Post Virtual Reality Sadness

Something I've noticed in many comments is its a mix of the game or story with perceptual warping.

My own perceptual warping story doesn't come with a game, but I assure you its super disorienting to spend a couple hours looking thru a low power binoc microscope to work on electronics and then just get up and walk around, your hand eye coordination is all messed up for awhile because what you see your hands do has been times 2 magnified and bent 90 degrees upward for some hours. Putting a key in a keyhole is a challenge for a couple minutes till reality snaps back. Its a form of sea sickness, after all. Your position sense doesn't match your optic sense and that makes some people puke although in low doses you just feel really weird.

Much like there is a difference between the taste of a beer in a relaxed setting vs after a long afternoon of yard work, your blood sugar or hormones or something distort your perception of the taste of the beer. Or DnD / pathfinder / rpg in general seems more fun when candle-lit. And a zillion observations in a hundred comments here about drugs or whatever.

I would think there are more technological opportunities to mix perception alteration with a story or game than just AI or what we've mentioned. Perhaps someone could scientifically calculate a formula to determine the correct music for a game. Maybe there is a type of food that naturally goes with social media use (probably something sugary). Maybe a certain hue of general room lighting is good for certain TV genres. Aside from VR technology, however cool it may be, I have this feeling narrative/game plus perception warping is a large mostly unexplored solution space.

I like to sail. I wonder if, along the lines of the theory above, liking sailing comes from ultra low dose perceptual warping due to subclinical sea sickness combined with the purely mechanical labor of sailing. Could you give me a small dose of anti-anti-sea sickness pills and I'd love basketweaving or something.

I actually bought Diaspora and Axiomatic while still within the first few chapters of Permutation City because I liked it so much. That was on the tail end of a sci-fi binge though, and I haven't read Diaspora yet, or much sci-fi since. Next time I feel like it though, I know I've got a very good backlog waiting for me.

Here's hoping I don't want to finish his other novels either :)

> More of "the kids aren't alright!" reporting they love to do to scare parents and elderly folks.

Sadly this is one of those topics, like violence in video games, where we don't get beyond this cycle of "accuse and deny". Which is a shame because IMO there are really important topics here we need to address collectively such as how this connects to addiction http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html

The "data point" I've been able to confirm with other parents of small kids (under 10) is there is a connection between extended periods of computer-aided escapism and aggression.

The experiment you can try with most kids is give them a smartphone or iPad for 1-2 hours then take it away again with minimal warning but without using force. Once you've recovered the device, the next 15-30 minutes will typically involve aggressive behaviour; shouting, physical aggression towards siblings, demands to have the device back and something not unlike Gollum desiring his Precious.

Based on my own experiences, adults can exhibit similar behaviour but extremes are dampened by conditioning, so harder to detect e.g it manifests itself in different ways e.g. sadness or depression instead of aggression.

My hypothesis for this is something like 'For every 15 minutes given to a medium capable of 'fully absorbing' human attention (books, computer games VR), 5 minutes of "unconscious recovery time" will be required to re-align the attention to the current "real" reality, during which subjects may display behaviour such as aggression, sadness or general distractedness / fidgeting'

This ratio of 15 to 5 might be different depending on the medium e.g. VR might have a more accentuated ratio than reading a book.

Why this is so I can't say for sure, but it's something like a tax on time spent existing in a disconnected reality vs. the "real reality" our bodies live in.

I'm not sure "sadness" is the way I'd describe it, but returning back to the real world is a bit weird if you've been in for a few hours. I've always attributed it to the wind-down. The crazy part of onward is it literally invokes a prolonged adrenaline reaction. At least it used to, it's not nearly as much anymore. Leaving can be exhausting. It's definitely part of the addicting aspects. The first few times when I dove to the ground because I heard gunshots near me was exhilarating. I find myself wanting increasingly more intense moments.

Looking at the "waifu" culture in Anime, it doesn't seem like you need a particularly deep or compelling experience. What you describe already happens; it just might start happening for a slightly broader array of people.