First, a little background. I'm 73 years old. Above average in the activity department, adept mentally, although I am literally the only person I know who can lose something when standing perfectly still. I have four grandchildren. I hold down a full-time job as a writer, and a once-a-year gig teaching Rio Grande Board Games at the annual World Boardgaming Championships (WBC). It was at the most recent WBC that I was introduced to MetaQuest 2 and in particular, its bundled game called Beat Saber. I'd tried much cheaper VR systems, the ones that hold your phone and you have to download apps to run on them. This was an entirely different ball game. This was, I should note, not a function of the WBC. It just so happened that one of the site administrators had brought the system along with him and one evening, invited me to give it a try. The first issue that one should note is that once you put the headset for this system on, you are pretty much detached from the reality around you. This is fine as long as it's just you and the machine, but you can forget about being outside the machine and trying to instruct someone inside the machine about what's going on. As it happened, the man who introduced me to the system basically set it up for me - put it on his own head, clicked the right buttons - and then transferred the headset to me. With a couple of hand prompts and a word or two, Beat Saber, the program that comes with the MetaQuest 2 when you buy it these days, came on line and there I stood, with two controllers, one in each hand, as my eyes beheld on the screen in front of me, a series of square blocks coming at me, each with an arrow, pointing either up, down, right or left. The controllers operate two light sabers, one in each hand, and the object of this game is to swat the approaching blocks in the direction indicated by the arrow on them. There are also occasional large obstacles coming at you, like skinny walls, which appear like three-dimensional line drawings as they approach. You can't swat these aside and the idea is to avoid them. In most cases, this entails just stepping out of their way, either to the right or the left, but dependent on some choices you make in Beat Saber, some of these objects can be wide and impossible to avoid unless you duck as they approach. No way to jump over them. And there's music. At first, you don't pick up on the idea that your swatting activity with the light sabers can occasionally be rhythmic, linked to the beat of the music. . .Beat Saber. Get it? But you'll pick up on that fairly quickly. If you don't dance and would like to, this is a good program that will force-feed you the concept of moving your body in beat with the rhythm of a song. You don't realize you're dancing because as far as you're concerned, you're swatting colored boxes with virtual reality light sabers. A note of caution. People familiar with the system and how it works will delight in recording video of your attempts to play the game; unbeknowst to you, 'cause you're wrapped up in the headset and can't see anything but what the machine is giving you to see. These people recording you will be LOL-ing themselves breathless, as you contort yourself in a relatively confined space, trying to dodge things and swat at the colored boxes. I made the mistake of failing to heed the warning that if I didn't buy one of these systems soon, its price was going to go up. A lot. And it did. But I bought it anyway and am just beginning to tap into the available free apps and exploring the possibility of buying other ones. There's a free Epic Roller Coaster app, which is fairly enjoyable, although oddly enough, both myself and my wife (now at home with our own MetaQuest 2) found ourselves getting a little queasy during the experience. Not sure what that's about. She NEVER goes on real roller coasters and I do it all the time. Also found a walking-on-a-building-skeleton app that had me God knows how many stories high and though not generally afraid of heights (acrophobia), I wasn't all that keen on walking on the available, skinny steel walkways to approach the edge. I'm in my living room, my mind knowing damn full well that I'm not only not as high as the program makes me think I am, but am, in fact, on solid ground. Yet, in an attempt to approach the edge and have a look OVER the edge, I am literally creeping forward, edging my foot out in front of me, making sure of my balance with each step. My mind absolutely refuses to grasp the concept that I am not in any danger. It should be noted that when you play in virtual reality, the mechanism has you define a space where you are going to be, literally drawing a perimeter line. It's not because the machine is worried you might step off the big building you only think you're on, but when you're playing a game like Beat Saber, you want to make sure that your arm movements don't knock over a lamp your Aunt Ethel gave you for Christmas last year, or in moving your legs around, you don't accidentally kick the screen out of your new Smart TV. I haven't been too excited by any of the first-person shooter kind of apps that are available. That kind of activity never lured me to the various systems that were already on the market. But I did notice and have been on the verge of pulling the trigger on some of the other activities, like table tennis, actual tennis and some other sports activities, like baseball. Am also interested in what is, at present, a small selection of board games, like Tsuro and chess (in a variety of different environments). They offer Catan (originally, Settlers of Catan) and though my interest in board games is strong, I never really liked Catan in real-time, so I'm not going to pick it up in VR. I recommend this system highly. The experience of good VR (and you can buy systems better than the basic one that I purchased) is mind-altering. It's something to which your mind has never been previously exposed; an alternate reality with its own set of rules that takes some getting used to. It's more expensive than pot, but unlike pot, it doesn't just let your head create new connections and free it from everyday anxieties, it creates a reality within your brain that is intriguing to watch, hear and interact with. And as my age indicates, fun for all ages. Oh, and one other cautionary note for those of a certain advanced age. The first time I tried the system, at the WBC, my score at Beat Saber was abysmally low. So I tried again. And again. It wasn't my hand movements with the controllers or the side-stepping away from approaching objects that got to me. It was the ducking at things that I had to let go over my head. I made the crouching moves necessary with reckless abandon. Once, again, and again. My upper thighs complained to me all of the next day. The good news is that it makes for good, healthy exercise.
