured to absorb primarily the defined discrete stimuli of digital pixels and digital images and who are increasingly incapable of absorbing properly the tactile and visual substance of the external world. But gamers are not very interested in this substantive reality with all of its rich flowing blendable continual stimuli that are part of what the gamer perceives as the organically perishable world.
More than any other manifestation of screen reality, the video game is one where a person can play God with the components he is given of a screen world, which, precisely because it has no substance and because it has a vacuumized background, is similar to a spiritual world. The major difference between a screen world and a truly spiritual world is that a screen world is rich in the defined discrete stimuli of digital pixels and digital images and fairly weak on flowing blendable continual stimuli, whereas the entities in a spirit world tend to have blurry boundaries and are weak on defined discrete stimuli and strong on flowing blendable continual stimuli like the forms in a lava lamp. For substance, for things in the reality of the external world, one needs both defined discrete stimuli and flowing blendable continual stimuli.
People who spend so much time in the vacuumized world of the video game are going to be so reconfigured to being able to absorb all the defined discrete stimuli being produced in such a world, that they are going to lose their capacity to absorb not only the stimuli of a traditional urban environment like Amsterdam but also the stimuli of any natural environment full of flowing blendable continual stimuli. Video games, television, computers, tablets, and smartphones are all such seductive little worlds capable of giving a person such a strong sense of control, transcendence and immortality that they can suck a person up and transform him even in more organic external environments like small towns surrounded by beautiful nature. These screens can make a person numb and can make him develop a craving for stronger stimuli to pull him out of his numbness. This is why a rural state in the United States like New Hampshire can be experiencing such a large heroin epidemic.
As modern technology transforms people to become more and more like robots, people increasingly lose their capacity to absorb natural environments even when surrounded by nature on a daily basis. And it is not only that these people get hooked on a particular kind of stimuli. They actually get hooked on a whole different kind of reality. Modern technology has created two new configurations of reality in the material world. External world reality is the traditional material reality that human beings have always experienced and that seems to continue to exist even when no one is directly experiencing it. It is a reality filled not only with the outlines and features of things created by defined discrete stimuli, but also with the mass and texture of things created by flowing blendable continual stimuli.
Screen reality is a vacuumized reality that exists like an island within external world reality. It is a reality that has minimal amounts of the mass and texture of external world reality – namely the boxy mass and smooth texture of the machine that contains the screen. It is primarily an environment filled with the infinite continuous stimuli of an experiential vacuum that serves as a backdrop, and then the subject matter consists of all the defined discrete stimuli of images and data that appear on the screen.
There are also pieces of video and music that are free-floating figures that contain the flowing blendable continual stimuli that allow images and sound to move over time. The original forms of screen reality – movies and television – didn’t permit a person to participate in the vacuumized forms on the screen. Later forms – video games, computers, smartphones and tablets – allow people to participate in the vacuumized world and, in so doing, draw a person further into it. At the same time, because this vacuumized world is contained in a box, one can always focus away from it and gain temporary grounding from the substantive reality of the external world outside of the box. One can always move away from the subtle effects of psychological disintegration from entropy that result from remaining in the vacuum of screen reality too long.
In virtual reality, there is an island of the external world in the headset connected to a smartphone that one wears in order to live in a vacuumized reality that literally surrounds the person experiencing it. In virtual reality, the infinite continuous stimuli of the vacuum and the defined discrete stimuli that are an important part of all the vacuumized figure phenomena that are displayed within it, work to shut out any experiential grounding from the external world. The person in virtual reality is literally a free-floating figure without anything apart from the small island of the virtual reality headset connected to a smartphone that anchors him in the external world.
We are not yet at a point where people can go to enchanting places like Amsterdam and stay in hotels that offer free virtual reality to their guests. It is bad enough that people can go and totally miss the unique pleasures that come from visiting a place that for most visitors is very different from home. The screen reality of video games is so addictive, that even though a person is not totally surrounded by a vacuumized world as with virtual reality, the sustained interaction with the screen reality world psychologically immerses the person in a vacuumized reality, even if the person is not totally sensorily immersed.
Such a person, because of his addiction is condemned to live a numbing vacuumized life in which he does not have rich vibrant life experiences, doesn’t make, receive or preserve many organic imprints and doesn’t prepare for death with a meaningful surrogate immortality. Not touring Amsterdam is the least of the problems of the visitor of the Arcade Hotel. Such a person is also absent a meaningful journey through life.
© 2016 Laurence Mesirow