Cubicles, and Why They’re Exciting
“Most people lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”
–Thoreau
So my phone chimes at me: a new e-mail.
I’m at work. It’s the middle of yet another thirteen-hour day. I’ve got clients to meet, conference calls to attend, and the spreadsheet on my computer screen is staring at me like Zuul in Sigourney Weaver’s refrigerator. I really shouldn’t be checking HSM e-mails at the office.
But I do anyway. I always do. HomeStation, although it’s a second full-time job, is insane amounts of fun. And Home is my social life. It evokes a wonderful sense of play in me.
As adults, we don’t get to play. We’re taught that it’s inappropriate to play. The world beats the play out of us. Our joints creak under the accumulated sedimentary layers of responsibilities: to employer, to state, to country, to family, et cetera. My personal definition of adulthood is when it takes some outside source to make you happy — because kids, it seems, are just inherently happy. They still get to play.
So why was I smiling with excitement, staring at the new e-mail on my phone?
The e-mail was from Sara Stephens, the Production Coordinator over at LOOT. Now, if you’ve spent any amount of time in Home, then you know that LOOT is responsible for some pretty cool virtual commodities, private estates and technological innovations in Home (not the least of which being the Entertainment On Demand technology, which is practically de rigueur for personal estates these days). And their latest content release, coming soon, is something fairly innocuous at first glance: the Office Furniture Bundle.
Take a look at the furniture pieces. It’s a perfect office/cubicle setup, which you’d find in countless offices across the world. No fire-breathing dragons. No UFOs. Not even a cuddly animal companion. Just your basic, banal, innocuous set of office furniture. In the greater catalogue of Home furniture, it sits like a beige family sedan in the middle of a Burning Man festival.
So why is it so intriguing to me?
Back during the days of the dot-com bubble, I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area. And, like many others, I spent my days bathed under fluorescent tubes, sitting at a cubicle, moving stacks of paper from one side of my desk to the other. Hey, it paid the bills. That’s what I kept telling myself.
One moment I’ll never forget: sitting in the break room at the nondescript office building, reading a months-old issue of some travel magazine, and staring at an ad to go to some far-off tropical locale. New Caledonia, I think. And that’s when I noticed that some of the blue ink from the sky in the double-page spread had rubbed-off on my fingertips.
Fake. All of it fake. The daydream of sitting on a beach at l’ile la plus proche du paradis was a joke — and it was a joke on me. The sunlight was on my fingertips.
Here I was, living in one of the most beautiful places in the world — because if you’ve never been to the Bay Area, it truly is phenomenal — working in an office that had great views out across the bay…and my days were consumed in endless CRT drudgery.
It was the complete anonymity of it all that finally got to me. The sheer mind-numbing sameness of it all. If something unusual happened, we’d all pop our heads up like cubicle prairie dogs to get a sense of what was going on; it was the most human interaction any of us had.
The next day, I went to the Pulgas Water Temple and spent the better part of the day in its gentle embrace. It was then that I resolved to never engage myself in something I couldn’t find some enjoyment from.
This isn’t one of those corny “live your dream” parables. Very few people are so fortunate. But you can try to make a living doing jobs you actually somewhat enjoy, if you plan accordingly.
Which brings us to today. Here I am in my office, staring at images of virtual cubicles for Home. I should be recoiling in horror. Home is a playground; it’s the absolute antithesis of the watercooler grind. And yet I’m looking at the selection of virtual office furniture and actually grinning.
Oh, there’s no question that Home’s various filmmakers will have a field day with the office furniture; LOOT continuously comes out with stuff which is perfect for machinima. No, this is hitting me on a more personal level.
I think it has something to do with the irony of using cubicles to play. Life is a precious gift — and the older I get, the more I realize the pounding, raw importance of having fun with it before it passes you by. So, to me, there’s a wonderful poetic justice to the idea of dropping an office into the middle of a virtual reality world and then using it as a personal playground.
The Pulgas Water Temple
There’s a mental image that I’ve had for decades now: kids laughing and playing together in the ruins of a military base that’s overgrown with foliage. Runways carpeted with flowers. Who knows, maybe I watched too much Matsumoto Leiji as a child. For some reason, the idea of goofing around with virtual cubicles — making a positive experience out of something which I view as so inherently negative in real life — hits that same emotional trigger.
This, to me, is the real magic of virtual reality: not the gaming or the technical whizbangery, but the ability to enhance lives. In literature, I’ve always had something of a taste for the magic realism genre; to me, Home is magic realism made manifest. And, ironically, it sometimes showcases itself best when it painstakingly tries to recreate the real world, allowing us to be as absurdist with it as we want.
Cubicles. Amazing that I’m actually looking forward to them. But that’s the magic of Home: it gives us a place to play.
September 15th, 2011 by NorseGamer | 10 comments
NorseGamer is the product manager for LOOT Entertainment at Sony Pictures, as well as the founder and publisher of HomeStation Magazine. Born and raised in Silicon Valley, he holds a B.A. in English/Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and presently lives in Los Angeles. All opinions expressed in HSM are solely his and do not necessarily reflect the views of Sony DADC.
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I love that picture of the Pulgas water temple, I really must go there someday.
As a Second Life user, (and I’m merely using this as an example of ‘Home’s’ Virtual world cousin) There are some areas of it that can be all fantasy and dragons and aliens while there are other areas that sort of hold up a ‘mirror’ that reflects real life. I have walked into maternity clinics and ‘real’ functioning offices, some run by real world ‘Brands’ or enterprises. So I ‘have’ seen ‘normal’ on a virtual world. And I think what’s happening is, we will shortly see a similar trend for reflecting some reality into our ‘Virtual reality’ on home. And yes I agree its great for machinema, something of which I really want to look into very soon.
I think part of your joy about having cubicles on Home might stem from the fact that now you will be able to control something that once you might have viewed as imprisoning or controlling you.I’d feel the same way if a public school were dropped into Home and I were allowed to own/run it.Now you get to decide where those cubicles will go,you will be in control of how long you stay behind them,in short you are now the master of what once enslaved you,have fun.
Bring on the “Home Office” machinima spoofs!
Im looking foward to having somehwhere in Home I can FINALLY get some work done. Just gotta remember to include a cover on those TPS reports….
“Have you seen my stapler?” (You’ll notice it is in fact the proper red one too!)
… there is? MUST have! lol
Am I the only one who notices how those All In One PC’s seem to resemble Sony Vaio’s. Or It’s just me =\
I’m pretty curious how Home Machinima Directors can be innovative with this set…
I can write you a script…. But you have to have someone brave enough to make the video
I sat on the copier and sent the page to Norsegamer, he edited it and sent it back.
OMG! MIKE!!!! You have been absorbing too much of the Podcast craziness -- they have corrupted you.
I told myself I’d never buy one of those “censored” outfits, as I thought they were just a bit over the top. Now with this photocopier, I may just have a use for one.