The Palliative Gaming Pod

Many would rather be euthanised than plod the last few humiliating laps.

That’s the honest math of ageing now. Pills, loneliness, bed baths. The simplest ablution requiring a tightly project-managed, fully-staffed procedure. Relatives losing patience somewhere around visit four hundred. Nobody wants the ending we’ve built for them. So we built a different one.

The Palliative Gaming Pod is the next frontier in age care.

Rather than sit out the last throes of life as a bedridden corpse, the incapacitated but able-minded are now offered a different exit: induced coma, then upload — physically and neurologically — into the pod. A network of cables, hypodermic drips and electro-pads handles medication, sustenance, nutrition, excretion, and the extra-sensory experience of their preferred virtual game. Thought Control Technology takes it from there.

Because the fantasy was always waiting. What better way to spend our final decrepit years than unleashing a lifelong alter-ego — the secret dream, the repressed fantasy finally let out from the belly of true desire. A career criminal marauding GTA’s San Andreas. A medieval warrior beheading goblins in World of Warcraft. Or, for the less ambitious, a low-fi fetish for collecting 8-bit pixelated fruit. The imagination doesn’t discriminate by dignity.

Once in the pod, they don’t leave until it really is game over.

Communication with the outside world must now happen inside the game. Which means relatives don’t visit anymore. They log in.

Each family member is coded and implanted as an avatar — an expensive, labour-intensive process, and a genuinely daunting one for the technophobic. Picture your daughter in a motion-capture rig, greeting your comatose father’s warlord avatar with a stiff wave, unsure whether to hug a character model. Picture a grandson trying to have a real conversation through a loot-drop interface, both of them faintly aware that this is easier than the ward ever was. Beta-testing suggests it genuinely improves interaction. The digital intermediary, it turns out, is less confronting than real life ever managed to be.

As the last generation of technophobes dies off, marketers are confident the Pod will become the default age care facility. An entire population who spent their working lives facilitated by computers will find the step from real to virtual isn’t a loss. It’s the natural exit.

A rumpus room before departing, where fantasies replace rigmarole, and the restraints of reality vanish.