Videogames Adventure Services. Where do I begin?
Featured in the Times about a week ago (article here), V.A.S is "a company that constructs 'reality adventures' for paying clients." Run by Columbia M.F.A-grad Brock Enright, this mind-boggling service arranges staged kidnappings at $1,500 and full-fledged odysseys of strangeness for no less than $10,000. The customers? Yuppie idiots with cash to burn, idiocy to spare, an inability to create meaning in their own lives, and an overwhelming need to make others do it for them.
At first, it's kind of cool to read about the "adventure" Enright and his team plan for Cristina, one such client. Cristina meets the team in a bar, interacts with people who are actually actors, and gets to act out a series of riddles culminating with a disappearing ventriloquist. Well, it's really awesome, actually -- or it would be, if this had been arranged by her friends or maybe as part of a movie. But when we find out that Cristina paid up to $60,000 for the complete unraveling of this life-overlapping-art fiasco, it gets a little less awesome -- especially when we know, well, it's all staged.
At some point, you could almost commend Enright for being the mastermind of what seems like an ingenious structure. He brainstorms, designs, and organizes incredible scenarios that people only dream about (or see in The Matrix), receives all the money needed to make it happen, and makes a profit to boot. He gets to hire actors, blindfold people, and even stage abductions.
But Enright, shacked up in a Bushwick apartment with his girlfriend and child, is one of those performance art junkies who thinks that urinating and defecating on himself are profound forms of self expression, and that's an immediate turn-off. He is a pretentious provocateur extraordinaire, armed with a Columbia degree that surely won't turn away fans -- or buyers.
Speaking of these buyers, let's review a few:
-Margo, a 38-year-old former Goth who was harassed with fake phone calls nightly and eventually flown to Germany, where she unknowingly played the role of rape victim on stage.
-A married couple looking to reignite their romance, chased by staged assailants in a country wood.
And the best:
-David, who paid under $5,000 (a bargain, no less) for a "superhero fantasy" during which he was "forced through a labyrinth of puzzles and endurance tests" and trusted to rescue a female damsel in distress (planted by V.A.S., of course).
The outcome? "The comedown hit me immediately," David reports. "Everything had been so heightened. The next day I had to go back to work, and it was tough. I got very depressed."
........
"Very depressed," huh? BOO FUCKING HOO. That's what you get when you pay shit loads of money to be the star in an alternate reality game that is not only not real, but completely indulgent and ridiculous and unnecessary to the umpteenth degree of all degrees. This reminds me of those fools who suffered "depression" when they realized Pandora, the fictional planet showcased in the movie Avatar, was not real, nor were the blue Nav'i (and their know-all Tree of Life).
...Really, people? You deserve to feel a "come down" if you think it's okay to pay several thousands of dollars to have someone else engineer a quest of meaning in your life, and to make you the center of the world. If you had any real consciousness, you wouldn't need this kind of validation.
"Hey Mom, I just paid $10,000 for someone to involve me in a perverse alternate reality game where I might be beaten, kidnapped, or flown out of the country with minimal notice. It's like, totally cool, yah."
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