Father Doesn't Wear a Headset

I read, this morning, over the second half of a grapefruit I did not finish because it had the audacity to be tart, that a person — a "tech journalist," which I am given to understand is an actual occupation one can hold, the way one might hold a coat — has been strapped into something called the Steam Frame, a headset, by a company called Valve, and has published his findings, and has additionally offered to answer further questions about the experience from strangers. Ask me anything, he said. I did not ask him anything, because I already know the answer to the only question worth asking, which is: why.

Why does one strap a computer to one's own face.

I want to be fair about this, because I am, at bottom, an extremely fair person — ask anyone who has ever watched me tip a valet the exact fare he requested, not a cent more, because generosity untethered from principle is just noise — and I understand, intellectually, that the Steam Frame is meant to transport its wearer somewhere else. Somewhere better, presumably, than wherever they currently are, which one gathers is a room, possibly a small one, possibly shared with a "roommate," a word I have heard used unironically by people my own age. The headset, as I understand the review, offers virtual reality: a constructed elsewhere, piped directly into the eyes, at a price point, with specifications, that a journalist was retained — retained! by an editor! for wages! — to go hands-on with and report back upon, like a scout returning from a country the rest of us have not been permitted to visit.

One simply visits the country.

I do not say this to be difficult. I say it because it is, truly, the entire solution, and I watch people build elaborate plastic scaffolding around problems that have a door in them the whole time. You would like to be somewhere else. Marvelous — so would I, on any given Tuesday, and my solution is a telephone call to Father's pilot, not a Kickstarter-adjacent product with "field of view" as a marketed feature. Field of view! One has a field of view already, complimentary, included with the eyes, and mine currently takes in a lawn that a team of very devoted men maintain at a length I specify weekly, in person, because I find text messages about grass to be a species of vulgarity I cannot abide. If your field of view is disappointing you, the poors' instinct is to buy a device that simulates a better one. The correct instinct is to leave the room the bad view is attached to.

But you know? I don't think it's really about the view at all. I think the whole apparatus — the headset, the review, the Q&A session, the comment section beneath it that I am told exists and is, apparently, thriving — is about a much sadder thing, which is that going somewhere costs money and having a computer pretend you went somewhere costs less money, and an entire industry has sprung up, humming and glowing, around the gap between those two facts. It is, when you look at it plainly, a kind of theatrical poverty. A very well-lit one, with excellent resolution, but poverty all the same, and I find that if anything, sadder than the ordinary, threadbare kind, because at least the ordinary kind doesn't require you to strap something to your skull and call it "immersive."

The journalist's whole job, as I understand it — and please do correct me if I've misunderstood the poors' employment structures, which I confess I find as opaque as cricket — was to put the thing on his actual face, on a Tuesday, presumably instead of doing something else, and then describe the sensation to other people who were not able to put the thing on their own faces yet, so that they might decide whether the thing was worth the money they, too, do not especially have. This strikes me as a remarkable use of a human life. Somewhere there is a man who trained, one imagines, for years — wrote things, pitched things, filed things on deadline, the whole grim liturgy of "having a career" — in order to arrive, at last, at the professional summit of putting on someone else's goggles and telling the rest of the poors whether the goggles were good. And then, having done this, he offered to take further questions. Voluntarily! No one made him stay. One does wonder what Father would say, except of course this man's father is not my Father, and does not, I imagine, have quite the same recourse, which — well. There it is again, isn't it. The gap. I keep finding it under everything, like a floorboard.

I want to be generous about the headset itself, so let me say: I am given to understand it is well made. Valve is, I am told, a serious company, taken seriously by serious people, and I have no quarrel with the object as an object — I'm sure the lenses are lovely, I'm sure the "specs" are exactly as advertised, I have complete faith in the engineering, the way I have complete faith in the engineering of, say, a very good umbrella. It's just that an umbrella is for when you must be out in weather you cannot avoid, and I have never once been out in weather I could not avoid, because avoiding weather is, I promise you, entirely possible, if one simply declines to go outside until it stops, or has someone bring the car around under the portico, which every house has, or ought to. The Steam Frame is an umbrella for people who have decided the rain is permanent. And I suppose, for them, at that price, it probably is a kindness. I only find it unbearably sad that anyone would need it, the way I find it sad when I hear people discuss their "commute" as though it were weather too, an act of God, rather than a thing they are choosing, every single morning, to keep doing.

Because that's really my trouble with the whole business — not the headset, not the poor overworked man narrating his own eyeballs to strangers for a paycheck, but the acceptance underneath it. Nobody in that entire review, as far as I can tell, paused to ask the actually interesting question, which isn't "how's the field of view" or "how's the tracking latency," whatever that is, but: does this person need to be here at all? Does anyone? I keep waiting, every time I read one of these little dispatches from the working world, for the part where someone simply stops — puts down the headset, phones home, and is collected. And it never comes. They just keep filing the review. They just keep answering the questions. Ask me anything, he said, and what I wanted to ask, what I still want to ask, is not about the resolution or the comfort strap. It's: darling, who is your father, and why hasn't he called?

One does hope he calls soon.

— Cynthia