Some Twaddle about VR

I don’t want to get all pretentious and cite the vast array of literature I read so that I come across as some kind of intellectual, because to be honest I don’t read that sort of stuff and I’m not clever enough to fake it. Most of what I read is non-fiction sciencey stuff and the fiction is almost exclusively limited to Terry Pratchett, Isaac Asimov, and Douglas Adams on loop (with the occasional stop-gap of some Philip K. Dick). All those classics? Can’t be arsed, if I’m honest.

BUT, here’s the thing. Despite being a million miles away from the sort of arty pretentious arsehole who would shake their head at TV and computer games while spouting the virtues of literature, they do kinda have a point. Pretty much everyone who’s seen a screen adaptation of a favourite book regards the film version as worse. One of my all-time favourite films, John Carpenter’s The Thing is, if I’m completely honest with myself, not as good as John Campbell’s novella Who Goes There? despite the film having Kurt Russell in it. The best I can come up with as an exception to this is… hmmm… bear with me… uhhh… maaaaaybe Apocalypse Now! versus Conrad’s Heart of Darkness? I’ve never read Mario Puzo’s The Godfather but that seems like a good candidate too. But anyway, the point is that they’re few and far between and where they exist it’s probably because the book is very short, very old (with somewhat impenetrable language), the film is staggeringly well-made or adapts the source so far as to be almost unrecognisable. Outliers or cheats, in other words 😉

So, my point is, with all these advances in cinema – colour, widescreen, surround-sound, 3D, IMAX, etc. – the written word (such archaic technology!) continues to have the upper-hand. We often get more spectacle, whizz, and bang with films now but we still accept that there’s a distinction between Captain America and Moon and don’t pretend that the former is the better film because explosions.

This is why the current trend of VR slightly baffles me. I get the spectacle aspect, I get the fact that it could open up new gameplay possibilities, the immersion. But despite there being some terrific advances in visuals, sound, writing, and design in modern videogames none of them have had the sort of effect on me that reading Alistair MacLean’s H.M.S. Ulysses did. I recently completed Remember Me which, all in all, I thought was rather good. The gameplay was simplistic but the world design was fabulous and, despite the whole story revolving around an incident which I didn’t find to be enough to justify the events, I really liked that the story was ultimately very personal – the wider implications pushed into the background kind of like a small independent film. It could have made for a great short story in a science-fiction magasine. I was fairly immersed in that world, despite not having 3D beamed into my eye sockets because immersion has, ultimately, absolutely nothing to do with the way something is presented to you or is interacted with – it’s entirely to do with selling your brain a believable world containing believable characters who you can empathise with and root for. There are extremely few videogames that I could say that about, so popping a headset on seems to me like trying to solve that delicate problem with a hammer. If we can’t immerse you through story and events then, here, pop this headset on and we’ll fix it with technology instead. Meanwhile, books continue to solve that with nothing more than some ink and paper. They must think we’re right idiots.

None of this means that I regard myself as immune to the spectacle, of course. Give me a 3D headset and I’ll be as wowed as the next person. But I have real trouble imagining myself using a headset as the primary way to play a videogame – to me, it’s a staggeringly expensive theme-park ride, something you hugely enjoy only very occasionally. But for £500+ I would expect more than that. But if we haven’t yet nailed immersion using conventional displays with any sort of consistency, why would we expect it to be any better in 3D? And those rare outlier developers who can pull it off, why would we expect them to be the ones to pioneer VR games when they already have the skills to accomplish it? Did anyone expect Quentin Tarantino to jump at the chance to make a film in 3D?

edit: I realise that games are not films (except an awful lot of them try to be), but my point is why not have a peruse of the various lineups of VR games and ask yourself, “how many of these games are offering experiences which would be impossible without VR, and how many of them are using VR as “free” immersion?”. Surely if VR were the game-changer it’s talked about as, should we not reasonably expect the emphasis to be on the former?

TLDR; It’s not the quality of games, the technical innovation, or the quality of experience I doubt or take issue with – it’s the hyperbole 😉