Today in Miami my cousin took me out on his speedboat. We headed to Biscayne Bay, gawked at the cool houses on stilts, had a picnic on the boat, did a little swimming off the boat.
The weather was perfect, and the experience was every bit as awesome as it sounds. But it wasn’t all fun and games.
As I saw today, there are many steps to getting a speedboat out of the house, properly hitching it to a trailer behind a truck, driving without incident to the water, and then getting the boat into the water and properly afloat, all without anything going wrong. Then when you’re done at the end of the day, you need to do it all again in reverse order.
There are lots of cool devices, both large and small, that make this process even possible: Winches, lifting devices (both powered and mechanical), ratchets, tow ropes, retractable ladders, and all sorts of other gizmos.
These devices don’t make the process easy — they merely make it possible. And my cousin had clearly mastered them all.
As he said to me at some point during the long process of getting the boat prepped for travel: Real life experiences are better than virtual ones [no arguments here!], but you have to really want them.
interesting point .. there is no “skipping” to the fun part in real life – as in game design for example there is always the debate about how ‘realistic’ do you really want to make the experience, especially in ‘sim’ games: a game world the size of a real city and hour-long travel times? going no faster than c in a sci-fi adventure across the galaxy? having to get your boat out and into the water before you can drive it? in a labor intensive and time consuming manner?
there are good reasons to provide shortcuts in virtual experiences. but maybe sometimes things are just all the more fulfilling if they take a little effort to accomplish. and this could even be true for virtual experiences…