Theme Park of the Glen + VR Will Break Museums
Hello new subscribers from my Digital Sight Management and QAnon pieces!
This is a very off-the-cuff email today. I’m keeping some newsletters more informal because if I spent a lot more time on them, they’d become blog posts and I’d send them far less frequently.
But I’m still writing serious stuff – in fact I’m doing an outline about cheating in gamification – and I’ll try to make it easy to tell the difference between my more and less serious emails. Please do let me know what you think about the balance!
Theme Park of the Glen
As a delayed birthday present, my parents treated me to a stay at the Gleneagles Hotel near Auchterarder, about an hour from Edinburgh. I knew it was famous for its golf courses, so I vaguely imagined a very nice, normal-sized hotel with some well-kept grounds.
This was only partly correct. The hotel was indeed extremely nice – it opened in 1924 so it has an Art Deco style that feels unusual in Scottish or English grand hotels – and its grounds were exceedingly well-kept. But to cut to the chase, Gleneagles isn’t really a hotel: it’s a Scottish theme park for the rich.
850 acres of grounds, 232 hotel rooms, shooting, fishing, horse-riding, gundogs(!), falconry, off-road driving, two swimming pools, eight tennis courts, four golf courses – like a cruise ship or Disneyworld, you could stay there for a fortnight and still have things to do, assuming your wallet didn’t vaporise upon entering the hotel grounds.
But there are bigger and fancier hotels out there. What makes Gleneagles a theme park is that it has a theme: Scottish aristocracy. All the staff wear the exact boots, tweed, jackets, dresses, and hairstyle that you’d imagine. Guests don’t need to dress up, but it’s more fun if you do, and certainly it helps for most of the outdoor activities.
Don’t have the right gear? That’s fine: the hotel has the most tasteful, selective, and outrageously expensive indoor mall I’ve ever seen, selling all the accoutrements one needs to impress the right people: cashmere jackets, Hunter boots, Barbour shoes, “price on application” 75 year old whisky. The brand synergy was breathtaking.
So if Gleneagles is a theme park, then at least some of its guests are LARPing. Which is cool! LARPing is neat. Cosplay is neat. Disneybounding is neat. What’s odd, however, is that when rich tourists dress up to shoot grouse or do falconry in Scotland, we don’t call that LARPing, even though it totally is. We don’t call it that because it connects to a largely invented history that nevertheless retains the aura of tradition and authenticity, whereas dressing up as Rey in Disneyland does not.
My point here is not to dunk on Gleneagles. I enjoyed the stay! It’s toh ighlight the absurdity of calling “low culture” things LARPing or cosplay when “high culture” things (which, again, are often equally invented for tourists!), and to mull over what a really expensive, exclusive sci-fi or fantasy LARP looks like. I’ve written previously about what Disney’s expensive Star Wars hotel will be like, but I’m talking more expensive than that.
Maybe I’m just describing Westworld here; I don’t know. I just find these vast constructed worlds to be utterly fascinating and I think we’ll be seeing far more of them in the future. What’s really important here is the theme and that’s what really surprised me about Gleneagles.
VR Will Break Museums
I wrote this essay back in 2016 but it’s perfect for our COVID-stricken times where more people are experiencing museums digitally rather than in person. Here’s the intro:
The first sign came with the Oculus Rift DK2 last year, when I discovered that consumer virtual reality could finally replicate a sense of physical presence in a digital world.
The second came last month, when I visited the British Museum’s Sicily exhibition.
The exhibition was perfectly fine, a well-curated narrative of the Greek and Norman periods of Sicilian history — the greatest hits, if you will. But here’s the thing: I couldn’t see shit.
It was a Sunday afternoon, only four days after it opened, so of course it was busy. I queued to read labels. I queued to study maps. I queued to peer over shoulders to gawp at shiny jewellery. And even after all that queuing, I only got to see each object for a few seconds — lingering any longer just made me feel guilty.
Perhaps, I wondered, there was a problem with the layout of the exhibition? Maybe they’d placed too many objects in corners, too many long cases against walls? But that wasn’t it. The designers did the best they could, given the constraints. And on reflection, I realised that I’d spent just as much time in other popular exhibitions queuing to see stuff.
Let’s be clear, overcrowding is a problem borne of success: 6.8 million visitors per year of success, to be exact. But it’s a problem nonetheless.
So to answer the inevitable question, “Why would you want to look at ancient objects in virtual reality when you could see them in real life for free?” I say, “Because even in the best museums in the world, I can’t see shit.” Compared to that very imperfect reality, virtual reality is an improvement.