(LifeSiteNews) – Are you ready to have your mind blown? No, I am being serious. Are you ready to literally have your head blown up?
If you answered “yes,” please seek help. But also, have I got a surprise for you!
Apparently, the founder of Oculus – a virtual reality company – has been floating the idea that video games with actual real-life injuries as consequences might be a fun idea.
Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus VR, has designed a headset that will kill you via explosive charge in real life if you die in a video game… ya pic.twitter.com/bmH87dNsMQ
— Jake Lucky (@JakeSucky) November 8, 2022
In a blog post called “If you die in the game, you die in real life,” Palmer Luckey wrote that “the idea of tying your real life to your virtual avatar has always fascinated [him.]”
He opined that if it could be formulated that what happens to your avatar also happens to your actual person, “you instantly raise the stakes to the maximum level and force people to fundamentally rethink how they interact with the virtual world and the players inside it.”
Well, I have to admit, in a way he is correct: If you could actually die by playing some first-person shooter game, or if you broke your neck from a virtual car accident, then yes, you would play differently.
However, I must also admit that this man might be insane.
This isn’t a joke
Luckey pontificated in his blog post about a fictitious scenario wherein people were forced to play games in order to gain their freedom, and “if their hit points dropped to zero, their brain would be bombarded by extraordinarily powerful microwaves, supposedly killing the user.”
Before you think this is just science fiction, it should be noted that Luckey is a defense contractor … and in his post he explained how he knows how to apply the tech that would kill the user.
He has created something called NerveGear, which can fry your brain by way of a headset.
Apparently, when the game-over screen is displayed, charges fire and instantly destroy your brain.
Sounds like a blast! No, literally like a blast to your brain that is followed by death …
Luckey went on to say that his death-game fantasy-come-reality “isn’t a perfect system.”
Now, you might be thinking that he said this because, well, killing people by video games is not a good thing to do. But that isn’t what he meant. It isn’t a “perfect system” because he is worried that the system could be tampered with.
“I have plans for an anti-tamper mechanism,” he said, “that, like the NerveGear, will make it impossible to remove or destroy the headset.”
I am sure we all feel better now, because our biggest concern was people being able to take the headset off and not die …
Logical conclusion of infantile pastimes
Now, at the risk of offending video users – Imagine that! Me offending someone! – I will offer an opinion about video games. It is not that they are intrinsically evil; of course, they are not, as playing make-believe is not intrinsically evil. However, there are many things that take place in games that are evil, and playing make believe is generally a hobby reserved for children.
Yes, it is sometimes appropriate, and even desirable for an adult to play make-believe, such as when a parent puts out cookies and milk on Christmas Eve, or when the tooth fairy leaves a quarter – or more due to inflation – under the pillow.
However, when children grow, they play make-believe less often. This is because they gain the faculty of reason and can distinguish between true and false with the help of logical categories, which they cannot do when they are young.
For a child, there isn’t much different between pretend and reality, but for an adult there must be, as reality is more serious than a heart attack.
Personally, although I understand that there is a competitive factor in video game playing that is appealing, I believe that it is a largely infantile and immature way of spending one’s time.
The fact is, there is a reason why the world of video games is called “virtual reality,” because it is not reality. Virtual reality is “almost” reality.
If you grow up constantly playing video games, then you grow up in “almost reality” as opposed to real reality.
This is a problem.
This “virtual reality” paradigm goes far beyond video games.
It is because we have a break with reality that we think we can just change biology at will and remove perfectly good body parts and pretend all is fine.
Our society is a society that lives in “almost reality” and now there will be video games that blow up your brain.
