"Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?"

As the featured post indicates, this is a routine diagnostic question used by the Park's Quality Assurance teams, addressed to a robot being examined. A "Yes" answer would indicate malfunction. Hence, the answer is usually "No" -- but of course the plot of the series is dependent on the ones who have in fact asked such a question.

For the "hosts", the nature of their reality is entirely artificial, with a constructed physical environment, made-up memories, personality characteristics adjustable with tablet sliders, and simple loop behavior with minimal variation, all within a fictional narrative. It's interesting to see what happens when they're extracted from that environment, or when parts of a world outside that reality are accidentally encountered. In the first case, when asked if they know where they are, the response is that they're "in a dream" -- the container for all "unreal" manifestations. (As it is for us as well?). In the second case, the evidence of their eyes, their perception, is simply ignored, the response being "It doesn't look like anything to me." (What would we say?)

For the "guests", the current reality is presented as just a startlingly realistic physical game -- but they're our representatives, and they bring with them all the baggage of the sort of ordinary lives we the viewers live. For us too, questioning the nature of our reality would seem peculiar at least, for anyone not philosophically inclined, and a possible indication of a problem -- i.e., a malfunction. Only one of the guests, William, really appears to do so, and his story defines the series' first season.

Already, though, we can see how the robot condition functions as an analogy to the human. Compare the situation with that of The Matrix, (the great Conspiracy Theory/Myth of our time), where the comparative relation of human and machine are reversed.