Holodeck virtual reality has become an ultimate projective target for digital technology startup companies which are developing virtual reality systems for applications in the “real world.” In these business, entertainment, and military contexts, the Holodeck has become a hyperbolic industrial standard of perfection, as well as a forceful cultural symbol. The Holodeck is the future of entertainment media.
For Michael Heim, author of The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality (1993) and Virtual Realism (1998), Star Trek’s Holodeck is to the burgeoning VR computer industry what Star Trek’s interstellar space travel in general is to NASA: its inspirational banner. The Holodeck, with its “ideal human-computer interface” of voice-activated commands and ultra-lifelike landscapes, objects, scenes, and walking-talking avatar story characters, is the Inner Spirit or Holy Grail that drives virtual reality entreprenurial research. Star Trek’s Holographic Simulators are comparable, in Heim’s view, to VR systems of the surround-media or CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment, first built at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory of the University of Illinois in the early 1990s) variety, which are themselves influenced by the design objective of “artificial reality telepresence” envisioned by pioneering computer artist Myron Krueger in the 1970s. The CAVE environment, which requires no heavy-duty personal hardware, is an alternative to VR systems of the “head-mounted display” and DataGlove type, brought to prominence by Jaron Lanier, founder of the company Visual Programming Languages, in the mid-1980s. Although both variants are regarded as pragmatic prototypes of the “full sensory immersion” VR of the future, CAVE is distinguished by its wall-projected graphics, surround sounds, lightweight user stereo glasses, encouragement of conversation among users, emphasis on group-shared cyberspaces, and the participant’s bringing along of her own “physical body” into the virtual world.
What has been the history (or will be the futurity) of the Holodeck on Star Trek since the “Amusement Park Planet”?
The Original Series
The Amusement Park Planet, like the virtuality engine on Talos IV that entices Captain Pike, is an early foreshadowing of the Holodeck. But it is in The Original Series episode The Alternative Factor that we first catch a glimpse of a virtual reality entertainment system as a “technology of disappearance” that is available to the crew members of a starship.
In The Alternative Factor, the honorable alternative dimension-traveling Lazarus twin from an antimatter universe, played by Robert Brown, enjoys a calm moment in the Enterprise’s Recreation Room, observing two crew members playing a challenging network computer game.
At the end of the episode, Lazarus is condemned to be locked up for all eternity, joined in hand-to-hand combat forever against his evil double, in a small “negative magnetic” tunnel connecting his parallel universe and ours. The online game functions as a sort of “Timeout from the Apocalypse.” In French dubbing, the episode is known as Les Jumeaux de l’Apocalypse, or Twins of the Apocalypse.
The Animated Series
In The Animated Series episode The Practical Joker, September 1974, stardate 3183.3, the Enterprise’s main computer becomes “possessed” by an impish “pure energy” creature after the ship passes through a gaseous energy field. The artificial-intelligence-gone-berserk entraps McCoy, Uhura, and Sulu in a “dangerously realistic” series of inclement-weather, or otherwise adversity-filled, three-dimensional simulation scenes, in that same Lazarus-visited Recreation Room on Deck 4.
The Next Generation
Many years later, in Encounter at Farpoint, the two-hour premiere episode of The Next Generation, we are introduced to the Enterprise-D’s celebrated “Holographic Environment Simulator” or Holodeck. The primary purpose of the Holodeck immersive virtual reality technology, in addition to training and scientific research, is to provide downtime recreational diversion to the officers and crew members of a Galaxy-class starship during a “psychologically arduous” Deep Space voyage, which can last several years.
In Encounter at Farpoint, Commander William Riker, played by Jonathan Frakes, is searching for Lt. Commander Data, with whom he has never worked before, to enlist Data’s participation in an away team mission to Farpoint Station. The ship’s main computer tells Riker, who is aboard the Enterprise-D for the first time, as he is walking down a corridor, that Holodeck Two is through the next hatchway on his right. Riker enters Holodeck Area 4-J, where he finds the android Science Officer in the midst of a riverside nature scene “Wooded Parkland” Holo-program already in progress. The doors slide closed behind him, and then disappear. Riker hears birds singing and the sound of a rapidly running stream. He thinks that he overhears a bird’s mating call, but it is Data whistling in the distance. Although he is standing in a forest, Data tosses a large stone generated by “replication technology” at one of the Holodeck walls three meters away, hitting it with a thud in apparent midair, in order to demonstrate that the holomatrix technology still has its limitations, and that the newly acquainted Starfleet officers are indeed standing inside an enclosed room. Wesley Crusher, played by Wil Wheaton, the adolescent prodigy son of Chief Medical Officer Dr. Beverly Crusher, also enters the beauteous “pattern,” and falls from a loose stepping stone into the flowing stream with a loud splash. He stays soaking wet even after the trio leaves the virtual environment.
The entertainment possibilities and adventures available on the Holodeck are endless, but ironically are part of an operation that seeks to seal off virtual reality and its implications in just one location, to not upset the stability of “the real” in general, to downplay the potentially staggering impact of virtual reality as “just entertainment.”
The futuristic reference works of Star Trek hyper-reality list the limitless options of Holo-program amusement, ranging from comedy clubs and Marseilles pool halls to baseball games, orbital skydiving, and whitewater kayaking trips. But such “fun” activities are never sufficient for constructing a successful Star Trek episode about the Holodeck. Nor are the – mainly pretentious – “literary” settings, such as Beowulf, The Three Musketeers, A Christmas Carol, or the Jane Eyre-like Victorian Holonovels, any more successful in themselves at sustaining appealing episodes. These forced gestures of humanities literacy or erudition are rarely able to hold the audience’s attention for more than a few minutes. They must always be instantly “supplemented” by the latest occurrence of the ubiquitous “technological accident.”
The Next Generation’s Enterprise-D has four main “group experience” Holodecks on Deck 11, and twenty additional personal simulator chambers on Decks 12 and 33.
The 1940s detective story The Big Goodbye, set in a seedy, gangster-ruled San Francisco, is the original multi-chaptered Holonovel, first called up by Captain Jean-Luc Picard, played by Patrick Stewart, in the same-named episode. As a diverting and professed “literary” pastime, Picard enjoys “being” the Holonovel protagonist Detective Dixon Hill, decked out in his period piece trench coat, black three-piece suit, and brimmed, banded-edged Borsalino hat. Picard enters the Dixon Hill Holonovel to distract himself from the mounting pressures of an upcoming diplomatic mission to try to achieve First Contact with the insectoid Jarada. Soon after arriving in San Francisco, Picard-Hill is detained by the municipal police on suspicion of murder. As psychoanalytic theorist Slavoj Žižek explains in Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (1991), being accused of a crime that one did not commit symbolizes in a condensed way the quintessential literary dilemma of the hard-boiled detective. The behavior of the Marlowe- or Mike Hammer-type gumshoe markedly differs from the analytical detachment and attention to detail of the Sherlock Holmes-style detective. The hard-boiled dick, in the later evolution of the genre, loses his distance and becomes too emotionally involved in precisely those interpersonal and criminological circumstances over which he is supposed to be the “master.”
In the Peabody-award winning episode The Big Goodbye, this central literary question interpellating the cultural or aesthetic status of the hard-boiled detective is quickly and irrevocably withdrawn, almost as soon as it has been posed by Picard-Hill’s arrest, in favor of the “technological accident” which is required to make the Holodeck “interesting.” For the explicitly stated purpose of retelling a detective story narrative, the Holodeck cyberspace technology by itself is revealed to be insufficiently engaging to Star Trek’s consumerist viewership. The accident or “technology gone haywire” instead launches its illustrious career as the endlessly recurring and supplemental “wild card” whose effects alone make the Holodeck captivating.
A long-range interstellar techno-scan by the alien Jarada occasions a glitch in the Holodeck’s normal functioning, and “the game turns deadly.” As the Paramount Pictures promotional video for the episode tells us, “a mysterious malfunction threatens the journey” of the Enterprise-D officers, “trapping them in a ‘real-life’ murder mystery.” The mishap causes the Holodeck avatar characters (bad guys Cyrus Redblock and Felix Leech) to gain “autonomous consciousness,” and the bullets in their “prop weapons” to become real and lethal. Enterprise-D “literature historian” Whalen, who entered the film noir Holo-program with Picard, is fatally shot by the mobster henchman Leech. Wesley Crusher and Chief Engineer La Forge, played by LeVar Burton, hasten from the outside to make repairs, but one false move, as Wesley explains, and “everyone inside the Holodeck could vanish.”
Deep Space Nine
At Quark’s Bar on Level 7, Section 5 (02-854) of the Deep Space Nine Space Station Promenade and shopping mall, directly across from the Bajoran Temple, customers can enjoy the upstairs Holosuite rooms, where they can indulge their secret vices in a wide variety of interactive programs at modest prices.
The array of available Holosuite Holofantasies includes “A Visit with the Pleasure Goddess of Rixx,” “Orion Animal Women,” which features three green-skinned slave girls, and “Vulcan Love Slave Part II: The Revenge.”
Voyager
With the starship Voyager and its crew stranded in the Delta Quadrant, tens of thousands of light-years from home, in a symbolic desert of the real, the Holodeck comes more and more to take on paramount importance. With little else to do in their henceforth bleak surroundings, the lives and fantasies of the crew members of the Intrepid-class starship increasingly revolve around the thrills and Holo-addictions of the virtual reality entertainment system. Despite not having enough power to operate the food replicators on more than a limited basis, Voyager personnel are able to make constant use of the Holodeck, thanks to the “independent functioning” of its energy subsystem reactors.
In the Voyager episode Night, the crew members’ boredom with their desolate existence while traveling for months through a dark and nearly empty expanse of space known as “the Void” gets so bad that they start to get into intense arguments over the rationing of Holodeck time. Neelix, Commander Chakotay, and the Emergency Medical Hologram contemplate installing Holo-emitters in Cargo Bay Two and setting up a third Holodeck to help relieve shipwide ennui.
In Extreme Risk, the half-Klingon, half-human B’Elanna Torres, played by Roxann Biggs, deactivates the Holodeck’s protective safety protocols and intentionally courts serious physical injury while orbital skydiving and participating in wrestling matches against Cardassian warriors. Torres experiences the Holo-masochistic psychological disorder of “needing” the pain which she suffers from Holodeck accidents in order to feel alive.
In Twisted, a story line develops that succinctly symbolizes the deepening decline of physical reality and the ascending function of Holodeck virtual reality as ersatz habitat and refuge from the contemporary crisis of sense.
While the Starfleet and Maquis officers are in Holodeck Two’s Marseilles tavern and pool hall Chez Sandrine celebrating the second birthday of the Ocampa Kes, played by Jennifer Lien, a massive cloud-like entity envelops the starship, setting into motion a ghastly “distortion ring” that menaces the stability of the spacetime continuum. As the twisting wave and its fluctuating electromagnetic activity pass through the ship, Voyager’s internal structural layout begins to implode. Due to the collapse of the normal spatiotemporal framework, crew members who leave the Holodeck repeatedly end up elsewhere than where they intended to go. They try to get to Engineering, the bridge, or their quarters — only to end up in a swaying corridor or a contorted Jefferies tube. Amid this chaos, the one bedrock of stability remains the Holodeck. It is impossible to go through the perpetually reconfiguring labyrinth of the Twisted ship, but one can always get back to the Paris-3 Mediterranean Bistro Holo-program.
After a while, Voyager’s main characters hole up in the Holodeck for good, bunkering down and taking cover from the breakup of traditional reality.
The Combo Accident
In most Next Generation and Voyager episodes about the Holodeck, an accident is staged in order to make the Holodeck interesting, because the normal entertainment functionality of the Holodeck is not entertaining enough. The fun and games must be enhanced by an “exceptional” and dangerous interruption, an experience-intensifying or catastrophic variation caused by a mishap or bug. Still more episodes combine an accident of Holodeck technology with an accident of another Star Trek technology of disappearance, and then track the calamitous consequences of the compound concoction.
In The Next Generation episode A Fistful of Datas, an experiment to see if Lt. Commander Data’s artificial intelligence positronic brain can be used as storage backup for the Enterprise-D’s primary databases goes sour. Aberrant energy fluctuations in the android-computer feedback loop cause dozens of characters in an ongoing Holodeck Wild West gunfight role-playing simulation to turn into clones of Data in appearance and potent capabilities. At the same time, the food replicators on Decks 4 through 9 start to dispense only Feline Supplement kitty fodder, reflecting the preoccupied Data’s personal concern about the welfare of his pet cat, Spot.
In Emergence, magnascopic turbulence in the Mekorda sector of space and effervescent sustenance provided by rare vertion particles from white dwarf star Tambor Beta 6 incite the Enterprise-D itself into gaining artificial intelligence and budding self-awareness. The “emergent life-form” sprouts a neural net, making “interweaving” connections among sensor and control systems, the warp core engine, the replicators, and the transporter. Inside the Holodeck, where Picard and Data are acting out Shakespeare’s Tempest, the anomalous development brings about recombinant merging of many different Holo-programs into a conglomerate “narrative” which unfolds on a runaway steam locomotive. Walk-on avatars from the Wild West, Dixon Hill, medieval knight, Midwest farmland, and Roaring Twenties Holonovels converge on the out-of-control virtual train to nowhere.
In the Deep Space Nine episode Our Man Bashir, the Space Station’s senior staff are transformed into scripted characters without “human consciousness” in the 1960s’ British Secret Service suave superspy Holosuite program of Dr. Julian Bashir, played by Siddig El Fadil. Commander Benjamin Sisko, Major Kira Nerys, and the others are beamed away, in emergency circumstances, from the exploding Orinoco Runabout ship after an act of sabotage. Lt. Commander Eddington manages to scan and temporarily safeguard the endangered individuals’ physical and neural patterns into the Holosuite’s core storage memory buffers.
Dematerializing from matter which is itself abruptly dematerializing, due to the violent blast, results in the double misfortune or Combo Accident of a transporter mishap and a Holosuite run amok.
Bashir, who was participating in the Holoadventure before the Combo Malfunction, must make sure that none of the stripped-of-self-awareness avatars, into which the Deep Space Nine protagonists have metamorphosed, is killed during the playing out of the James Bond-style fantasy. With the Holosuite’s safety protocols disabled by the compound calamity, the life of any of the Space Station command team operatives could be instantly terminated by the demise of his or her character in the Holonovel.
In spite of their emphasis on the technological accident, the Holodeck and Holosuite episodes of these later Star Trek series covertly reinforce the idea that the accident is a secondary and contingent occurrence, dissociated from the primary and necessary standing of the regularly operating or “humming along” technological system. In the stories about Holodeck malfunctions in The Next Generation and beyond, the accident is always posterior to the standard operating procedures of the purposive-rational technological system. For Captain Picard and company, the VR accident is a mere glitch, worm, virus or bug.
For the proto-Holodeck virtuality engine of the Amusement Park Planet, on the contrary, the accident is fundamental. Only in The Original Series episode Shore Leave is the separation between anomalous catastrophe and standard intent in virtual or cyberspace systems not yet established. For the senior officers of Captain Kirk’s Enterprise, virtual reality is in essence an accident. The “incidentally requisite” technology of disappearance precedes any notion of a normalized performance of the VR system. Kirk and the landing party are by happenstance brought into contact with a virtual reality technology which they know nothing about. The fact of their “presence” in the online system is the mishap. This “intrinsic irregularity” lends the situation its emotional and literary force.
To make the interactive playgrounds – with their wireframe models, geometric renderings, backdrops, panoramas and textures – enchanting once again, one would have to think inventively about media technology in relation to a secret pact of reciprocity with the fabulous surprises and impossible events of the world in radical uncertainty and illusion. Motifs and forms that are vertiginous, undecidable, aleatory, or imbued with existential openness should be considered for reintegration into the creative activities of the virtual.
