We need technology that is less immersive, not more

I believe this has been true throughout human history. The greatest artists and thinkers throughout history have earned their keep by providing services to the wealthy or teaching paying students (also often wealthy).

There are upsides, the artists get to eat but they also have all the benefits of being connected to their employer/patron including time spent practicing their craft. If they were to quit and focus on pure art then they would likely earn far, far less and possibly spend less time making any kind of art commercial or not.

It reminds me of this survey that made the front page not long ago about author's that contained this illuminating paragraph:

> While 80% of respondents considered themselves to be professional authors, only 35% said they were full-time authors while 53% said they were part-time authors (with the balance being one-book authors or undecided). The primary writing occupation of part-time authors outside of publishing books was professor/academic (8.5%), followed by book illustrator/author (4.2%), editor (2.9%), poet (2.4%), journalist (2%), teacher (2%), and entrepreneur (1.5%).

So even people who consider themselves professional authors are unable to work at it full time. It makes sense, there's only so much one person can produce and it's quite difficult to find an audience willing to pay for what you make. This likely holds true across all professions i.e. you have to do the work that they want done and not the work that you want to do.

https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/p...

It's an attention-conservation strategy. Looking at an abstraction takes less precious attention than looking at reality. And abstractions are so malleable, so useful.

You can do it with a page of text. You can do it with no technological augmentation at all, just thinking.

It's so easy and useful that it's become a habit. The border between dream and reality is so blurred now that we've forgotten that there's a difference.

Maybe this is what the Buddhists call "Samsara".

immersive games are fine. games aren't failing to teach anything or help you relax because they are immersive. they are not teaching anything because they don't have a good story that would teach something, and they don't let you relax because specific game elements are putting you under stress.

to give two examples: i play elite dangerous. i can travel through space with a VR headset and i trade items between various space stations. very immersive and quite relaxing, until pirates come along and want to steal my cargo. that's stressful. and i wish i could turn that off.

likewise i may play some puzzle game, that is not immersive at all, and that could be relaxing if the gamedesigner hadn't added a timer that forces me to complete the puzzle in a certain time. that's stressful.

so i don't think immersion has any impact here, other than immersive games are just more attractive. both are a waste of time however if they are not educational or relaxing.

but now this issue of entertainment vs advancing society is a problem of the whole entertainment industry. very little content produced is entertaining as well as teaching something.

and so for me the question is not about how immersive the games are but how educational. i believe it is quite possible to create fully immersive but educational games.

looking back at elite dangerous again, for example, the universe in that game is modeled after our actual galaxy. where possible, stars are named by their actual astronomical names, and their looks are designed after what we know about them and i can take a star system in the game and look up its name on eg wikipedia and learn real facts about it. compare that to eve online where the universe is completely fictional. in elite dangerous i can fly around and get a sense of the relative distances of say alpha centauri vs the north pole star or of the position of our solar system vs the rest of the galaxy. (assuming that it is all accurate)

immersive and educational and relaxing (as long as i can avoid pirates)