Lover of trading, tacos, 3D/AR/VR, cryptos, and most things Japanese

Remembering Westworld

I’ve always been a fan of great stories. I’d often fantasize about entering and living in the worlds portrayed by my favorite books and the sense of immersion and experience conveyed by great stories, movies, comics, and games has given me ample opportunity to explore the depths of imaginations – both of others and my own. Through these media, I’ve experienced a vast range of stories, settings, and surprises. Westworld represents the (un?)natural progression of storytelling.

The introduction of the open world concept was a watershed marker in gaming history when players were given the choice to play the scripted game narrative or to finally venture out on their own, exploring the virtual world of the game, making their own choices. Right now, this seems to be the apex of the immersive experience – the ability to participate in a given storyline or to wander off and explore one’s personal narrative. Westworld’s writers expertly blend storytelling’s narrative elements with game mechanics in a hauntingly familiar and compelling way.

Great storytellers are also visionaries and all it takes is just one person to fall in love with the story so much that they strive to make it a reality. What Trekkie hasn’t dreamed of life aboard a starship? What Star Wars fan hasn’t tried to use The Force, even in jest? What fan of superheroes hasn’t envisioned having super powers? How many of today’s advances were first expressed in the tales of days past?

Stories have a way of foretelling and a select few have shaped my life paths. TRON and The Last Starfighter blended video games with revolutionary visual effects of their times, which helped propel me into a computer graphics career. William Gibson’s Hugo Award winning Neuromancer was the quintessential cyberpunk tale about hacker console jockeys, street samurai, and birthed the term cyberspace – inspiring me to explore the online world long before the internet became commonplace. Avatar breathtakingly showcased telepresence and advanced biomechanics, showing that anything that can be imagined can be made real on the big screen. And now, with photorealistic virtual reality finally approaching mass adoption, a new wave of experiences will soon be upon us. As such, I have been learning the technologies and tools necessary to be well positioned when that wave crests.

At some point in the future, sooner I’d wager than many believe, we will have the opportunity to go to parks like Westworld. As technology continues to advance at an exponential rate, people will soon have the ability to experience their every curiosity, dream, and desire first hand in a virtual world. It is going to happen, it is just a matter of time. And, as studies on active visualization have shown, the brain cannot tell the difference between a visualized event and one that happens in reality. Emphasis will shift from the technologists to the creatives, the designers.

Imagine what that means… 🙂

Read Christine’s Take on Westworld here.

Remembering Westworld

The HBO creators describe the show Westworld as “… a dark odyssey about the dawn of artificial consciousness and the evolution of sin. Set at the intersection of the near future and the reimagined past, it explores a world in which every human appetite, no matter how noble or depraved, can be indulged.” Hmm. Clearly, I need to get out more.

Each week’s story focuses on a growing self-awareness within the show’s robotic “hosts” and how their “artificial consciousness” drive some of them to slowly deviate from their scripted loops into independent exploration. The experience in the WestWorld park for the human guests is dynamic and exciting enough that many are unaware of the growing imperative of their hosts….which creates the perfect recipe for delicious tension and fear.

Each day, as the robotic hosts are damaged or killed within their prescribed storylines, they are brought back to the lab, physically rebuilt, mental and emotional pathways erased and reset, and put back into service in the park, year after year. The show’s writers cleverly leverage the use of memory fragments or flashbacks to enable select hosts to slowly begin to realize that there might just be more to their lives than their current script.

As viewers, we learn the backstories and nuances of the hosts’ personalities through these fleeting memory-based story lines – showing the host in their originally developed story lines as well as in currently adapted story lines, suddenly flashing us back and then returning to present several times in one episode. Vox entertainment reviewer Todd VanDerWerff writes “ … [the show’s] clever use of mixed, interlocking timelines, which nicely replicated how a Host could become effectively unmoored in time, trapped in their memories and reliving moments from their past, it was able to cover over three decades of the park’s history, all the better to underline how terrible existence was for the Hosts.” I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that we all were rooting for the hosts to kick some human ass at the end of Season One.

But for one robotic host, Dolores, the frequent transition from present to some flickering memory and back again creates for her a human-like dissonance and a confusing and terrifying feeling of being “unmoored” in her growing sentience. Many times she asks others in the scene if they are real, if she has gone mad. Even emboldened, she is clearly adrift in unfamiliar territory.

Perhaps these HBO writers are just the good students of every exceptional, haunted, broken, lost, bold, scared writer of our past. Perhaps this experience of being “unmoored” from what we perceive as “reality,” this perceived madness, is in fact a primary way for us to develop a more sophisticated sense of self awareness.

Perhaps it is through a growing sense of discordance with the anchors of normative reality, challenging the linear nature of traditional learning, thinking of growth, like in WestWorld, not as a climb up a self-actualized pyramid, but as a circuitous, mad journey towards the center of a hidden, obscured maze, that begins to finally create in some of us a sense of real consciousness.

If only we are brave enough to remember.

“..the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars…” – Jack Kerouac

This weekend I found myself smiling as I was enlisted to work on a Halloween costume for my 12 year old son, because it seems, even in 2016, costumes are half store bought and half cannibalized from items in your mother’s bedroom closet.

I grew up as a child of the 70’s, in a lower middle class section of suburban Boston.  For most of us, that meant we asked our Moms to drive us to Osco Drug Store or Woolworths to buy one of those hard, pre-molded masks in the shape of Casper the friendly ghost, Cornelius from Planet of the Apes, a Hobo or Bum (remember when that was considered a costume?) or a shape vaguely resembling Snoopy.  There were only two reasons why these were considered mother-approved costume purchases; (1) These masks were really cheap – Mom would give you a five dollar bill and expect a bit of change back, and (2) there was no branded outfit worn on the rest of the body – which meant kids could wear the always-required, no-exceptions overcoats and mittens.

Late October in New England meant either bitter cold or snow.  Dads followed us around at a respectable distance, idling in their rear wheel drive, 10 mpg, who-gives-a-shit-about-emissions olive green Chevy Monte Carlo boats. We kids were bundled up thick, plodding along in the headlights, distinguished only by our smooth molded faces.

In 1977, Wonder Woman dominated the TV ratings, and took America’s heart by storm.  I was eight, and Lynda Carter instantly became my childhood hero.  That very summer, soon after my Mom had purchased me a Wonder Woman printed one-piece bathing suit,  I hatched my plan to trick or treat as Diane Prince for Halloween.  My plan was to don the bathing suit, purchase a molded mask as usual, and ask Mom to make me some golden wrist cuffs from the remnants of a shiny outfit I wore in that year’s dance recital.  The plan was coming together nicely, until Halloween night.

Of course, it was cold that night in 1977, and just before dinner, my Mother suddenly realized that her eight year old was gleefully planning to stroll the neighborhood in a bathing suit.  Despite all my crying, whining, pleading and all the logical, rational and creative arguments my young brain could conjure, she insisted that I wear my long underwear top and bottoms under the swim suit – the white long underwear with small pink roses that I normally wore when I took skiing lessons.  Then the pull-on rubber boots with the two Velcro straps.  Then the dark brown wool coat with the leather and wooden toggle closures.  Then the black mittens with the clips – mercifully removing the long white elastic band that normally fed up one sleeve and down the other.   Oh, the shame.  The sweating.  The blooming sense of anarchistic determination that took shape that night.

Today as my own child’s Halloween costume takes shape, I too feel the instinctual maternal pull, whispering insistently for my son to add insulation under his costume this year.  Then I think, this purposeful and pragmatic kid just got his Flu Shot… he can survive an hour or two in the cold.  That’s the way of Amazonian logic.

…

As a kid growing up in the rural foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains in northwest California, there weren’t a lot of houses or other kids in the neighborhood. Our neighbors on either side had three kids between them, and there were about 20 houses in the area we were allowed to haunt on Halloween. If we were lucky, half of the 20 would be home and Halloween friendly. We didn’t get much in the way of candy, but the neighbors that participated seemed to understand that pickings were slim, and gave us a little extra candy, so it wasn’t all bad.

As for costumes, my sister and I were generally left to fend for ourselves. Most years, we couldn’t afford to buy costumes or masks, so we usually had to create whatever we could from household items. I think I went as a flowery-sheeted ghost most years.

Halloween has always been my favorite holiday. I have always had a penchant for skulls, Dia de los Muertes (Day of the Dead)-style art, spooky things, and of course CANDY! I had always wanted to get decked out in a really cool costume. By the time I had the means to do so available, I was a teenager and trick-or-treating was no longer done.

Fast forward to college, where I had the good fortune to befriend a bunch of guys and gals that worked in the special effects industry in Hollywood. For them, Halloween was the biggest holiday of the year. They’d spend months planning and then creating their costumes. Full head masks were sculpted, cast in plaster, molded in latex, painted, and accessorized. Others would machine intricate parts to mechanical appendages, or wire up circuits to control tiny LED lights that were strategically position around the face or in the mouth to make teeth glow eerily. They spent a lot of time, effort, and money preparing for All Hallow’s Eve, and I learned a lot helping or watching them work their magic.

Another friend took me to see Oingo Boingo’s concert in Irvine, California, on Halloween in 1986 – their most popular concert of the year. I only knew a few of their songs at the time, Dead Man’s Party most notably, but the whole experience blew me away. The music was incredible (xylophones!), the fans were all dressed up, the stage decked out in Dia de los Muretes-style art, and Danny Elfman put on what I would learn to be his typically fantastic show. I had discovered my new favorite band.

When my son was old enough, I took him out trick-or-treating around his neighborhood while his mom stayed home to hand out candy to the local spooks and spectres. It was a brisk night, he was young and bit unsure of what to make of things, but we braved spooky facades, rang doorbells, said “Trick or Treat!” when answered, and dutifully collected the sugary delights. We would walk around the big block of his neighborhood, hitting up maybe 40 houses, and filling his bag to the brim before returning home. Once there, we’d dump his spoils out on the floor and go through them, removing anything that had peanuts in them. His mom and I would set up guidelines for how much he could have at a time (which unsurprisingly eroded over the years), would take a few pieces we wanted as “tax”, and divide up the stuff he couldn’t eat. This was our Halloween ritual, year after year, and it worked well for us all.