Looking for Love in the Uncanny Valley

The other day a co-worker of mine told me about a new pornographic sex-simulation game for the Xbox Kinect.  I suppose it was inevitable that something like that would happen, but they certainly didn't waste any time getting around to it.  I should point out that my source for this information is a known liar and idiot, but it's the principle and concept that I'm concerned with here anyway.  If they haven't actually made something like this yet, you know that they will sooner or later.  In an earlier post, when I complained that they needed to make more mature games for the new Kinect, this vision of a lonely middle-aged guy groping, gyrating, and smacking the thin air in front of his TV was definitely not what I had in mind.

Of course, this is hardly a new thing.  The Atari first took a stab at the idea with the pixelatedly pathetic Custer's Revenge.  As far as what sort of erotic satisfaction someone was supposed to get out of this, your guess is as good as mine.  Was it just good for a few juvenile laughs, or were people actually turned on by this?  At any rate, the genre persisted.  Computer system after system, console after console, there has always been an underground market of these games.  In Japan there is even apparently a whole cottage industry of pornographic anime games with interactive cartoon characters that can be abused in the satisfaction of all sorts of perversions and fetishes.

Setting aside issues of morality and taste that might be raised in objection to all this, there is a common failing to all these attempts.  It is this failing that keeps this latest Kinect example from being something that people might secretly find intriguing, and makes it instead something hopelessly, embarrassingly lame.  It's the missing element of physical contact.   Without this, what are you left with?  There's the visual stimulation, but good old fashioned regular pornography does a fine job of providing that.  There's the added element of interaction, but this comes at a noticeable price to the visual.  Sure, our lonely gamer can actually manipulate the subject of his amorous attention, but it ends up looking like he's just moving the wooden joints of a lifeless marionette.  Besides, this interaction is always facilitated via mouse or motion control.  At no point does the gamer have even the remotest sense that they're touching another human being.  So, allowing the gamer to thrust at the empty air, only to see these actions translated on the screen as relations with a virtual avatar, misses the point for miles upon miles.  The poor guy could turn off the TV, pump at the air, and use his imagination, if there was any hope of getting the slightest gratification out of it. 

There was a point, though, when that gratification seemed within our reach.  In the mid 90's virtual reality was the big fascination.  A fully immersive, artificial environment seemed right around the corner.  Sure all the current efforts involved  cumbersome gloves and helmets and they often caused seizures, eye-strain, and nausea, but it was just a matter of working out the bugs, right?  Sooner or later, we were going to find ourselves stepping out onto a virtual landscape that would feel just as real as the natural one.  Somewhere down the line, virtual reality went the way of flying cars and video phones.  It became yet another idea that seemed to serve no practical need.  The dream remains, simmering somewhere on the back burner of all our thoughts, but it's no longer something that we hope to find in the stores tomorrow afternoon.

But what was this dream?  What fulfillment were we hoping to find?  If you think about it, virtual reality was more about the physical sensation than the visual.  Sure, we wanted everything to look real, but this was a secondary consideration and one that we've come to satisfy with the refinement of graphic quality on the flat screen.  In all but one crucial respect, which we'll discuss shortly, the difference in the appearance of computer graphics and the real world is almost a negligible one at this point.  And yet, the dream remains unfulfilled, doesn't it?  It was really all about feeling like you were really in the virtual world, and somewhere deep down in a dark recess whether anyone wanted to admit it or not, a big driving motivation behind this desire was sex.  Sure, in polite company we'd all be in awe and amazement of how you could reach out and touch the leaves on the virtual trees, but after everyone had cleared out at midnight, you know what we would have all been up to. 

That missing variable of physical contact in the coital equation would have finally been provided for.  In fact, it might be for the best that this technology ended up on the shelf for the time being.  If we were to achieve a simulation of sex that was virtually indistinguishable from the real thing, who knows what kind of disaster that would spell for human relations.  Sex, just as physically satisfying as the genuine thing, would be ready at hand, even making the unintended pun here obsolete.  The pains we go through now in the pursuit of satisfaction are a huge and integral part of every facet of our existence.  It's no telling how far we'd let ourselves go.  Would we all degenerate into fat blobs of jaded satiation?  Would the human race burn itself out over this?  Will we ever be ready for this sort of thing?

And what of the "crucial respect" mentioned above?  In the world of computer programming and robotics there is a familiar term that defines the issue here, "The Uncanny Valley".  This is the idea that the closer simulations come to look and act and resemble real human beings, the more acutely we become aware of the fact that they are not human.  It's that strange, lifeless mask that we're all familiar with whenever we see a CGI replication of a person.  The lines of real and artificial converge, but never intersect on the horizon, at least not as far as the eye can see at the moment.  That could change in the future, further down the road.

In our virtual scenario, this issue goes beyond appearances and becomes a metaphysical one.  It can even serve as a mile marker of authenticity between the two realities.  At what point is the blurred line between masturbation and actual conjugal relations crossed?  At what point is the shame replaced with afterglow?  Ironically, I would have to pin-point that frontier at the point when the virtual object has reached the level of autonomy and A.I. self awareness to actually be capable of rejecting the advances of the user.  Unfortunately, that leaves our poor lonely gamer right back he started from in the real world.  This poor guy can't catch a break.