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Comment by Afforess | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if the author has ever experienced the joy of reading a good book, or the first showing an amazing movie. Finishing an amazing story, you feel a let down afterwords; the characters were not real and you can never interact with them. The realm of fictional worlds are often more engaging, and seem superior to the world you live your day-to-day life in. The actions and experiences in those stories were more fulfilling, the characters had more agency; their lives or stories were more "real" than ours. After experiencing the greatness of our imaginations, how can our bleak reality measure up? I often find that I start reading my next book immediately after finishing the previous one in attempt to recapture this high, to re-experience the betterness one more time.

I don't think this effect is specific to a medium. That it can happen with VR is a sign that the technology has matured.

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A few years ago I started reading "The Wheel of Time" by Robert Jordan. I had somehow timed it so that the week I finished the thirteenth book "Towers of Midnight" the fourteenth book "A Memory of Light" came out. I blew through the first chunk of the book and then got to a chapter that was over a hundred pages long, maybe even longer, Google says it was over fifty thousand words. It was the last battle, the moment the previous four million words had been leading up to. I read a few pages and then set it down. For six months. It was obvious the series was going to end in a way that was bittersweet (as all good stories end) but I just couldn't bear the thought of there being nothing left.

By putting it down I was freezing the moment I had left it in time. When I returned to finish the book I felt that familiar sense of sadness. A period of my life (fourteen months!) was over. I'll probably re-read the books someday, but I know it won't be the same. I often get that feeling when I finish a work of fiction I enjoyed greatly. But there was something about "The Wheel of Time' that made it much more profound.

Any medium that can tell a story that people find intense and immersive will produce that same feeling. Why would VR be any different?

I purposefully read both the last Harry Potter (which I assume everyone knows) and Lev Grossman's "The Magician's Land" (which I assume less people know) slow for that very reason.

Yeah, reading the Magician's Land took me longer than the previous two combined, because as much as I wanted to know what happened next, I also wanted to preserve that feeling of wanting to know what happens next.

Finishing "A Memory of Light" and the The Wheel of Time series left me in a funk that lasted a whole week. I sometimes regret finishing the series, I now know how it ends, so I can not go back and re-read the series for a 4th time.

Audiobook the whole thing! Re-reading is hard, but taking the slow path with audiobooks is great. Personally, I've had some of the best memories of the books while listening to them while hiking. Especially for fantasy books, walking/adventuring while listening is great fun.

Re-reading is anything but hard. It's like slipping back into my 17 year old self, complete with breaks to jump around like an idiot because I'm so hyped and I need to expend a bit of this pent up energy before getting back to the whole reading thing.

At least there's fanfiction. It might not be ever up to snuff as the original author's work, but some are quite entertaining, albeit in different ways.

>> but I just couldn't bear the thought of there being nothing left.

As I exited my 20's and entered my 30's, I had to deal with several deaths in the family and having to finally deal with my own mortality, this has affected me in profound ways.

I've done the same thing you have, albeit with several movie trilogies. I skipped the last Matrix movie, I refused to go see the last LOTR movie (even though I read the books when I was in my teens and knew what was going to happen), and the same thing in the Divergent series.

It's practically become a common theme in my life - some sort of psychological avoidance to have to deal with the ending of a story, the emotions and the emptiness of something I pursued for so long, now at an end.

Have to agree on the wheel of time. It's a shame it had to finish. That level of escapism over so many books is hard to match. Finish it and you're lost for weeks.

Dark tower was another guilty pleasure of mine.

I'm on book six. Thank you so much for not adding spoilers.

> I'll probably re-read the books someday, but I know it won't be the same.

That is how I felt about Planescape: Torment, widely regarded to have one of the best tales of all RPGs, and all other great stories in other mediums.

It makes me wish there was some way to get selective voluntary amnesia, where you wipe all memories of the specific content of something, just keep the feeling that it's something you have to experience [again].

> selective voluntary amnesia

I'm lucky (?) enough to have the involuntary form of this to some degree for media. I will often forget the plot points of a movie I've watched within days to weeks, and in many cases after a year I have completely forgotten ever even having watched it. I'll pick a movie, my wife will say "we've already seen that", I'll say "I don't think so", she lovingly puts up with me because she luckily likes re-watching movies, and even by the end of the show I'll have nothing but a vague sense of deja-vu the whole time.

I have on multiple occasions, rewatched movies with twist endings like The Usual Suspects and still been surprised on the second or third viewing.

I'd rather have my wife's photographic (videographic) movie recall though...

I wish that too. In particular, I'd like to wipe Mass Effect trilogy from my memories, at least temporarily. It had huge emotional impact on me, and I would love to relive it all again - unfortunately, I still pretty much remember the entire plot after the years (and though ME has some interesting degree of non-linearity based on your in-game decision, there's still too much of the plot that's constant to really enjoy a replay without a memory wipe).

You don't need amnesia to feel an experience fresh again. It's a matter of mindfulness. Sure, it takes some training. Someone who is present in the moment will always feel everything is fresh and alive.

Indeed. That's how I try to relive an experience of a great story, be it a game or book or movie. The best way though, is to replay it with someone else, who is new to it.

You might enjoy the stormlight archive by Brandon Sanderson, who finished the last novel in the wheel of time.

Try 20 years. I started the story back when book 5 came out and re-read (or skimmed) the series each time a book came out. I literally grew up alongside the characters (although book time certainly slowed as the series progressed). I cried when I read that chapter, finishing in tears; it still smarts a little today.

Every emotive, immersive experience seems to produce some whiplash of the soul upon separation. As you noted, this is not unique to VR or even literary works. Even so, since one's first such is the most memorable, VR will likely slowly replace older works in this department.

Wouldn't it be cool if there were written multiple endings for the story? One is randomly selected when you start reading, and you won't know which one! Would that bring back the excitement?

Oddly I think it wouldn't, and wonder why. Is it because we want to know the one single ending the author intended?

I think it's simpler than that. We don't want to miss out on a great ending by picking a suboptimal one. Endings are definitely not equal.

No, it wouldn't be a good thing. Stories are works of both art and engineering, and neither of those fields have much room for random outcomes.

The 'Dragon Age' and 'Mass Effect' series of video games has player choices -- that may not be apparent in advance -- which influence the fates of characters you bond with, and alters the ending. I have not finished a complete playthrough of any of these games, because I'm afraid that my choices will leave me with regret, and when I come back to make different choices, the novelty will be gone, and the suspense, the hopes and the fears, the genuine real-world emotions I feel wouldn't be the same.

In my case, having multiple endings to a book would definitely make my hesitation worse.

I get like this with my favorite things. I do it less frequently than I did as a child, but I still do. It's silly I guess.

The last book I did this with was "Permutation City" by Greg Egan. There's probably less than an hour's worth of reading left, but I just don't want it to end. This was maybe a year ago and I still haven't touched it since. Eventually I'll probably re-read it from the beginning and actually finish it.

I also do it for bands I really like that are slow to put out albums. I haven't heard the latest GSY!BE (from early 2015) yet, not because I don't want to, but because who knows if they're going to go through another 13 year gap between albums! Maybe in 2020 I'll be having a really bad night and 40 minutes of "new" music from one of my favorite bands is exactly what I'll need.

Egan's becoming a better author over time, though. Permutation City is a relatively early novel... but I hope you'll look at the others as well, if you haven't already.

I think my favorite has to be Schild's Ladder, just for sheer conceptual interestingness. I ended up writing fanfiction for it.

The best one from a literary standpoint is probably the Clockwork Rocket trilogy, though.

I'm definitely excited to read more by Egan, and already own a few of his other works. I just tend to binge on sci-fi and haven't been in that mood since, well, not-finishing Permutation City.

I originally bought Permutation City because of a recommendation on HN. Schild's Ladder might have to be my next sci-fi read for the same reason. "Sheer conceptual interestingness" is pretty much exactly what I want, haha.

Quick google says it talks about parallel transport. If that's true in any meaningful sense, I'm happy differential geometry science fiction is a thing. :)

For what its worth, Egan has written a few works that follow up on, and expand, the ideas presented in Permutation City. Most notably Diaspora and Schild's Ladder. So there's more to enjoy after you finish it :-)

I actually bought Diaspora and Axiomatic while still within the first few chapters of Permutation City because I liked it so much. That was on the tail end of a sci-fi binge though, and I haven't read Diaspora yet, or much sci-fi since. Next time I feel like it though, I know I've got a very good backlog waiting for me.

Here's hoping I don't want to finish his other novels either :)

Permutation City's ending is actually quite uplifting. Has a very Star Trek-like "To boldly go where no man has gone before" feel to it.

On the other hand, I wouldn't blame you for not wanting to finish Diaspora. Although its opening chapter is fantastic.

This is going to sound silly (and tangential to the original topic), but Permutation City gave me the idea for my last startup. I liked the idea of being able to rent out compute power from anywhere in the world, AWS style, but where the supply of compute could be democratized.

Anyway, I would recommend finishing it. It's a great book.

hmm, maybe this is why i can never finish a book... ;)

This is one advantage of A Song of Ice and Fire (a.k.a. Game of Thrones). At the rate the books are being written the series will never finish in our lifetimes. I can only hope we perfect cyberbrain technology soon so George R. R. Martin can finish the work, typing out a single line per day or so.

People said that about Robert Jordan too, then he got sick and the mantle passed to another, faster author.

I felt the same way the day I went to check the results of the french baccalaureate at my high-school. A warm summer day surrounded with friends, acquaintances, and other people I went to school with every day for years. There was joy, sadness sometimes and an overwhelming feeling of excitement about what the future holds. We were laughing together, drinking already, lots of discussions. Everyone was here.

I remember everything, every single detail, from the bitter smoke of the cigarettes to the sweet smell of drying leaves. That's all very vivid. And I can recall that incredible feeling of solitude. In fact, the certitude that this was over. That from now on, I would only ever be able to look back on this period of my life.

Honestly, this was a strange experience. I had the feeling to be extremely old, on a death bed and looking back to the life I had. When in fact, reality could not have been further removed from that setting. I was barely 18 years old, and about to start a whole new life in North-America.

You know there is something incredible about the carelessness of one's youth. Of course, to appreciate it fully you would need to be aware of it. That, in fact, would kind of weaken that very state of mind now that I think about it.

Plus France is such a wonderful country to grew-up in. I know it might sound ridiculous, but at 21 years old, I already feel a little bit like my best years are behind me. Or rather, that the warmth and happiness I have experienced will remain unmatched from now on. It's hard to think about the gardens of Paris or the Cathédrale de Reims' parvis in the summer without a heavy heart. They were my companions for nearly two decades, and years later I still don't want to say goodbye...

I guess that's the cost of happiness

Have you ever considered being a writer? That was quite lovely.

do you know why? Because you were there too. So was I.

Thank you, I'm glad you liked it! It was a good way to relief homesickness a little bit. I'm trying hard to get a better grasp of English, so your compliment means a lot. Thanks again. :-)

It's incredible that we haven't found a way to reproduce the social warmth of a school class. After that period where you're constantly surrounded with a group of 30+ potential friends with a 1-year cycle, everyone goes their way and never socializes that much again. They may build families, assume CEO positions or head for humanitarian causes, I personally flatshared for 14 years after high school, but we tend to surround ourselves with likeminded people (due to the network in which we meet those people) and we barely ever meet the variety and intensity of high school relationships. And society has never built anything similar to high schools for grown-ups.

That said, high school also had its social games. Most people recall having been bullied or excluded at one point or another during scolarity.

And yes, you're an excellent writer ;)

Thank you for the kind words! For what it's worth, I have considered joining my country's reserve army. It's only a few weeks of commitment per year (and a couple months of basic training). Friends of mine have already joined, they almost unanimously enjoy it a lot. You get to meet people from all walks of life that often share little else than the desire to serve. That aspect has also been of the major reasons re-instituting mandatory military draft for a few months to a year is highly popular in France. Conscription has been said to tear down social barriers between classes and reinforce a common sense of civic duty. Whether this is true or not, I don't know. That's an old idea that has massive support in the french society.

And even those who dislike the idea of having a trained conscript army in addition to regular troops have their own version of conscription. The overall tone is the same, only the military context is replaced with community work.

Either way, it is hard to imagine the shape and form of such organization because of the sheer scale at which it has to operate to be even remotely efficient. I agree with what you said about college. You meet people, lots of people, and in fact lots of similar people. There is relatively little space for the kind of variance you see in high-school when the members of the community are filtered by their performance on a standardized test anyway.-

I actually socialize in groups now more than I did in school, but I didn't like most of the people at schools; To the extent that immediately after school I was pretty withdrawn, and am still surprised how friendly strangers interact with me as an adult.

An important difference, at least for me, is that in school you still lead a very sheltered life with few worries. Once you're done with homework you're actually free for the rest of the day and can pursue leisure activities without the nagging feeling that you should instead do this or that. Being free is the default mode and working is a special state. At some point in live this seems to flip around.

It could be that this is not a coincidence but just the chemistry of the imperfect goop inside our heads tricking you into these thoughts... [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reminiscence_bump

In a little over a month, I read the entire 11 volumes (12? I forget) of the John Carter of Mars series when I was in 6th grade.

When I finished the last book, 12-year-old me cried. This epic whirlwind of a journey was over forever. And no one else in the world around me even acknowledged it had existed.

I felt the same way when I finished Memory of Light. I had been reading WoT since 1994. The book definitely marked an end to a period of my life. It wasn't just the end of the book. There were changes going on at the time leading to greater maturity. It included a cross country move and shedding of most of my possessions, including many of my physical books. I had realized collecting dead tree versions of sci fi and fantasy was more wishful thinking on my part (more practical to get the books on Kindle, very easy to move cross country with them).

I was also disappointed with the ending. I roughly knew the general sketch of the ending based on remarks Jordan made at a DragonCon. I knew he had written that entire series just to get to that ending. But by the time I had reached Memory of Light, I saw a possibility for something even greater.

A year later, the unpublished chapter on Damonadred (don't remember how to spell his name) came out and therein lies that possibility. Except no one will write that epic :-D

That existential anguish that comes from having journeyed ablong way -- well, the Wheel keeps turning. That's the point. There is a koan that goes, "before enlightenment? Chop wood carry water. After enlightenment? Chop wood carry water."

Stories always come to an end, no matter how magnificent. It does not matter whether that story is a work of fiction, or something you tell about yourself. What doesn't end is awareness. The Wheel moves on.

When I was in Congo and experienced talking to the women that had been raped, the tortures, the children that had killed their parents or raped their sister at gunpoint and even being involved in a shooting, with bullets whistling over your head I entered into a psychological shock.

I could not stop thinking: This can't be real, this can't be reality BUT IT IS reality. You start realizing really what the people experienced in WWII and how reality surpasses fiction, how terrible and how amazing life could be.

I was an avid reader but it is one thing to read on the safety on your house and a completely different thing experiencing it in reality. I can't stand reading war novels now like War and peace because it really hurts me after experiencing some of it.

And then you have this "living dangerous" thing in which you want more and more of this war experience, like going deeper in the jungle and talk with people in arms even when you are risking your life and a mistake means death.

You watch things you don't want to remember but you want more and more for some stupid reason.

VR will be a great tool for people learning but it could be dangerous with some things too.

"That’s what I love about this place, all the secrets, all the little things I never noticed even after all these years. You know why this beats the real world, Lawrence? Real world is just chaos. It’s an accident. But in here, every detail adds up to something."

For those of us who don't watch the show, what's the context here?

Yeah I was going to add that I get sad after a good book or tv show or film or video games but reading the article it seems to talk about a much more debilitating effects related to the increased immersion from VR. I think it warrants some closer study specifically because it reminds me of that scene from Inception, where people prefer their VR life over their own and end up like junkies in an opium den.

If you look at how good computer graphics have gotten, it's no a far stretch to see where it will be in 20 years, 40 years. Suddenly, the are-we-in-a-simulation philosophical debate comes to mind.

Sounds like the HyperNormalisation[0] will only get worse

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fny99f8amM

>Finishing an amazing story, you feel a let down afterwords; the characters were not real and you can never interact with them.

For whatever reason I've never heard anyone say this before but that's exactly the experience I had after I went and saw James Cameron's "Avatar" (2009) in 3D at the cinema back when it came out. I think I may have had that same feeling after finishing a couple of books as well -- probably after Catch-22 and after Cryptonomicon -- and likely some other movies too but Avatar is the one that I remember having had that feeling after.

Anyway, thanks for making me aware that others have felt the same way about fiction. Of course, I don't believe that any of my feelings are unique in the way that nobody else has felt the same but I hope you get what I mean. Also, when I say that I remember the feeling, I don't mean mean to say that I still keep wishing I could travel to Pandora or interact with the blue catpeople -- the feeling itself faded within a few hours or days or something like that, but the memory of having had that feeling stuck with me :)

As long as the developers didn't chunks up the ending with silly mechanics to draw out the experience, games can also have this effect.

> I don't think this effect is specific to a medium.

Your assertions are going to be wrong if the medium is the current reality around us. The question then becomes where does that line begin and end?

Yeah, I tend to agree. I think you can probably toss this on the list of lessons that human beings seem completely incapable of learning (myself included).

That escapism doesn't really work.

I am more optimistic. Some people may react to those feelings by going and constructing some of that world in reality. Isn't that sort of the link between a whole range of SciFi/Comic books in the 50's and landing on the moon?

And we can not only hope that the Star Trek economics of abundance comes about, but that it is made true through a combination of technology and new economic thought.

What is the longest this effect has lasted on you?

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