Agreed, given the amount of damage the Hosts seem to receive each day it doesn't feel plausible that they could collect them all and do what seems to be a manual operation on each to return them to perfect condition overnight.
This is partially explained by the end of season spoiler: a lot of what you're watching isn't happening simultaneously. We see Maeve get reset a hell of a lot of times, while in the meantime Teddy is wandering all over the park with William, Dolores is somewhere and so on. There is no mention of actual dates.
My initial reasoning was that the park doesn't get continually reset every day, nor does it necessarily happen over night. It gets reset when a storyline finishes or a catastrophe happens in one location, e.g. the shootout in the starting town. It would make sense for guests to be given allocated windows for entry (note how the park is clearly not teeming with players, we meet perhaps 10 extras over the course of the entire series). Then that 'game' gets run, people play through the stories and then a new cohort begins. This might take, for example, a week.
We see the transition from the church in the Maze town being totally covered in sand, to being unearthed again. That clearly isn't an overnight (or even a week's) job.
Recall William had to get permission to launch an incendiary attack at the prison. It's possible that the control centre would deny the use of dynamite to a player if it was used in a location that would be frequently re-used.
That's one of the aspects of Westworld that I think you have to just more or less accept and move on. The nightly reset is implausible at all sorts of levels: economically, scale and effort (even to buildings burning down), and just logistically (does the park just shut down for a few hours every night). And we're shown that, as you say, this all seems to be a very manual process for the most part.
Something else you pretty much just have to accept is that through all sorts of mayhem, the humans stay safe (well, until the end at least). There's some rather inconsistent hand waves around guns and bullets but one has to believe there are still ample opportunities for serious injury in some of the scenes we see.
[SPOILERS]Dolores kills a human outright by aiming at their head mid-season. Then it isn't mentioned again.[/SPOILERS]
I always assumed something in the suit lining made the guns faux-fire, and the suit responded by exploding a pocket of air or something. But then you can see The Guy In The Black Suit (I've forgotten his name) load his revolver by manually inserting bullets, so I have no idea how that'd work. It's probably one of the only things that bothered me about the series.
It's not a human, it's a host that Dolores kills. The significance is that she doesn't have "weapon rights," and so is programmed to be unable to shoot a gun.
Which is a reasonable handwave until you start asking about the physical damage that the bullets do to [EDIT] hosts and ignore the mayhem involving explosives, fires, etc.
It doesn't especially bother me though. We know that TV and movies generally have a convention that trauma that would put someone in the ICU in the real world is brushed off as a flesh wound. And I'll accept technobabble about the bullets. I'm also happy to accept that maybe Westworld takes place in a culture where theme park risks on par with base jumping are considered fine and proper.
In the movie, and I'd assume it's sourced from the book, the guns have temperature sensors and won't shoot at something that is warm blooded. But... that probably doesn't hold up with the "they're basically humans" anatomy of the hosts.
The supplementary materials released on-line include, AFAIR, Westworld's Terms of Service - which do touch on possibility of injuries and death during the visit in the park.
Yep and they're presumably with guests. And it's not like all the guests head off to the Westworld Hilton after dinner every evening so that the park can do its daily cleanup.
I'm doubtful something like very good VR or even good VR can even exist. You'd need to simulate physical forces interacting on the human body and movement to make that happen.
Unless we achieve the ability to essentially run a MITM attack on the brain, to intercept commands from the brain and to provide it with sensory input, VR won't come close to being something genuinely deserving the name virtual reality.
One can at least imagine things like body suits with very fine-grained force feedback, etc. But that still leaves you with a whole range of other senses and physical feedback mechanisms absent.
There are scenarios where you are more constrained in real life (e.g. sitting in a vehicle of some sort) where g-forces aside, you can probably get pretty close with vision, sound, and some fairly basic force feedback will be able to get you to a fairly decent simulation. But I agree that anything involving running around and physically interacting with a 3D world is a lot more challenging.
One can imagine that. I can also imagine that it would involve a lot of effort to create it, that it would be a lot of effort to use and that it would still be very limiting for all the reasons you mention.
Currently you can't even really walk around in a room without being incredibly restricted in terms of room layout, furniture and let's not forget you the headset with cables attached.
Last but not least even this hypothetical virtual reality is still just that: virtual. Simply the knowledge that something is merely virtual will always be somewhat of a disappointment, the same way a copy, no matter how perfect, is not quite as appealing as the original.
The concept of Westworld has an authenticity to it, that virtual reality can never hope to reach. As humans we are just weird that way.
That was my thought when I started watching the show, but as you watch more episodes you realize why the creator didn't go that route. I don't want to spoil it for anybody that isn't a regular viewer.
