At the HowTheLightGetsIn festival earlier this year, Slavoj Žižek, Steven Bonnell (aka Destiny) and Lisa Miller met to debate ‘The Game of Life’. Hosted by Myriam François. The philosopher, the YouTuber and the spiritual psychologist traversed the increasing gamification of reality, and what it might mean for capitalism, virtual reality, and the meaning of life. Ricky Williamson explores the debate, Apple Vision Pro, Nietzsche, and consciousness, and offers a perspective to help you win at the game of life. Watch the debate this article is about here. 

Apple has entered the AR/VR game. The new Apple Vision Pro allows the wearer to enter into a half-virtual, half-physical world. The virtual and the real are blurring and becoming one.

We already spend half our lives staring at our phones. But what if our phones were literally taped to our eyeballs? This is effectively the vision of Apple, Meta, and other tech companies. It appears ‘the current thing’ has gone full circle, from VR to AI, and now back to VR/AR. Forget the singularity, two letter acronyms are taking over the world!

As the metaverse is reborn into relevancy, the potential negatives of a VR future lie before us. Firstly, if you are in a virtual or augmented world, you might miss what is beautiful about this one. Sure, David Chalmers argues the virtual and the real are one and the same reality, and we can see his point; when you put on Apple Vision Pro you don’t actually ‘go anywhere’. However, a walk in a real-life park is full of the unmatchable beauty of real trees, and the un-replicable smell of real grass and, most importantly, it is not at the whim of tech companies vying for your attention. During a walk in a virtual park your eyes are being constantly tracked and the data sold to everyone from virtual property developers to dog ice-cream manufacturers. And in this virtual reality nature’s wonders could be interrupted at any moment by a WhatsApp notification from a friend telling you they’ve bought a virtual pet hamster and named her Dorothy. Did you know you can buy virtual property and live, virtually, next to Snoop Dogg?! God, I feel like I’ve gone back in time to peak metaverse and crypto-mania. I miss AI already.

SUGGESTED VIEWING The game of life With Slavoj Žižek, Steven Bonnell, Lisa Miller, Myriam François

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It was hard to gamify romance in the 14th century, but Tinder managed it pretty easily in the 21st century. Tinder turned love into a game of snap – with each ‘match’ causing an addictive dopamine rush

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