Experience Mapping Problem – Case Study: SUPERHOT VR

July 30, 2021 Leave a comment

For an introduction to the Experience Mapping Problem and the goal of hyperrealism in VR, see this post.

SUPERHOT VR succeeds in creating an intoxicating player power fantasy. Time moves at your command, allowing you to execute action moves worthy of a scene in the Matrix. It delivers this powerful fantasy while maintaining a highly abstract graphical style. This game is as far from “photoreal” as you can get. It is also very immersive — people get wholly absorbed by the game:


(video source)

SUPERHOT quickly builds a simple and understandable mapping from life to game, using verbs like “grab” and “shoot”. To analyze how it achieves this rapid, simple readability, we need to characterize the way we unconsciously categorize the world around us.

Suppose I am looking at a shelf full of objects. If I am moving about the room normally, the shelf exists as a single thing to me, a symbol tagged “shelf”. Under normal circumstances, all my knowledge and perception about this collection of molecules is filed under “shelf”.

However, if I become interested in a particular object on the shelf, the symbol of “shelf” decomposes into a slew of new symbols. The object of interest is a symbol (say, “box”). I may also have symbols like “figurine” and “row of books” for the other things on the shelf. The “shelf” symbol still exists, but there is a Symbol Hierarchy now. “Box” and “figurine” have a relation to “shelf” (they are on it), but they also have their own properties.

If I am curious about the contents of the box, the “box” symbol decomposes into “box” and “contents”. (Note that I use the same word (“box”) for both the box-and-contents as well as the box-itself. This word→symbol overlap is a common source of confusion during any discourse, and we must stay wary of it.)

If I want to open the box to see what the contents are, the “box” symbol decomposes into “box” and “box lid”.

Note that Symbol Hierarchies tend to decompose based on the verbs in the context. If the context includes verbs like “open”, then the box symbol hierarchy decomposes into box and box lid. If the context has the verb “grab”, suddenly the shelf decomposes into grabbable objects (“figurine”, “book”, “box”). And if I discover that the figurine is glued to the shelf and therefore cannot be picked up, its symbol is somewhat absorbed by its parent: the figurine object becomes part of the “shelf” symbol again, in the context of “grabbing” or “picking up”; any relationship you have with the shelf (e.g. too heavy to pick up) is shared with the figurine too, and if you knock the shelf down, the figurine will also fall to the ground.

Within this framework, it is obvious why SUPERHOT can deliver an effective, immersive fantasy. The first thing the game does is introduce a verb — “grab” — and teach that all black objects can be grabbed. Second, when you are holding an object that looks like a gun, you can “shoot” the gun. Third, there are red enemies. Red enemies die if a black thing touches them. Then there are other rules, like time moves when you move, you die if a bullet touches you, and white objects are inert and will stop black objects.

The set of symbols and verbs is now defined for the game, and there is a 1-to-1 correspondence between sensory perception and symbol. A gun is always a “gun”. It never decomposes into “slide”, “magazine”, or “grip”. White objects are always “the background”. Even if it looks like a console with buttons and a telephone handset, the player will never even try to decompose the “background” symbol into “buttons” or “telephone”. There are no properties that belong to some white objects but not others; they are always immovable, and impervious to bullets.

This very simple model means that the player rarely encounters a mismatch between expectation and outcome. If I throw a gun, it kills enemies, just like any other thrown black object. I can take cover behind a small flimsy chair, since it is white. I can kill an enemy with a thrown ashtray, since it is black. The player never encounters a mismatch because they never attempt to improperly decompose a Symbol Hierarchy. The game clearly indicates whether something is atomically a “gun”, a “black object”, an “enemy”, or “the background” and never requires you to further divide those atomic symbols.

The player is free to map additional narrative and emotional properties onto these symbols. “Enemies” become an attractor for all the qualities of antagonists from movies and TV, and the suggestive background environments help encourage this emotive transfer: airport, shopping mall, rooftop. These are contexts we have seen action scenes occur. Similarly, the guns and ninja stars are symbolic attractors and gain all the forbidden, sexy power that weapons are granted in other media contexts.

Finally, the game allows the player to perform kinesthetically pleasing sequences with these verbs and symbols. Sure, the enemies just burst into triangles when “killed”, and the guns are simplistic black blobs. Yes, “shooting an enemy” means tiny black blobs came out of your little black blob and hit the big red blob. But you just “punched” an “enemy”, “grabbed” his “gun”, and “shot” another “enemy”! The interaction of symbols carries all the weight the player has put behind the symbols, and the fact that “punching” is kinesthetically similar enough to a real punch (same with “ducking” and “aiming”) allows the player to map back from symbol to reality.

The important take-away is this: because the player quickly builds an accurate model of this virtual world and NEVER encounters a mismatch between expectation and outcome, they stay immersed. And because the objects behind the symbols enable generic symbol assignment (the enemies are not “storm troopers”, they are just archetypal “enemies”), they attract lots of affective qualities. An immersive virtual world filled with high-affect symbols is, well, hyper-real.

Filed under Analysis, Blog, Games, VR Tagged with ,

Will Half-Life: Alyx Set VR Back?

April 4, 2021 Leave a comment

Half-Life: Alyx poses a conundrum for the future of VR. On the one hand, it is praised as one of the best VR games yet. It is critically acclaimed and immensely popular, bringing a best-of-class experience to countless enthusiasts and VR-newbies alike. Yet, as some (disgruntled) people have pointed out, it hardly seems like the game is native to VR. Little in the game requires VR to be playable. The environmental exploration and the gunplay, arguably the core loop of the game, could be turned into a paint-by-numbers flat FPS.

How can we reconcile this paradox? If VR is truly a medium that can upheave and uplift interactive entertainment, how can its poster child be a simple shadow of a regular flat gaming experience? Will every VR game just be a watered-down pancake game with a small garnish of VR laid on top?

Previously, I posed two questions for determining if a game belongs in VR:

  1. Would I rather play this game in VR, or on a flat screen?
  2. If this game wasn’t in VR, would I choose to play it instead of another flat game?

The answer to the second question is almost certainly “No”. Flat games have had decades to refine their metaphors and mechanics; a game that has been shaped to fit in VR will inevitably lose out to non-VR games in their home territory.

So if the second question is answered “No”, the answer to the first question better be “Yes”. But it’s tricky to get a “Yes”. If you play VR games, you have likely felt frustration or boredom and wished that you weren’t wearing an uncomfortable headset and could instead snuggle on your couch and play on the TV using a gamepad.

But perhaps surprisingly, the answer is “Yes” for Half-Life: Alyx. Of course it’s subjective, but it seems that most people (myself included) are eager to strap on a headset in order to dive into that immersive world. What other games make you eager to throw on the headset? Only a handful. Beat Saber’s continuing popularity is in part due to the fact that user’s are willing to jump into the headset just to play a few rounds of Beat Saber.

There is no one answer to why Alyx succeeds where so many fail. Polished audiovisuals; excellent pacing in visuals and spatial design; finely-tuned tension in combat encounters; compelling characters, dialogue, and worldbuilding. The game keeps you present and immersed in the virtual world, and that is the value of the game. Conversely, the game’s core loop is sufficient, but not spectacular. You come for the virtual adventure, and the core loop keeps you from being bored.

Previously, I posited that a VR game can succeed only if it stands out on at least 1 of 3 pillars:

  • Kinesthetically pleasing core loop
  • Compelling character
  • Fantasy fulfillment

Alyx certainly succeeds at having compelling character. The worldbuilding, environments, characters, dialogue, and humor are all engaging. For fantasy fulfillment, the game leverages its distinguished IP, drawing you back into a universe that has been in our collective consciousness for nearly two decades, growing to near-mythic proportions.

And yes, its core loop has kinesthetically-pleasing elements. The tuning on the gravity pull is just right, making it a simple joy to fling objects towards your hand. The stress of reloading the pistol during a tense fight is exhilarating, when in other VR games it can be frustrating. Jabbing a syringe into yourself to heal while in cover makes you feel like an incredible badass.

It’s no wonder Alyx succeeded. It executes expertly on all the things that people seek in games, and VR games in particular.

And yet.

Mechanically speaking, the actions you do in the headset are things that can translate to non-VR. Point at a thing, pick it up. Reload a gun. Climb a ladder. Push joystick to walk. Point a gun, shoot. Crouch behind cover.

Compare to the acrobatic gun-fu of SUPERHOT, where you can dodge or block individual bullets, or the savage skull-bashing of GORN. Compare to the rhythmic, full-body synthesis of Beat Saber and Pistol Whip, or the graceful low-gravity navigation of Lone Echo.

Previously, I said that the promise of VR is one of hyperreality, a world that is better than reality: denser, more exciting, more enabling, less annoying. 

Half-Life: Alyx is hyperreal. But its delicate tuning is a brute strength solution to the problem. It isn’t through new clever design paradigms that Alyx captures the hearts and minds of VR gamers, but by relentlessly polishing a mediocre foundation. It is a triumph of budget, not a triumph of innovation.

And accordingly, history will not remember the game for its design. The other games mentioned above will accord a place in history as innovative pioneers, similar to how Spacewar, Pong, and Pacman are still fun to a modern gamer. But in 10 years, Alyx will hold little appeal for VR gamers. Game development tools will advance, decreasing the cost of fidelity. Its audiovisual polish will become less impressive. Correspondingly, its laggard design sensibilities will become more grating.

***

The sad truth is that there is an inverse relationship between design innovation and the overall scope of a game. When following well-worn paths, a development team can spend their energy creating more content and polishing the game. 

Gamers want big, polished games. VR is young enough that the bar has not yet been raised too high in terms of design expectations; players will suffer clunky design because, for the most part, they don’t realize it could be better. 

But clunky design limits the growth of the medium, because it restricts more casual players from being drawn in by the experiences. When an uninnovative yet polished game succeeds, it lures more developers into believing that it is fine to settle for less when pursuing the promise of VR. Collectively, the level of expectation is dragged down. The raising of the bar is stunted. And the longer the bar stays low, the longer new casual users are being exposed to an imperfect incarnation of hyperreality.

So Half-Life: Alyx makes me happy and sad. It is a triumph that gives visibility to the medium and may attract new users in the short run. But it is a mediocre vision of what VR could and should be like in the future. It is sufficiently hyperreal in today’s marketplace, but it accomplishes this with brute strength, not with cleverness. And in doing so, it threatens to set the medium back in the long term.

Filed under Analysis, Blog, Games, VR Tagged with , , , ,

Real-time Strategy in VR

February 22, 2020 Leave a comment

Real-time strategy is the genre that’s possibly been knocked hardest by the evolution of modern gaming. Interest in games like Starcraft have waned in favor of action games and MOBAs. There are two competing explanations for this: either the modern market isn’t big enough to support an RTS ecosystem, or the developers of real-time strategy games have failed to innovate and keep up with the times. In either case, it is undeniable that the RTS is a dead genre.

Or is it? Of course not! The spirit of the RTS is alive and well. The same things that hooked players back in the 90s still hook players today. Human psychology hasn’t changed. But to survive in the vast and confounding battlefield of modern gaming, the genre has had to twist, split, and adapt to fill sustainable niches. To the legions of fans forged in the heyday of the RTS, it seems as though the genre is dust and bones because the RTS is held, in the public mind, as a single monolithic conception.

The RTS suffers the same fate as Star Wars. A novel presentation in a fallow market captured the hearts and minds of many, for myriad reasons. Unfortunately, its fame necessitates its failure; the intersection of so many interests leaves nowhere to progress, creatively. Moving in any particular direction will cause some fans to lose interest. So in a sense, the RTS genre is dead, if you define the RTS genre by the specific mechanics found in Starcraft, Warcraft, and Dune. Such a precisely defined genre is a dead-man-walking.

To find the modern RTS, one must look at the aspects of play that create such a devoted fanbase. As I mentioned, these are diverse — from a quick survey of internet threads where people discuss why they love real-time strategy:

  • Building power over time
  • Introduction of mechanics over time causing increasing complexity
  • Discovery / Exploration
  • Having to choose where to invest time and resources
  • Managing multiple tasks / dividing attention
  • Single-player stories
  • Challenging yourself
  • Directing troops
  • Base building
  • Devising strategies offline and then implementing them ingame
  • Improvising when a plan falls apart
  • Defeating an equally-matched human opponent
  • Analysing your own mistakes and better learning the specifics of the game to improve

There are some high-level generalizations about player experience to draw from these. I think the attractions of a traditional RTS can be reduced to the following:

  • Fantasy of Command / Warfare
  • Struggling to acquire and subsequently manage streams of information (in real time)
  • Efficiently growing a base, set of units, and pool of resources (in real time)
  • Overcoming opponents by building and manipulating a superior mental model of the game dynamics (in real time) [“dynamics” in the sense of the MDA framework]

Note that I have appended “(in real time)” because these can be fulfilled by a number of turn-based strategy and tactics games, just not with a time-constrained component. Indeed, what separates the RTS from other “games of command” seems to come down to giving commands at multiple locations at the right time. Many modern games of command involve a single unit, or do not have a relentless time component (i.e. not turn-based and no pause feature). For this reason, the “Fantasy of Command” can be safely put aside for the purposes of this essay. It is fulfilled by other games and is incidental, not essential, to the genre.

We expect that modern inheritors of the RTS mantle will continue to fulfill some subset of these general player experiences. Indeed, we see Offworld Trading Company fulfills most of these, but is weak when it comes to “Fantasy of Warfare” and “Struggle to acquire information”, since the game lacks any units, and there are few mechanics that allow players to learn more about their opponent than what their opponent knows about them. Clash Royale delivers a strong experience when it comes to “Overcoming opponents through superior mental models”, but lacks virtually any information-gathering or economic growth components.

Those are the elements of the high-level player experience, the aesthetics of play. When it comes to crucial mechanics, I found this analysis compelling. The analysis essentially pinpoints 11 features that are both necessary and sufficient for calling a game an RTS:

  • Players themselves are not in control of turn progression, and there are no direct interruptions of the progression of actions within the game.
  • Not being in direct control of the pacing of game events put pressure on the player to make fast, accurate decisions based on limited information.
  • Poor decisions must be eliminated or mitigated in future attempts (that is, later in the course of a particular match or in future matches against the same or different opponents).
  • RTS train players to quickly evaluate situations to determine the best future path forward.
  • Acquisition and expenditure of stores of value
  • Array of options with which to progress
  • The player must be asked to invest limited (though not necessarily scarce) resources into progressing and expanding, capitalizing on their past actions towards future goals
  • Players be able to actually lose their investments
  • they must defend their own investments and use them as wisely as they are able.
  • Require the player to simultaneously manage multiple game pieces or elements.
  • Uncertainty of other player’s actions to be incredibly important

As a summary:

Multiple participants engage in competitive economics, managing limited resources to expand multiple game elements in order to gain an advantage and ultimately wrest control of one or more critical systems to attain a concrete victory.

While this is useful for determining what is and isn’t an RTS, or figuring out which elements of a specific RTS are core to its being and which are secondary embellishment, it doesn’t necessarily lend itself to the sort of abstract, blue-sky thinking that you need when pushing an existing, well-loved concept into uncharted waters. You could follow its prescriptions to the letter, and find yourself with a product that fails to fit its niche or entertain its users.

Real Time Strategy in VR

Plenty of developers have tried to make archetypal ports of existing genres into VR. These evidence themselves as being bids for the statement “X is the Y of VR”. “Pavlov is the Counter-Strike of VR”, “Space Junkies is the Quake of VR”, “Sprint Vector is the racing game of VR”, “Beat Saber is the rhythm game of VR”.

A good rule of thumb here is to ask, “if I had the choice of playing this in VR or not in VR, would I rather play it outside of VR?” Then ask, “if I played this as a non-VR game, would I rather be playing something else?” The answer to the second question is almost always “yes”, so the answer to the first question better be “no”.

Everybody wants a VR strategy game, and plenty have been made: Tactera, Base Blitz, Airmech Command, Brass Tactics, Skyworld, Landfall, Cosmic Trip, Final Assault. (I’ve played all of them, by the way). Plenty of these come close to being an archetypal port, a true “RTS of VR.” Personally, I’m currently enjoying Final Assault.

But would I rather play these outside of VR? Absolutely. VR is uncomfortable, and these games don’t (for the most part) bring anything to the table that precludes playing them on a flat screen. No game has yet provided an RTS experience that is integral to VR.

Can we define an envelope for the “ideal” VR RTS? I will suggest two heuristics that help us towards a vision of this hypothetical game.

Heuristic 1

The perhaps less controversial heuristic is that the game shouldn’t be worse off for being in VR. By this, I mean that the game is not less player-friendly or less fun than the “pancake” version of the game you would get if you tried to port it back to traditional platforms. This applies to qualitative things like “fun”, but also concrete things like input level and game feedback. If the input scheme of the game is frictional, the player will immediately reject the game. The controls should grant the player new opportunities, not restrict their ability to act.

There is a corollary which follows logically from that first heuristic: the inputs to the game should not be able to easily be mapped to mouse and keyboard. For example, all of the aforementioned VR games — with the exception of Cosmic Trip — involve commanding troops to move around on a 2-axis battlefield. There may be height variation, but there aren’t even multiple levels. In addition, troops are commanded by selecting groups of units, then directing them to a point on the battlefield. Naturally, this is exactly how pancake RTS games work, and it becomes quickly obvious that a mouse and keyboard is much better than a pair of VR controllers for this kind of work.

But this also applies at a higher level of abstraction. It may not seem problematic if my VR RTS involves giving commands to troops at ground level by making gestures. How could that be translated easily to a mouse and keyboard setup? Well, players tend to build the most abstract mental model possible when learning a game. Unless there is a significant amount of additional unique control afforded by this gesture-based command system, there will be no difference between it and a simple top-down point-and-click command system in the player’s mental model of the game. It would be difficult to build a gesture system that affords control so unique that it couldn’t be easily replaced by a pancake GUI using a few buttons, hotkeys, sliders, or mouse gestures. But trying to imagine such a nuanced gesture-command system might lead to some interesting RTS ideas!

Heuristic 2

The first-person, gesture-based RTS as a thought experiment points to an important distinction to be made between the hypothetical “ideal RTS” and existing archetypal ports of other genres. All successful archetypal ports are currently action games. At a most basic level, the game’s fun is grounded in a certain viscerality. Arizona Sunshine isn’t about learning the game’s sandbox; it’s about being in a horror situation, about reacting to surprises and danger under loads of stress and anxiety. Sprint Vector is a game of going fast and perfecting your execution of maneuvers. You beat out opponents by performing actions more precisely, not because you’ve built a more sophisticated mental model.

Conversely, three of our four identified core player experiences of the RTS genre are dependent on the fact that the player will be trying to understand the game as thoroughly as possible (i.e. build a mental model):

  • Struggling to acquire and subsequently manage streams of information (in real time)
  • Efficiently growing a base, set of units, and pool of resources (in real time)
  • Overcoming opponents by building and manipulating a superior mental model of the game dynamics (in real time)

A good mental model will help you filter, prioritize, and categorize the information you collect. It will help you manage your resources most effectively, and it will allow you to overcome your opponents. The core fun of an RTS is the feeling of having achieved victory by being a total genius. The core fun doesn’t come from ordering troops around on a battlefield.

This leads to a second heuristic: victory in the game should be determined by whoever builds a better mental model. It should not be determined by whoever masters the controls better, or acts faster. This heuristic also ensures that one of the most egregious VR issues is avoided: frustration at the controls. It can be stated with certainty that if the player is annoyed at the controls of a game, the designer has failed. Having the player fail because they are struggling with the controls is the worst possible outcome.

Constraints For An “Ideal” VR RTS

We can take it as a given that this hypothetical game is about achieving victory. Thus, it must contain mechanics that combine to produce interesting, nuanced dynamics, since the core gameplay is the way the player uses their mental model to understand the dynamics, and subsequently determine the best way to harness the mechanics to their end. Additionally:

  1. The controls of the game cannot be something which map easily to flat gaming (mouse and keyboard, touchscreen, etc), following from Heuristic 1.
  2. It is difficult to imagine a mechanic which would work well in a pancake game, yet whose corresponding controls do not map well to mouse and keyboard (or other flat input device).
  3. Therefore, any mechanic essential to the game must be something which could not easily exist in a pancake game.

This is a tall order. It calls for something few VR games have achieved, which is a core loop and core mechanics that cannot exist outside of VR. We need, essentially, the Beat Saber of the RTS genre.

When we envision “VR native” mechanics, we must start at first principles. What does VR have at its disposal? The ability to look in all directions; locate audio sources; ability to feel presence in a space; a sense of scale; room-scale movement (the ability to crouch, jump, and walk around a space); and tracked hand controllers with haptics.

Acquiring Information

We could use the perceptive aspects of VR (looking around, binaural sound spatialization, stereo vision, haptics) to feed into the “struggle to acquire and manage information” player experience.
But we need to be careful not to violate Heuristic 2. For example, in Brass Tactics, the fact that you can’t be everywhere at once is an important gameplay element. You might think this would force players to use their mental model to choose the best place to focus their attention — a positive gameplay element. However, in reality, it means that the person who is better at moving across the table and orienting themselves using the game’s controls gains the advantage. The player who is better at using the controls is more effective.
In our ideal RTS, players must be able to quickly take in all the available information using an incredibly intuitive interface.

We should keep in mind the current limits of headsets. Resolution is very low (compared to angular size of pixels on flat displays), and focal length is fixed to a single distance. Empirically, visual acuity is reduced to between 20/32 and 20/42, depending on the anti-aliasing and supersampling settings the user employs [1]. Oculus says in its best practices document that it is most comfortable to view objects between 0.75 and 3.5 meters away, since the focal distance of the headset is about 2 meters.

Here is an image demonstrating a vergence mismatch between eyes.

Accordingly, we should place all important elements of the interface 2 meters away from the player (this minimizes the vergence-accommodation mismatch problem, illustrated in the image above). Any text (which there should be very little of, since people hate reading) needs to be big enough that someone with 20/42 vision could read it comfortably at a distance of 2 meters.

Managing Resources

As the player deals with resource management (let us generalize structures, units, and resources pools under the term “resources”), they will contend with VR’s input methods. At a low level, this is the position and rotation of their head and hands, and the buttons on their controller. The pose of the head should not be used as to not interfere with the player’s information gathering, so we are left with the controllers. Here, there are too many possibilities to enumerate.

Most of the existing VR RTS games utilize variations of the “laser pointer” input paradigm, which ultimately boils 6 degrees of freedom (DoF) into 2 dimensions (specifying a point on a planar topology). Our ideal RTS would require input along at least 3 dimensions, increasing the difficulty of mapping it to a accessible pancake and thereby increasing the likelihood of satisfying Heuristic 1.

Our input interface must also contend with Fitt’s Law. Specifically, in VR players can either do a lot of sweeping actions quickly, or they can do few precise actions slowly. If the interface requires precise actions, and increasing action frequency increases player power, then a player will become frustrated as they try to actions faster than is possible for them. However, even if the inputs involve broad movements, we would still like to avoid coupling input frequency and player power.

(As an aside, games like Starcraft contain just such a coupling. The faster and more precise your actions, the better you will do against a slower opponent of equal strategic mastery. However, this is archaic. Other modern genres have captured this “twitch” aspect. The modern RTS may safely abandon it.)

If inputs fall on the slow-yet-precise side of Fitt’s Law, they should not require fine wrist control. Many VR games use a laser pointer-style interaction, and anybody who has played these games knows that hovering over a small UI element and pressing a controller button is an exercise in futility. Besides frustrating the player, encouraging myopic focus on small interface elements means the player won’t be focusing on the larger environment around them, an experience that is one of the key selling points of VR.

Putting It Together

To recap:

  • We should avoid coupling input frequency and player power.
  • Inputs should not require fine wrist control or angular precision.
  • Inputs to the game should have 3 or more dimensions.
  • Interface elements should sit around 2 meters from the player, and not require much visual acuity to operate.
  • Players must be able to quickly absorb available information using an intuitive interface.
  • The mechanics must combine to produce interesting, nuanced dynamics.

Additional easy wins would include a focus on co-presence with other players, a component of play that involves scale (seeing big things or feeling big in VR is cool), and the option of playing the game sitting.

Side Note: Ergonomics

Many VR RTS games have poor ergonomics. Since their action takes place on a flat horizontal plane, you spend the majority of your time looking down. With the weight of the headset on the front of your head, this induces considerable neck strain over time.

Additionally, a lot of the games use some form of world-dragging to translate the player around the virtual game space. Smooth artificial locomotion causes people to stand still, which is biomechanically more tiring than moving around on your feet.

Our ideal game would have you looking straight or slightly up during the majority of the game, and would take place within a fixed volume to encourage the player to move around physically.

Specific Ideation

This section is going to be a bit of a freeform brainstorm on how to drive the design of our hypothetical game.

The geometry should be topologically 3D and exist within the player’s real space volume. Perhaps the battlefield exists as a series of nodes with links between them. Nodes would provide both resources and 3D arenas for engagements, while links could be created and destroyed over time, and have different properties (slow/fast, dangerous, etc).

In order to decouple input frequency from player power, we can implement an action budget. This might be a power meter that slowly fills up, and allows manipulation of nodes and other resources on the board. Managing and budgeting your energy would be an important meta-game. You could burn energy to push an offensive, or burn energy to defend more effectively. Having low energy would make you vulnerable. Final Assault is an example of a game that does this well.

During direct engagements, when two players are both competing for the same location on the battlefield, we must make sure to provide significant choices to players and also prevent the faster player from automatically gaining the advantage.

The majority of an attacker’s effort would be in preparing an attack. Adding a delay between finishing preparations and the actual attack would allow defenders to be alerted and turn their attention to the engagement.

Micromanagement would be penalized – it could cost energy from the action budget, and take time to be delivered to the battlefield. Sending too many commands in succession could paralyze your units.

Leveraging high-level inputs like unit formations and group composition could be effective. Having unit behavior change significantly based on group composition could allow deep strategic play and forward-thinking. For example, assigning a fighter escort to your bomber squadron could cause the bombers to focus on making headway towards their target rather then spend effort defending themselves.

This concept of purchase-then-attack could be expanded by allowing players to purchase reserve units at a discount; if you can properly judge how an engagement will play out, you can get proportionally more power onto the battlefield in the right place at the right time.

Resource income should be expandable, but not exponentially. We want to prevent “steamrolling”, and instead foster a tug-of-war dynamic. Spending time arranging your resource production in 3D space could yield some efficiencies — but ideally this requires a trained eye rather than a fast hand.

In addition, adding unit exhaustion could prevent a well-designed push from completely overrunning the opponent without giving them opportunity to counter. Making defense easier than offense means you need to continually exercise superior play in order to win. Over time, this balance should become more unstable – this prevents a complete stalemate. After many minutes of play, a single advantageous play could cascade to victory.

Perceivable situational details should influence the outcome of encounters. Things like group composition, terrain, weather, flanking, formations, and unit morale, if properly exploited, can lead to one-sided engagements.

Game conditions should change to prevent a player from establishing a totally unassailable position. For example, a changing battlefield topology would open new flanking routes or render previously vital positions redundant. This would also require players to continually adjust their personal strategy, leading to more interesting matches.

We want to encourage strategic posturing. Placement of units should be a mind-game, to some extent. Direct engagements should resolve fairly simply and quickly, discouraging micro-management and feelings of helplessness as your forces lose. There could be several discrete points during an engagement where player commands are communicated to the units – creating a rock-paper-scissors guessing game. “Is the opponent going to change his formation command, or keep it the same?”

All together, this should lead to a “dance”, where the player shifts around the space, setting commands up that will execute at some time in the near future.

Anyways, I hope this has excited some ideas in your brain. It has certainly done so for me.

Filed under Analysis, Blog, Games, VR Tagged with , , , , , , ,

VR Games are Less Immersive than Pancake Games

February 1, 2020 1 Comment

When people first try VR, they often experience The Blu. It is a spectacular demonstration of the presence and immersion possible in VR. In the most popular sequence in the experience, you find yourself on the deck of a sunken ship. As you marvel at the beauty of this underwater environment you have been transported into, a gigantic whale comes into view, mere meters away from you. It pauses to eye you (curiously? balefully?), before swimming away and sending a rush of water past you.

Wow! The fidelity of the environment in its visuals and audio stun the senses at first. Then, you realize you can walk about this deck as if you were there, even crouching down to inspect objects and fish, or reaching out your hand to brush the fauna of this seascape. Now, you come face to face with a creature whose scale you have only been privy to before maybe once, in a natural history museum. But this whale is living; you can lock eyes with it, and the encounter is as ephemeral as a real encounter with a wild creature – before you know it, it is gone.

This is VR in its best form: you are truly transported to a realm that is better than real life. Even if you took the time to become certified for scuba diving and started exploring sea wrecks and swimming with sea life, it wouldn’t be the same. VR allows you to strip away the scuba mask and the hours of training, the cost of taking a boat out to a site, and the danger of entering an alien world. It condenses a transcendent experience into a package that is available to ANYONE, even the young and the handicapped. It is hyperreal: better than reality.

But most of what you can experience in VR does not match this level of hyperreality. It struggles to justify the friction of the medium – the setup time, the cost, the discomfort of strapping a device to your face. Even enthusiasts soon realize that the available virtual worlds of VR don’t offer a better experience, holistically, than sitting on the couch watching Netflix or playing a 3rd person action game on the computer. Why is this? There is a fundamental calculation being performed unconsciously:

Relative Value = Unique Benefits – Unique Downsides

VR has a lot of unique benefits as compared to traditional pancake gaming, as well as some unique downsides. One large benefit is the novelty factor. But this benefit decreases with exposure, and in the end this calculation of relative value results in a negative number for most people. The data backs this up. 40% of people only use their VR device once a week, 34% of people use it less frequently than that. [1] A lot of people mostly break their device out to show to someone else.

Some of the common unique benefits of VR:

  1. Presence – VR has a phenomenal ability to make your brain believe you are truly in a different space.
  2. Massive input space — 6 DOF VR’s motion controllers afford many degrees of freedom over traditional computer inputs. Not only are there the eponymous 6 degrees of freedom (position and rotation), but there is linear and angular velocity, two or more analog inputs (joystick, trigger, etc), and several digital inputs (face buttons).
  3. Physical Freedom – you can transcend the limitations of your mortal form, flying across the world like a superhero or diving deep into the depths of an abyss.
  4. No Consequences – this is a benefit shared, nominally, by traditional games. In Grand Theft Auto you can shoot, steal, and drive like a demon without consequences – you won’t feel bad for killing real humans, and you won’t go to jail for the rest of your life. In VR, you can explore the same kind of consequence-free space, but mapped much closer to reality. You aren’t pressing a button to smash open your opponent’s skull in the gladiatorial arena; you are actually doing it!

Some typical downsides of VR:

  1. Time, Space, and Monetary Cost – not only are the headsets and computers expensive, but you often need to dedicate space in your house to them, and spend time setting it up and maintaining it.
  2. Hassle – by this, I mean the stress imposed by the ensemble of equipment. In order to enjoy the benefits of VR, you must contend with adjusting the headset to fit your head, finding a proper IPD setting, adjusting the headphones or earbuds, picking up the controllers after putting on the headset, adjusting straps on the controllers, minding the headset cable during play, avoiding lens fog, etc. Then sometimes the computer will be acting up, requiring some troubleshooting and application restarting.
  3. Discomfort – even with a perfectly situated headset, it presses against your face and scalp and heats up. Most devices also introduce some ocular discomfort over time, whether due to pupil swim, IPD mismatch, or other subtle optical problems.
  4. The Experience Mapping Problem.

The Experience Mapping Problem

The human brain is fantastic at recognizing patterns and drawing connections. As young children, we gain an intuitive understanding of physics by observing how objects react to our inputs – we unconsciously construct an elaborate mental model of reality, which allows us to accurately predict the outcome of our actions. This is what lets you grab a mug and set it down elsewhere without spilling its contents, or push through a door and enter the room beyond. Sometimes, this model is incorrect: you misjudge the weight of the mug, or the door is locked. When this happens, your body often continues to execute a planned sequence, causing you to drop the mug or run into the door. Trained on hundreds of thousands of hours of experience, our mental model maps certain stimuli to certain responses – and it takes a lot to break that linkage and reform your model to account for a new reality:


VR, fundamentally, runs smack into this mapping problem. Traditional pancake games exist as a separate reality – one that exists on a screen, and which you interact with by pressing buttons. You construct a new mental model when playing pancake games, one that maps the stimuli on-screen to button-pressing responses. Virtual reality, on the other hand, intends to present a reality that mirrors real life. You see it and hear it the same way you see the real world, you can move around with your actual body and you can use your hands to interact with the world – just like real life!
So your brain, naturally, attempts to use the same mental model to react to stimuli in VR. But this rarely serves you well. Current digital worlds function with radically different rules. And this radical mismatch between your mental model’s expected outcome and the observed outcome breaks immersion.

This is the basis behind my claim that VR is actually less immersive than traditional interactive simulations. This runs contrary to what you would expect; what could be more immersive than actually being physically present in another world? But what is immersion? Immersion is the transportation of the spirit – when your subjective experience is completely subsumed by a piece of media. You can be sitting on your couch with a controller, but be completely immersed in the fantasy action game in front of you. Your entire consciousness is in the world described by the image on-screen. Yes, your bodily presence never leaves the couch, but your mind and soul are elsewhere. This can happen even with a movie or book. A book is not naturally immersive, but eons of narrative craft can be leveraged by a good author in order to transport you to another time and place.

The antithesis to immersion is any reminder of your bodily presence in the real world. If you must consciously acknowledge the duality of your existence (the body in one place, the mind in the other), your mind is drawn back to the mortal coil. A distraction causes you to look up from your book, someone walks in front of the TV, or a phone goes off in a theater.

On one hand, VR enables a powerful sort of pseudo-presence. Your eyes and ears are physically present in this other reality, as are your hands (sort of). On the other hand, this physical presence is hampered by invasions of external elements — the cables, the screen-door effect, limited field-of-view, inner-ear and proprioceptive discrepancies — which remind you that you are strapped into a headset.

In addition, many VR experiences are chock full of metaphorical phones-in-theaters. The unconscious attempt to apply your mental model of the real world to this virtual world results in constant discrepancies between expected and observed results, which must be resolved with conscious effort. This further drags your mind away from the constructed reality and back into real life.

What can we do? How do we create a virtual reality that delivers on the promise in The Blu?

How do we tip the calculation of relative value from red to black?

Simply posing the question suggests an answer: we leverage the unique benefits and minimize the unique downsides. Fortunately, lots of people are already working to this end. The monetary cost of VR is decreasing, along with the setup and hassle. Technological improvements in display technologies and audio simulations boost presence, and new apps give players new freedoms and consequence-free fantasy fulfillments.

People are working on these problems because they are obvious. But the Experience Mapping Problem is not obvious. Its results are obvious – a lack of immersion. But this is frequently diagnosed as a fidelity problem, to be solved by higher resolution displays, more realistic graphics, advanced physics simulations, and more “natural” controllers. Unfortunately, these things may actually worsen the Mapping Problem with current-gen VR.

[Asgard’s Wrath]

[Job Simulator]

Which is more immersive? Asgard’s Wrath is more realistic, but you are less likely to lose yourself in the simulation.

[Hand tracking]

[Oculus Touch]

Which is more immersive? Finger tracking is more realistic, but when you try to grab a virtual object, the outcome is VERY different from the expectation based on a lifetime of using your hands.

One solution is to create a set of stimuli that are so different from reality that the player does not make the mistake of assuming their IRL mental model will apply in this space. But this means we must abandon the benefits of VR related to player fantasy. Physical freedom and consequence-free spaces are less meaningful if they are completely unrelated to reality anyways. Nonetheless, some experiences like Tilt Brush and Oculus Medium leverage the input freedom and physical movement freedom to create engaging abstract experiences. But the promise of a hyperreal VR world that is “like real life but better” demands that we try harder to resolve the Mapping Problem.

There are two paths to resolution – the first (and more common approach) is to expedite the player’s development of a new mental model. The second path is to develop virtual realities that are designed to gracefully accept players’ actions and minimize mismatches between expected and observed outcome.

We need elements of both solutions in order to achieve VR’s potential — but modern games need more of the second path. Forcing the player to develop a complicated new mental model to interact with virtual reality means sacrificing a significant amount of VR’s hyperreality, and thereby decreasing its relative value. But we need to maximize the relative value of VR — it’s now or never. If VR doesn’t enter the mainstream now, it will likely never flourish.

The most popular apps and games can teach us how to minimize the mapping problem; games like SUPERHOT, Job Simulator, Robo Recall, and Thrill of the Fight.

Let’s make VR the immersive hyperreality we were promised by science fiction:


(video source)

[1] “77% of Virtual Reality Users Want More Social Engagement”

Filed under Analysis, Blog, Games, VR Tagged with , ,

What can the current VR market teach us about design?

October 4, 2019 Leave a comment

In this post:

 

Introduction

I figured I would write this post now, since it is rapidly becoming outdated. For a while now, I’ve been following the popularity of various virtual reality (VR) games. Specifically, I’m interested in the real player engagement generated by these games, for the purpose of creating a rough qualitative model which can predict a given game’s success.

What are the stakes here? Assume we want to make a profitable VR game on a (relatively lean) budget of $500,000. In order to break even, you need to sell 25,000 copies at a $30 price point. In reality, your price point is probably lower ($20 or $25), and you’ll be selling a large number of copies at a discounted price point in Steam sales. Your budget may also be higher (think 1-2 million dollars). However, we can also assume your sales figures will be roughly doubled if you release the game on PSVR, and maybe tripled if you release on Oculus Quest (big assumptions, but these are all ballpark numbers anyways).

More than 1,000 games with VR support were released on Steam in 2018. Even assuming that 80% of those are hot garbage, you need to beat about 165 other games in order to reach that 25,000 sale mark. That’s right: by the time you get to the 35th best-selling game in 2018, you are looking at games that only sold around 25,000 copies.

I will delve a little more into the specifics later, but the crux is that, in 2018, there is heavy correlation between sales and active playerbase. That is, the games that people keep playing tend to get the most sales. Therefore the pertinent question is: what can we glean from the top-played games, so that we can more reliably develop profitable VR games?

More explanation can be found at the end of this post. But, a caveat: here I’m mainly looking at Steam and assuming it is a representative sample of the market at large. Ok, let’s jump right into it.

 

What are consumers choosing?

If we take a gander at what games people are playing on Steam in a given day, you’ll find a list that looks like this:

  • Beat Saber
  • Pavlov VR
  • B&S (full title: Blade and Sorcery)
  • Rec Room
  • H3VR (full title: Hot Dogs, Horseshoes, and Hand Grenades)
  • Skyrim
  • Arizona Sunshine
  • Job Simulator
  • SUPERHOT VR
  • Onward
  • Fallout
  • GORN
  • Elven Assassin
  • The Lab
  • Zero Caliber VR
  • Space Pirate Trainer
  • STAND OUT

This is roughly ordered by player count. Beat Saber usually has between 1000 and 1500 players, Pavlov usually has about half that; Rec Room, B&S, and H3VR have a few hundred players, and the others have between 120 and 20 players.

(Rec Room and The Lab are free, so we will ignore those henceforth)

Most of these have between 200,000 and 500,000 owners on Steam. Some are lower; B&S, Elven Assassin, STAND OUT, and Zero Caliber have 40,000 – 100,000 owners. Note that you can’t multiply the owner count by the sale price to get the gross revenue, because owners include people who got it for free or at a heavy discount. However, high owner count usually means high revenue.

All of these “top-played” games landed on the top 20 best-selling list of games for 2018. Despite the low ratio of active players to total owners, the top-played list is remarkably stable. All this suggests that it isn’t freak chance that these games are on top.

There are only a few games from the top 20 best-sellers in 2018 that aren’t on this “active playerbase” list:

  • Orbus VR
  • DOOM VFR
  • Raw Data
  • Rick and Morty
  • I Expect You To Die
  • Budget Cuts
  • Sairento VR
  • Sprint Vector

These all have ownership numbers between 20,000 and 100,000 on steam, but normally 10 or fewer active players at a given time.

The ones in bold are linear singleplayer games — i.e. you play them once and you’ve gotten everything out of them — so it isn’t surprising they don’t have an active playerbase. Three of the others, OrbusVR, Raw Data, and Sairento VR, benefit from a first-movers advantage. OrbusVR is the first “VR MMO”, while Raw Data and Sairento were some of the first games with significant amounts of content and “good graphics”. This has placed them as well-known titles in the VR market, and continues to drive consumer interest despite the fact that they clearly can’t sustain player interest. I would argue that Sprint Vector also benefits from a sort of second-hand first-movers advantage, being developed by Survios, the same company behind Raw Data (and thus benefitting from higher consumer awareness).

Many of the top-played games also benefit from a first-movers advantage. Some happened to be high-quality games in a very early market: Space Pirate Trainer, Arizona Sunshine, Job Simulator, SUPERHOT. Some happened to hit a particular niche, maybe without being high-quality: STAND OUT, H3VR.

But, are there features intrinsic to these games that we can learn lessons from?

Only 40% of the top-played games have a multiplayer mode, and you would expect games with active playerbases to have multiplayer support. When you consider all the top 35 best-selling games (which, remember, you need to be in to turn a profit) only 25% have multiplayer. I used to think that a VR game needed multiplayer support, even if people didn’t tend to use it, because it added significant perceived value to the consumer. This is clearly not the case. From a numbers perspective, adding multiplayer support is currently not worth it.

I suspect that having a game with an active playerbase is healthy for sales, since it places you on the front page of the “What’s Being Experienced” chart in the Steam store. It looks like this:

As a player, this list is very appealing. It shows what games people have found to be continually fun; if I buy a game from this list, I have a higher chance of maximizing the bang for my buck.

So while VR games can and have been successful with low replayability (Moss and I Expect You To Die come to mind), creating a game that players can return to night after night significantly increases the chances of making a profit. A game that people can keep playing is also a game that people will keep talking about both online and in real life, and word-of-mouth is not to be underestimated as a force for generating sales in the VR market.

However, it is incredibly difficult to provide the sort of value that keeps a player entertained for months, especially since every player wants something different. This is where user-created content and mods are invaluable. It is no accident that the games with the biggest active playerbases are also well-known for their user-generated content and mod support: VR chat, Rec Room, Beat Saber, Pavlov VR, B&S, and Skyrim. In fact, it could be said the mods for these games are more popular than the games themselves.

If someone says “I couldn’t imagine playing this game without mods,” as is often said of those games mentioned above, it isn’t a sign of failure on the developer’s part. It is a sign that they have provided a platform that will continue to excite people and generate sales, even without further effort from the developers. It is the holy grail of VR game development: maximum engagement at minimum cost.

Thus, we have a basic template for thinking about a VR game with a chance of profitability: a mod-friendly singleplayer game that a player can jump into night after night and that makes them want to talk about their experiences.

 
 

Three Design Pillars

What keeps players coming back? What keeps them in the headset when they could be doing other things? In my estimation, all the top-played games succeed in one or more of three design categories, or pillars:

  • Kinesthetically satisfying core loop
  • Colorful and compelling atmosphere or character (henceforth “compelling character”)
  • Fantasy fulfillment

 

A kinesthetically satisfying core loop is a basic gameplay loop that, absent all else, makes you move your body in a way that feels good. The best of these have the player doing things you can imagine a kid doing by himself on a playground just because it’s fun to do. Beat Saber, B&S, GORN, Space Pirate Trainer, and SUPERHOT all get you moving in satisfying ways. There isn’t a lot of standing still, trying to point your controller at something, or fumbling with menus, or fiddling with two small objects. They have sweeping motions and encourage you to sway your body smoothly and sinuously. When describing the game to your friends, you can move your body and make sounds with your mouth to convey the experience.

Compelling character is when a character in the game, or simply the attitude of the game itself, makes you want to stay in it. Arizona Sunshine has a fun self-narrator that lends life to a game that otherwise would become a drag after half an hour. Job Simulator is silly and absurd. GORN is a masterful blending of comical and gory action that sucks players right into the universe with minimal friction.

Finally, fantasy fulfillment is the thing most players actively look for in a VR game. They want to be a Jedi, a gladiator, a marine, a wizard, a survivor of the zombie apocalypse. Whether through the story, the action, or the environment, a game with fantasy fulfillment transports the player to a different time, place, and role. Their return to the real world after a play session is a shock, and it creates a yearning to return to that place where they were something different than they are in real life.

Some VR games ride solely on their fantasy fulfillment. People harp on Skyrim VR for being a bad VR port, but it hits the top-played list because it has such rich, immersive environments. H3VR is a gun simulator with some game modes tacked on. Most successful VR games have at least partial elements of fantasy fulfillment. Even Beat Saber, a game that isn’t really *about* anything, still generates fawning comments about how it really feels like you are wielding a lightsaber.

Obviously, each of these pillars are highly personal. Different people like different characters, have different fantasies, and enjoy different motions. For example, I can’t stand the bow-and-arrow motion in VR, but I know a lot of people enjoy it — hell, the only VR “genre” more prevalent than bow-and-arrow games are shooters.

It is thus a developer’s goal to execute on a concept that squarely hits all three pillars for their target audience while still doing the other things a game needs to do to succeed, like providing a unique value proposition to the player and being easy to market. These three design pillars are necessary, but not sufficient, for success.

Does this describe your VR game?

A single-player game that fulfills a fantasy for players. Once in the headset, it immediately captures players with a kinesthetically fun core loop, and keeps them playing for its compelling character. Players want to talk about their experience in the game and play it again, exploring user-generated content and mods to play exactly what they want and how they want.

 
 

(The rest of this post is data sources and housekeeping. Feel free to skip it.)
 

Appendix

I’ve been using data from a few sources:

https://vrlfg.net/ VR LFG provides live stats from Steam for VR games.
http://steamspy.com/ SteamSpy provides historical data and ownership numbers for Steam games.
https://vrscout.com/news/steam-leak-reveals-vr-player-count/ This was a player count leak in summer of 2018.
https://store.steampowered.com/sale/2018_top_vr/ This is a list of games by “top-selling in 2018”, measured by gross revenue, sorted into buckets or “tiers” (but not ordered within a given tier).
http://gamstat.com/games/ Not relevant to this post, since I focus only on Steam stats, but GamStat provides stats on Playstation games including PSVR, currently the largest virtual reality platform.

The numbers I used in this post are mostly from May 2019, but I don’t think moving that needle backwards or forwards by 6 months would change the conclusions of this post.

To put game owner counts in perspective, at the tail end of 2018 there were roughly 2.5 million Oculus Rift headsets sold, and 1.5 million Vive headsets. There were also around 4 million PSVR headsets (thus the comment about releasing for PSVR doubling sales numbers). These PCVR numbers from Statista are corroborated by a report by NVIDIA that there are about 4 million PC headsets total out there.

[1] PCVR headset sales from Statista
[2] NVIDIA PCVR headset count confirmation
[3] PSVR headset sales

There are two major storefronts on PC — Oculus and Steam. This hampers analysis a little, because numbers from Oculus are basically impossible to come by. However, based on some other data I’ve been privy to, sales numbers on the Oculus store may be about 50% of sales on Steam. I have no idea how reliable this number is, or what the variance is, but it at least provides a starting point for ballpark estimates.

Rough player counts are possible for Steam through Steamspy, and Playstation through Gamstat, but ultimately without access to the raw data behind each of these platforms, opportunities for quantitative analysis are limited (as are my skills in that regard). However, obviously some patterns have emerged.

It seems to me that this general alignment between what people are continuing to play and what is selling well is a sign that 2018 was the first year of stability in the VR market. Games can no longer benefit easily from a first mover’s advantage, where people will buy a game simply because it fills a gap in the market.

Below are the best-selling VR games in 2018, along with ownership numbers. The games were sorted into tiers based on the sales achieved in 2018, meaning some games in lower tiers have higher owner counts than games in higher tiers, due to release date or sales pattern differences.

Platinum (Tier 1)

Game Release User Score Owners
Beat Saber 2018 [EA] 97% 563,000
Pavlov VR 2017 [EA] 89% 370,000
H3 VR 2016 [EA] 97% 297,000
Job Simulator 2016 84% 280,000
SUPERHOT VR 2017 89% 262,000
Onward 2016 [EA] 91% 256,000
Arizona Sunshine 2016 86% 249,000
Skyrim VR 2018 82% 215,000
Fallout 4 VR 2017 71% 201,000
GORN 2017 [EA] 97% 195,000
OrbusVR 2017 [EA] 81% 29,000

Gold (Tier 2)

Game Release User Score Owners
Space Pirate Trainer 2017 [prev. EA] 95% 164,000
DOOM VFR 2017 59% 119,000
Raw Data 2017 [prev. EA] 87% 97,000
Rick and Morty 2017 74% 89,000
I Expect You To Die 2017 92% 68,000
Budget Cuts 2018 73% 49,000
STAND OUT 2017 [EA] 77% 44,000
Zero Caliber VR 2018 [EA] 73% 39,000
Sairento VR 2018 [prev. EA] 90% 38,000
Sprint Vector 2018 90% 28,000

Silver (Tier 3)

Game Release User Score Owners
Audioshield 2016 82% 126,000
Serious Sam: The Last Hope 2017 85% 79,000
Blade & Sorcery 2018 86% 74,000
Fruit Ninja VR 2016 85% 69,000
Dead Effect 2 VR 2017 83% 55,000
Richie’s Plank Experience 2017 83% 45,000
Moss 2018 91% 43,000
VTOL VR 2017 94% 37,000
In Death 2018 91% 29,000
Duck Season 2017 86% 28,000
Creed 2018 82% 27,000
Talos Principle VR 2017 87% 23,000
Box VR 2017 87% 22,000
Serious Sam 3 VR 2017 89% 19,000
LA Noire 2017 62% 18,000

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VR Isn’t Ready

March 6, 2016 Leave a comment

Recently I’ve heard a lot of hubabaloo about VR, especially with regards to games. This wave of hype has been going on for while, but it has personally intensified for me because one of my professors this semester is running a VR startup. I’m also working on a VR-compatible game, so VR talk has become more relevant to me.

Array of current VR headsets

Array of current VR headsets

First off, I believe VR is still 10 years away from its prime-time. The tech is just not advanced to a viable level right now, and some fundamental issues of user experience have yet to be solved.

For example, my professor gave an example of why VR is such an immersive mode of interaction: the first time people put on the headset and jump into a virtual world, they reach out and try to touch objects. He trumpeted this as being evidence of a kinetic experience (i.e. it pushed them to “feel” things beyond what they immediately see). While is this kind of true, I see it far more as evidence of a fundamental shortcoming. The moment a user tries to interact with the world and fails, they are jerked out of the fantasy and immersion is broken. This is true in all games; if a user believes they can interact with the world in a certain way but the world doesn’t respond correctly, the user is made painfully and immediately aware that they are in a game, a simulation.

Control VR isn't enough.

Control VR isn’t enough.

This brings me to the first huge issue: the input problem. VR output is relatively advanced, what with Oculus and Gear VR and Morpheus. But we’ve seen little to no development effort targeted at ways for the user to interact with the world. Sure we have Control VR and such projects, but I think these haven’t caught on because they are so complicated to setup. Oculus made huge strides by turning the HMD into a relatively streamlined plug-and-play experience with a minimal mess of cables. We have yet to see how Oculus’s custom controllers affect the space, but I have a feeling they aren’t doing enough to bridge the haptic gap. We won’t see VR takeoff until users are no longer frustrated by the effort to give input to the game by these unintuitive means. As long as users are constantly reminded they are in a simulation, VR is no better than a big TV and a comfy couch.

Speaking of big TVs: the output tech isn’t good enough. The 1080p of the DK2 is nowhere near high enough to be immersive. Trust me: I’ve gotten to try out a DK2 extensively in the past few months at zero personal cost. My opinion is informed and unbiased. Trying to pick out details in the world is like peering through a blurry screen door. As long as I’m tempted to pop off the headset and peek at the monitor to figure out what I’m looking at, VR isn’t going to take off. Even the 2160×1200 of the consumer Oculus won’t be enough. When we get 3K or 4K resolutions in our HMDs, VR will be a viable alternative to monitor gaming. Of course, this tech is likely 5-10 years away for our average consumer.

These never caught on.

These never caught on.

This all isn’t to say that current VR efforts are for naught. These early adopter experiments are definitely useful for figuring out design paradigms and refining the tech, However, it would be foolish to operate under the assumption that VR is poised to take the gaming world by storm. VR is not the new mobile. VR is the new Kinect. And like the Wii and Kinect, VR is not a catch-all interaction mode; most gaming will always favor a static, laid-back experience. You can’t force people to give up lazy couch-potato gaming.

Of course, outside of gaming it may not be a niche interaction mode. In applications where immersion is not the goal and users expect to have to train in the operation of unnatural, intuitive controls, VR may very well thrive. Medicine, industrial operation, design, and engineering are obvious applications. It might even be useful for education purposes. But temper your expectations for gaming.

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