How Realities Are Created

"What is Reality?" -Philip K. Dick

The Philip K. Dick head. Photo courtesy of jmarshallpittman.

It's a common idea in video-game theory that we are seeing the birth of an entirely new art-form, something that has never been seen before, and that many people will soon go flying off into the future of virtual worlds. It's an even commoner idea in antique ways of thinking that this is a horrible proposition and we should destroy the machines before they destroy us.

the truth is neither as dramatic or as mundane as all that. actually, i believe video games are the future in a field of study that's older than history: the quest to mediate reality.

Neurologically, all our knowledge of the world around us is mediated--transformed by our sensory apparatus into something the brain can process. this interface of your senses with your brain is the original set of virtual-reality goggles, a fully immersive interface that displays data to you that most of us usually assume to be "reality." It is, in fact, mediated reality, which is very different. it is, to put it bluntly, a bubble, constructed around the Self, through which nothing can pass before being transformed so our brain can digest it. It is a tiny world that only exists for one person, and these worlds can vary infinitely.

So, right from the start, we understand that all reality is constructed, and that we use a meat machine to interact with the squishy stuff, and that different worlds exist, different head-spaces created by this tendency of our mind to create a world around us. Each brain inside his own environment, whether it's a jungle, a hovel, or a grand central station of ideas. The point is not that each of us has our own---we all have hundreds. Thousands. (Try to have even more.)

So the idea of creating our own realities that exist independent of the four-dimensional universe, that exist alongside our own, in thoughts, dreams, stories, plays, music, movies, or lines of code, well, that's something our people have been working on since the very beginning. the cave paintings at Lascaux were the original Disneyland ride, the first movie. The Philip K. Dick head is one of the most advanced. These arts are called media because they insert another layer of translation onto the world, interpret reality and tell their own story. The ancient jewish mystics would descend into a cave whose walls gave off a vapor that delivered psychedelic revelations of the One True God. They emerged and wrote the Scriptures which are still studied today as glimmerings of "unmediated truth"--while the medium actually exists right underneath the ground. This is what books are--a translation of a previously experienced mental state, which may or may not create another instance of the author's thought, or a new shard of his thought which has a completely different effect on someone else.

in any case, mediation is our first tool, the equivalent of our first joystick or NES controller, movie projector and personal musical singing theater, the thing we grab to make sense of and take part in the world. Making video games is not only natural, it's necessary to move forward the Human Experiment, the quest to interact with all existence in a way that's meaningful and pleasurable for all parties.

and this idea of strapping goggles on your head and using a wired-up glove or a Wii-mote to grab things and move ideas around inside your headspace, well, to me it's the natural extension of what we've done so far. I will become a cyborg, because we have always been cyborgs. Weld the keyboard finger- and wrist-bones into my hands, and the analog rotary servocontrollers into my thumb joints, and make me whole.

In future explorations of CREATING REALITIES, I'll delve further into old and new realities I have loved, and look at how all kinds of different realities can talk with each other.