The Intrinsic Perspective
There’s a profile I once read of an American drone operator, one who bombed people in Afghanistan from the safety of an air-conditioned building near Las Vegas, a guy who spent a whole virtual war in Nevada looking at an infrared screen, choosing little targets. Eventually, the operator began to dream about it. His dreams combined his drone-view experience of Afghanistan and his favorite game, World of Warcraft, where characters from the games would appear and run along the desert sands in infrared.
In college I played World of Warcraft too—my first semester I spent way too much time on it, and I too would dream of it, occasionally. We were both inside the supersensorium. And by “ supersensorium” I mean the entertainment analog to a “supermarket” with all its conveniences and stocked shelves. What makes a supermarket so super is that everything is so readily available, organized, accessible, standardized. So too now with our screens, through which we can easily access almost any available pre-packaged entertainment. The result is that, just as obesity rates took off after supermarkets became the dominant way everyone in America got food, so have rates of entertainment addiction followed the rise of the supersensorium.
The subreddit r/StopGaming is a repository of stories and memes about what being totally captured by the modern supersensorium is like—mostly from young men. The worst are “ I lost my wife” level stories, along with plenty of laments about spending 63,000 hours (~7 years) on games, all while being only 30. Sometimes this is handled with humor:
