Entering the VR

I'm not a techie person. I'm not into all the new things that come out. I don't play video games. But you know, when virtual reality became reality, I was excited for that one. Sci-fi had genuinely come to life. I'd like to say the Holodeck had come to life, but in actuality VR is more like (that which even has the exact same name) VR in Earth 2 (I'm sure there are plenty of other examples, too, but that's the one that comes to mind for me). I remember when I watched that show a few years ago and I said that VR was cooler than the Holodeck--and then VR became real.

And yet I didn't even try VR until yesterday. I don't know. I guess it's one of those things where I wasn't going to buy it myself and I never got around to trying it anywhere else. So yesterday.

The first game felt a little more like Tetris in a way. When I used to play Tetris on my Razor (a slim cellphone from back in the day for any who are unfamiliar), that tiny screen became my whole vision because I was so focused on the game (I was pretty great at Tetris, a skill that comes in handy when you're packing groceries into your shopping bags or stuffing the trunk of your car or packing a suitcase). So that first game felt kind of like that. The game was all I saw but that's kind of how it is when you play a screen game, anyways. It was cool, though, because you're using your hands and arms more than just your fingers.

The second game was a set of them. I just tried a few here and there, the carnival games that I'm terrible at, anyway, so of course was pretty bad at in the game. I probably had more fun on the home pages of this one, looking around at all the scenes around me. You turn your head and there are more things over there. You look up or down and there are things to look at. If someone's standing next to you in reality, you know they're there but they're not really there because they're not what you see next to you. It's crazy.

The last game I tried within this set was a little more interactive in the way that only VR can be. It was climbing. You're climbing across ropes and against walls/cliffs. So you're changing scenery. And you look down and you see down and it's amazing, even though it was animated style imagery. When you fell, you would "die" and the world would fall around you. I kept saying, I like dying, that's fun. Just seeing everything fall was so cool. And then in the end when you finish the course, there's a crown that you grab and if you waved it, there were stars. So I was just waving my crown and watching the stars fall. It's weird because there's something tangible in your hand and yet there isn't.

I can see how people get addicted to things like VR. They're really cool, no mistake. But I'll stick to it as just a novelty, something for every so often and not for every day or every week. It's amazing to enter another world but I also want to keep living in this one.