Just like books and movies, video games have always been subject to trends. Most of the time, it’s certain genres that take over. In the 90’s it was platformers, in the 2000s it was adventure games, and in the late 00s to the early 2010s it felt like everyone was making shooters. Even now we’re still in the midst of the “friend slop,” battle royale and hero shooter trends, though the latter two are, at long last, finally on their way out. Sometimes, however, technology itself is the trend. And in the 2010’s, the trendy tech was VR.
VR was always such an odd thing to me. It really did seem like a leap forward in some ways, and in others it felt like the opposite. In terms of really putting you into the environment of a game, then the tech was unmatched. You could plop yourself into something like Minecraft, freely look around and really feel like you were there. But that only lasted until you started trying to do anything beyond just looking around.
The first issue was just moving around. If you just tried to move your character in the virtual space, but didn’t physically walk, then your brain receives conflicting signals from your eyes and your inner ears, with one saying you’re moving and the other not, which resulted in a kind of motion sickness in most people.
Then there was trying to interact with things. You couldn’t just use your hands since, well, there wasn’t anything physical for you to grab. Also, it seems that programming a glove-type control interface isn’t exactly easy either. So there was a mismatch in interaction too. Then there were the limitations of genre. You can’t exactly play a 3rd person or top-down perspective game in VR, nor can you play as a character. It just doesn’t fit the format, so you’re limited to the kinds of games you can play right there.
As for 1st person games, they couldn’t be too complicated since movement depended on what the player could physically do, or even just do without triggering violent motion sickness. Basically, the more you tried to do in VR, the more limitations you ran into, and the ever-growing gap between what you’re shown versus what you can do (and even how you can do it) just made for an inferior experience to traditional games in the end.
And yet, VR was THE technology trend at the time. All the big publishers and tech companies pushed it, the media largely praised it and early adopting gamers hailed it as the future. It went on for pretty much a decade too. Facebook was trying to convince everyone to live in the “metaverse” while Google was busy trying to convince businesses that they could just have all of their meetings in virtual reality. Publishers and platform holders were eager to get as many people into it as possible too, convinced they’d found a lucrative market. Yet, for all the reasons mentioned above.
VR managed to hang in there longer than the motion controls of the mid-to-late-00s, but it never saw even a fraction of motion controls’ adoption. It was always even more peripheral than they were despite offering something that, on the surface, seemed like an even greater step forward. Some argued that the tech (as it was envisioned) failed because your average person just wasn’t ready for it. We were all, apparently, just too stubborn and set in our ways to embrace the “obvious” leap forward. But the truth, I think, is much more simple: it wasn’t superior at all.
Rather than breaking down the barriers between gamer and game, VR threw up new ones. IT was expensive, hard to use and limited in terms of genre. A trendy game genre can last forever because it offers people something that they want without adding any new barriers to entry. Technology trends are different. They’re risky and expensive and have not, not even now, ever managed to justify their existence. Who knows, though? Maybe that could change.
Maybe VR will be a part of video gaming’s future. Maybe one day we’ll have holodecks or devices that tap into dreaming in order to deliver their experiences. Or, maybe someone will dream up an entirely new technology that really does manage to turn the world on its head. That’s not today, though, so for now, let’s look back at VR and see what about its story can be applied to today.
What’s your take on VR? Does it get a bad rap or was it always a bad idea? What do you think the next trend will be once the LLM one finally runs its course?
Image by cary
VIRTUAL BASTION 