The Jack Ryan Experience helicopter.

“These are getting more elaborate every year,” said my fellow media person Callie as we gazed up at the full-scale model helicopter above the two-story set intended to invoke a bombed-out Middle Eastern edifice. We were standing in a pop-up bazaar outside the northern edge of the Convention Center on Comic-Con’s opening day, waiting to immerse ourselves in the hyperreality of the Jack Ryan Experience’s Training Field and so get ourselves excited for the August 31 premiere of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan on Amazon.

Hyperreality, explained PR man Stephen Warr in his best Ben Whishaw-as-Q accent, meant that “we’re trying to get as close to merging the real world and the digital world as possible.” For starters, that meant a one-to-one mapping of real objects and their virtual counterparts: hence the helicopter, the building, and oh yes, the zipline (seen in VR as a downed telephone wire). It also meant fans blowing air up at you as you “jumped” from the chopper, and a properly wobbly plank stretched over a 30-foot virtual drop. “It’s just a plank on the ground,” said Warr, “but you’d be surprised at how real it feels.”

Hologate’s amazing VR experience, exterior view.

My confirmation email for the Jack Ryan Experience had warned me to arrive early for my 4:20 pm appointment, and that separate parts of the Jack Ryan Experience could take up to 20 minutes each. But by 5 pm, I was still marinating in the dim, close heat of a canvas tent (very immersive!), waiting to get suited up in my harness and multi-point VR sensor array. The operation had encountered delays, both obvious and otherwise: one of my fellow operatives turned out to be too young (under 18), two others lacked proper footwear (you can’t take on The Enemy in open-toed shoes). Happily, none of us exceeded the 260-pound weight limit. An employee told me that members of the group immediately ahead of me had been waiting since early morning.

I had a birthday party to attend that evening and a toast to write beforehand, and so I abandoned the illusory triumphs that awaited me in hyperreality for the quieter, more enduring pleasures of regular reality. I will still watch the Jack Ryan premiere, but I will be unable to cry “I did that!” if and when star John Krasinski jumps out of a helicopter.

Fun vs. juice

An elegant weapon for a more civilized age.

I did, however, get to goggle up over at the Omni hotel’s FutureTechLive! exhibit. My 21-year-old son was terribly impressed with Hologate’s four-wall setup, which let four players share a virtual space for either player vs. enemy or player vs. player action. We wound up shooting robot samurai, ninjas, sumos, and dragons from within our mini-fort at 90 frames per second. The experience fulfilled the wish of every ‘80s kid who wanted to follow Jeff Bridges into the video game world of Tron, or every millennial who wished he could actually step into Master Chief’s body armor — minus the pesky presence of narrative and character. I was not surprised when US operations manager Nick told me that the $100,000 setups were selling fast and paying for themselves in three months by putting through 40 people an hour. “People like the social aspect,” he said. “They can talk to each other while playing. We’re selling them to cruise ships, bowling alleys, arcades, trampoline parks, malls, and cinemas.”

Cinemas — you know, where people used to go to see movies. Hologate was fun. But I’m an old man raised on stories more than experiences, and so it didn’t juice me the way Lenovo’s comparatively stone-age $200 Star Wars Jedi Challenges did. Because there, I was fighting Darth Maul. Yes, his attacks followed a predictable pattern. Yes, he appeared as a ghostly figure in my world instead of a full-blooded denizen of his own. What of it? He was a Sith Lord, a Jedi-killer, a figure out of the mythology that shaped two generations of kids, myself included. “You don’t have to move around so much,” said my son as I lunged and skipped about the room, bumping passersby. “Nonsense,” I answered. “I’ve seen lightsaber fights. They jump all over the place.”

What color is your experience?

Game over, man!

You know what else jumps all over the place? Facehuggers, aka throat rapers, aka the Alien movie franchise’s skittering embodiment of male anxiety about being made into a woman — penetration, pregnancy, and all. I have complained to friends that James Cameron’s sequel to Ridley Scott’s original turned a brilliant horror movie into a less brilliant action movie, and the Alien: Descent VR installation at the Outlets at Orange is clearly based off Cameron’s story of Space Marines going on a bug hunt while extracting survivors. So yeah, maybe what I felt when the eggs yawned and the crablike facehuggers started climbing the walls around and above me wasn’t horror. But it was definitely fear. I broke a full sweat while standing still. I swore unconsciously at the little bastards. I wasted ammo like the greenest of noobs, because “they’re coming out of the goddam walls!” And because, you know, throat rape.

(My poor son got short-changed by his own shoot ‘em up experience. In no time, he figured out that the critters — facehuggers or xenomorphs — weren’t ever going to come inside our elevator cage. Even when they landed right on top of it. After that, it was time to just point and shoot and rack up kills — a slicker version of the Alien Armageddon video game down the promenade at Dave & Busters. Not me. My touchstone was the movie, and so I was fighting for my life. Why did I waste time and bullets on the poor bastard giving birth to a baby alien? Human sympathy. Screw the high score.)

My only real quibble came at the end, when the virtual body scan detected an incubating alien in my chest cavity. The game was going for a bit of narrative horror, as if the makers hadn’t lost sight of what made Alien’s alien iconic. But it hadn’t earned it; no facehugger had ever gotten close enough to implant. Because that would have been more experience than most folks could handle.