Virtual realities.

The worst thing about being a kid was that no one told me the truth about my situation. In fact, they did the exact opposite. And, of course, I believed them, because I was just a kid and I didn’t know any better. I mean, Christ, my brain hadn’t even grown to full size yet, so how could I be expected to know when the adults were bullshitting me?

So I swallowed all of the dark ages nonsense they fed me. Some time passed. I grew up a little, and I gradually began to figure out that pretty much everyone had been lying to me about pretty much everything since the moment I emerged from my mother’s womb.

This was an alarming revelation.

It gave me trust issues later in life.

I started to figure out the ugly truth as soon as I began to explore the free OASIS libraries. The facts were right there waiting for me, hidden in old books written by people who weren’t afraid to be honest. Artists and scientists and philosophers and poets, many of them long dead. As I read the words they’d left behind, I finally began to get a grip on the situation. My situation. Our situation. What most people referred to as “the human condition.”

It was not good news.

I wish someone had just told me the truth right up front, as soon as I was old enough to understand it. I wish someone had just said:

“Here’s the deal, Wade. You’re something called a ‘human being.’ That’s a really smart kind of animal. Like every other animal on this planet, we’re descended from a single-celled organism that lived millions of years ago. This happened by a process called evolution, and you’ll learn more about it later. But trust me, that’s really how we all got here. There’s proof of it everywhere, buried in the rocks. That story you heard? About how we were all created by a super-powerful dude named God who lives up in the sky? Total bullshit. The whole God thing is actually an ancient fairy tale that people have been telling one another for thousands of years. We made it all up. Like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.

“Oh, and by the way … there’s no Santa Claus or Easter Bunny. Also bullshit. Sorry, kid. Deal with it.

“You’re probably wondering what happened before you got here. An awful lot of stuff, actually. Once we evolved into humans, things got pretty interesting. We figured out how to grow food and domesticate animals so we didn’t have to spend all of our time hunting. Our tribes got much bigger, and we spread across the entire planet like an unstoppable virus. Then, after fighting a bunch of wars with each other over land, resources, and our made-up gods, we eventually got all of our tribes organized into a ‘global civilization.’ But, honestly, it wasn’t all that organized, or civilized, and we continued to fight a lot of wars with each other. But we also figured out how to do science, which helped us develop technology. For a bunch of hairless apes, we’ve actually managed to invent some pretty incredible things. Computers. Medicine. Lasers. Microwave ovens. Artificial hearts. Atomic bombs. We even sent a few guys to the moon and brought them back. We also created a global communications network that lets us all talk to each other, all around the world, all the time. Pretty impressive, right?

“But that’s where the bad news comes in. Our global civilization came at a huge cost. We needed a whole bunch of energy to build it, and we got that energy by burning fossil fuels, which came from dead plants and animals buried deep in the ground. We used up most of this fuel before you got here, and now it’s pretty much all gone. This means that we no longer have enough energy to keep our civilization running like it was before. So we’ve had to cut back. Big-time. We call this the Global Energy Crisis, and it’s been going on for a while now.

“Also, it turns out that burning all of those fossil fuels had some nasty side effects, like raising the temperature of our planet and screwing up the environment. So now the polar ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising, and the weather is all messed up. Plants and animals are dying off in record numbers, and lots of people are starving and homeless. And we’re still fighting wars with each other, mostly over the few resources we have left.

“Basically, kid, what this all means is that life is a lot tougher than it used to be, in the Good Old Days, back before you were born. Things used to be awesome, but now they’re kinda terrifying. To be honest, the future doesn’t look too bright. You were born at a pretty crappy time in history. And it looks like things are only gonna get worse from here on out. Human civilization is in ‘decline.’ Some people even say it’s ‘collapsing.’

“You’re probably wondering what’s going to happen to you. That’s easy. The same thing is going to happen to you that has happened to every other human being who has ever lived. You’re going to die. We all die. That’s just how it is.

“What happens when you die? Well, we’re not completely sure. But the evidence seems to suggest that nothing happens. You’re just dead, your brain stops working, and then you’re not around to ask annoying questions anymore. Those stories you heard? About going to a wonderful place called ‘heaven’ where there is no more pain or death and you live forever in a state of perpetual happiness? Also total bullshit. Just like all that God stuff. There’s no evidence of a heaven and there never was. We made that up too. Wishful thinking. So now you have to live the rest of your life knowing you’re going to die someday and disappear forever.

“Sorry.”

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Immersive censorship.

The future of virtual reality isn’t just about whether or not it causes a stampede at your local big-box retailer, ends up in bedrooms and living rooms around the world, or enables new artistic achievements­—if, in short, VR becomes a mass medium. Let’s get past that and ask: then what? Take a January 2014 article on Forbes’ website titled “Legal Heroin: Is Virtual Reality Our Next Hard Drug”. I assume the authors left out the question mark because they’d already made up their minds. The article lurches from irresponsible comparisons of the effects of VR immersion with middle America’s worst nightmares (“a rapid hit of speed, heroin, ecstasy, marijuana, and cocaine”) to singing the potential praises of VR as a learning tool.

If you’re up on media history, that kind of overblown language sounds mighty familiar. Looking back at media panics—from dime novels to train robbery flicks to horror comics to videogames—it’s easy to imagine how VR might be vulnerable to a similar wave of fear. Those previous panics look ridiculous in hindsight: In 1954, Fredric Wertham declared Batman and Robin secret lovers in front of a U.S. Senate subcommittee as part of his crusade against comic books. In the halcyon early '50s, when comic books overflowed on newsstands, Wertham's bullying played a key part in relegating sales to their current specialty market. Even pinball machines were banned in most major U.S. cities for four decades because of their alleged deleterious effects on the nation’s youth.

Looking back at media panics, it’s easy to imagine how VR might be vulnerable to a similar wave of fear 

There’s a definite cycle of mistrust, misunderstanding, and censorship by older generationsofthe new media embraced by youth. Dr. Dmitri Williams, a professor at the University of Southern California, calls this cycle the River City effect, referencing a tune from The Music Man. Williams describes three phases of reactions to new media used by kids: worries about the activities the media displaces, fears about health problems caused by the new tech, and opportunities to assign them blame for larger social problems. VR has some peculiarities that make it a fine target for all three phases.

What will be displaced? The physical world, for a start. Immersion in a virtual world is exclusion from the world around you. When a teenager is playing a console on the TV in her room, she can still turn her head to listen and look at her mom when she asks how her day has been or whether or not her homework is finished. That same mom might have a harder time accepting her offspring whiling away her free time behind goggles and headphones that completely block out the outside world. The inhuman, slightly sinister design of the headsets mocked up in prototypes and concept art isn’t doing the medium any favors: Headsets that obscure most of the user’s face transform a familiar daughter into a cyborg interloper occupying the living room couch. For bonus points, put a plastic gun in the player’s hands, or have them swing their fists to punch.

If game creators do their jobs right, the player’s mouth will be zombielike in slack-jawed ecstasy or twisted into a lunatic’s rageful maw, caught in the ecstasy of popping a cap into a noob or disemboweling an unfortunate goblin. Watching someone’s entire body react to a world you can’t see is deeply unsettling. Something about blocking out the outside world makes you forget to wear the mask of normalcy. Because VR seeks to mimic the senses by covering up the outside world with the virtual, it doesn’t allow passerby to become spectators with the same ease. The fertile imaginations of a fearful parent can populate what goes on beneath those goggles with their worst nightmares of debaucherous sex and violence.

Let’s say Mom wants to try out VR for herself and straps the goggles on. Ten minutes later, she’s staggering down the hallway to eject dinner into the toilet bowl Professor Williams’ health issues phase of the River City effect. “Simulator sickness” has been the bane of virtual world development for decades­—it’s something like motion sickness, but for virtual worlds, and while motion sickness usually requires long-term or extreme exposure, like a cruise or a roller-coaster ride, just being in VR makes some people sick. Maybe commercial hardware developers will be able to crack the simulator sickness problem where the military-industrial complex and its mountains of cash failed. But given that simulator sickness is caused by a variety of factors—including the design of the virtual environment and player movement—that manifest in varying ways, degrees, and populations, a certain percentage of people will likely never be able to experience VR without nausea.

Headsets that obscure most of the user’s face transform a familiar daughter into a cyborg interloper occupying the living room couch 

Still, most people develop a higher tolerance to simulator sickness over time through gradual exposure. So an excited teenager might get past some initial wooziness over the course of a few weeks, but a parent who wants to see what all the fuss is about could plunge into a virtual environment and end up severely disoriented. This problem isn’t going to be restricted to parents: If kids today remain anything like kids have always been, they’re probably going to overdo it on their new toys with marathon VR sessions. Christmas might get messy.

Making someone hurl isn’t generally considered a great first impression, and the cipher of VR is going to absorb all the perennial fears and complaints about young people. These complaints become a crisis of conscience when sharpened by links to the kind of horrific violence that has become all too routine in America, in tragedies like Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Sandy Hook. This is the final phase of Williams’ River City effect, where the most troubling issues facing a society are blamed on a younger generation’s embrace of new media. After the angry newspaper editorials, the outraged appearances on talk shows, and overplayed clips of the most extreme content VR has to offer run for days, what would the case for regulating and censoring the new medium look like?

Each new medium has to be explicitly approved by the justices as speech before it’s protected 

Some precedents have been set. In 2011, the United States Supreme Court declared videogames protected speech. Unfortunately, they’ve never gotten around to giving a definition of speech that has much predictive power: Each new medium has to be explicitly approved by the justices as speech before it’s protected. The first step for would-be goggle-grabbers will be to make the case that VR is a radically new medium and assert that its greater interactivity and realism are fundamentally different and more dangerous than what came before it. If they can manage that, the four decades of case law and precedent that established videogames as part of the First Amendment will be irrelevant.

The next step is to make the argument that VR isn’t speech at all; this is exactly what happened to videogames in 1982. By collapsing motion-based technology into the same category, legislators might make the argument that VR isn’t speech but action, which has a much lower barrier to regulation. When something is considered speech by the courts, any legislation regulating or censoring it must pass a very high standard of proof known as “strict scrutiny”, and the videogame speech case suggested that media effects research isn’t going to get there anytime soon. If it’s not speech, restrictive laws have to pass only the “rational basis” test: Basically, if the lawmakers give any justification at all, that’s good enough for the courts. That result could be disastrous, giving enterprising local, state, and federal politicians free reign to censor virtual reality for children or even adults. A promising new medium could be snuffed out under the onerous weight of regulation.

VR is still protean in its technical and cultural configuration: The future will bring many surprises and new wrinkles to an age-old contest between young and old. The best insurance against a future of censorship for VR is by making sure a generation gap doesn’t develop. The best way to do that is by showing people who wouldn’t otherwise put on a pair of goggles what VR is like, and by showing politicians that voters recognize the cycle of censorship and fear-mongering surrounding the birth of new media.