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Are we all going to be terrible at Virtual Reality?
It's entirely possible....
If you remember, a couple of weeks ago I was in Las Vegas at the Dice conference and while
I was there I got to try out the new Crystal Cove prototype of the Oculus Rift.
I played EVE: Valkyrie, which originally was an internal experiment at the Icelandic developer
CCP. Five minutes in, and I was doing cartwheels in outer space.
It was awesome, but then I got a little bit dizzy. But not in a bad way, it just felt
like I was actually in a spaceship doing loop-de-loops.
And it's not just me. When the project lead for Black Mesa toured Valve's virtual reality
cave, his account read like a hallucination.
An 100ft tall atlas, things flying at his face, a profound amount of cursing,
and alot of exclamation points. Basically...
Just look at all the videos of people playing the oculus rift. This one's my favorite.
There's a reason why people are freaking out.
Stanford University researchers are reaching a cyberpunky conclusion. Our brains can't
yet distinguish between actual reality and virtual reality.
Let me say this again: we can't distinguish between actual reality and virtual reality.
Though it's weird, it makes sense when you think about it.
No matter how immersive a traditional game feels there is always physical separation
between you and the game world.
Georgia Tech University researcher Michael Niche refers to this as the distance between
the mediated space of what we see on the screen and the play space of our physical reality.
Your heart may race and your palms may sweat from excitement, but unconsiously you still
know where you are. So when your mom comes in and turns on the lights because you're
ruining your eyesight, which you are, you're gonna notice.
Virtual Reality eliminates that distance, completely.
When I was playing EVE Valkyrie, all my visual and aural inputs were telling my brain that
I was flying.
So then my brain told my body, this is intense. I'm feeling loopy, even though I'm not moving.
The move to Virtual Reality, is NOT going to be like moving from the PS3 to the PS4
(or the Xbox 360 to the Xbox one, if you will.)
It's such a radically different experience that it makes me wonder: are we ready for
virtual reality gaming? Are we going to be any good at it?
Now, before we go any further, I know that there are some of you who will dedicate the rest
of your lives to playing well in VR, so I'm not talking about everyone everyone.
But I think the answer, for a lot of people, will be no, we're not ready. And I think that's
true for two reasons.
The first reason is that the physical and mental skills that will be required for being
a proficient gamer will be a lot different.
When gamers think about virtual reality games, they think about applying VR to the games
that we already have.
But VR will change the expectations of how we play.
Think about it. If you're prone to flight sickness, a game like Ace Combat is going
to be a much less pleasant experience.
And doing a VR barrel roll at the speed of sound could quickly go from awesome to nauseating.
Have you seen the first-person version of Flappy bird?
Or if you're a little afraid of heights, Mirror's Edge quickly becomes terrifying.
What about Forza or Gran Turismo? Will you be willing to drive 200 mph if it actually
feels like you're going to crash?
And Dead Space or Amnesia? I can barely play those games now so I'm already peeing myself.
And that's just the mental game. There's going to be new physical demands as well.
The recommendations from Valve about playing Team Fortress 2 while under the influence
of virtual reality read like the disclaimer from a Cialis ad.
Start slow. For the first few sessions, plan to play for no more than 10 minutes in VR.
Stop if you feel unwell. You cannot "push through" motion sickness, it just continues.
Side effects include--
That idea of "it's just a game" is going to go out the window. Being able to control your
fears, your emotions and your body is going to be dramatically more important.
But there's another reason that I think we'll be bad at VR, especially at the start. It's
going to push us away from keyboards and controllers and towards a wildly different input system.
Up until now, we've basically defined playing video games as being good with buttons.
It's a literacy and for the past 40 years your video game skill was tied to your ability
to use a keyboard or controller. That's going to change.
In fact, Oculus Rift founder Palmer Luckey told me that Team Fortress 2 in virtual reality
is easier for noobs than it is for pros.
VR is a lot more intuitive than using a keyboard or mouse, and new players don't have the same
muscle memory or expectations on how to perform specific game tasks.
Oculus Rift's CEO has said that ultimately they don't know what VR control is going to
look like. But their goal is to literally make a controller that feels like your hand.
And that's just for Oculus. There's a VR gun controller that actually changes its weight
depending on what weapon you're using.
And then there's the omni-directional treadmill that uses Kinect to track your movement. Let's
hope you're in good shape.
And I'm not saying that all this stuff isn't going to be awesome.
I'm as excited as anyone to try these things out, but there's a danger that we could all
become old fogeys, like the people who couldn't make the jump to 3D games.
But the reality is that the best experiences for the Oculus Rift haven't been made yet.
When new tech comes around we tend to think about old ways of using it. But maybe the
biggest games for VR will be nothing like Halo or Team Fortress 2.
Maybe we'll see a rise in stealth based games, or purely visual games.
Maybe cheesy dinner theater-style *** mystery games will be a lot of fun, or slower-paced
atmospheric games like this prototype for Old City will thrive with the help of VR.
Or look at this demo for Ambient Flight, you're just a bird. That's it. Flying around.
For some of you it might be hard to accept that this could be a future game of the year.
Because as VR godfather Jaron Lanier said, "In Virtual Reality there's no need for a
single metaphor." Games can be whatever.
But right now, we're radically underestimating how it will change the way we play games.
And I guess we'll just have to adapt.
What do you think? Will the skills that we use now while gaming be totally useless in
the world of virtual reality?
Hash it out in the comments and if you like what you saw, please subscribe.
I will see you all next week.
Last week we talked about why we get so attached to NPC's and featured 10 of my favorites.
Let's see what you had to say.
So it was great to see so many of you leave your favorite NPC's in the comments. Really
appreciated all the feedback.
But we wanted to highlight three commenters who thought that I had some notable omissions,
and told us about their favorites.
The first is LionTheKingOfCojons who wishes that Sweet from GTA San Andreas was his brother.
Not sure how your mother would feel about that.
The next is Aaron Leather who thought that he was having a love affair with Nozomi Harasaki
from Shenmue. Glad you worked that out.
And the last is actionvolcano who noted that Elizabeth from Bioshock Infinite was his favorite NPC
Thank you so much for all your feedback. I really appreciate it.
Drew Miller didn't really care at all for his Sims, killing them in fantastic ways.
I did the same thing. But, when he played The Legend of Zelda, for example, he really
cared when Link died and was curious about why that is. So one possible theory might
be is that the Sims is more open-ended, there isn't like a story there. There's no set-up,
except for one you sort of generate yourself. Whereas The Legend of Zelda kind of creates
this sort of pattern, this story as we've noted. So that might be part of the reason
you feel more connected to their death.
Or you're just like a really sadistic kind of person. And don't care about anybody.
But it's probably the other thing.
Like me, Axel Skellington also loved the security bots. Yeah, I was a super-big fan. And also
makes the point that in the Portal series, it's suggested that perhaps the companion
cubes were humans and test subjects themselves. Which I didn't know. So, thanks for pointing
that out. Now I'll feel terrible when I destroy them.
Matthew James and others point out that Clementine from the Walking Dead is an NPC in season
1, she was my favorite, but is not an NPC, she's a playable character in season 2. I'll
be very curious when season 2 ends whether people feel like they have the same sort of
relationship since they've been able to play her on both sides of the fence. Huh.
Let me know.
89taklung wants to know what someone has to do to get their comment featured in an episode.
I don't know man. If you figure it out let me know.
Hey there newcomers! First of all, welcome.
Second of all, as many of you have noticed I wear
glasses without any lenses in them and the reason why is
because I where the exact same frames but with lenses but there's lots of
glare so that's super distracting. So when we're filming,
voila! No glare! No lenses. So I'm
not one of those people who just like wears glasses without any lenses in them to be cool or
something like that. That'd be pretty dumb. So no need to say anything about it in the
comments hopefully. Anyway, thanks for watchin!