Yeah, for me it totally recontextualized how crude our normal 3D character controls are, barely able to navigate around a table, next to VR, all about picking up things off of tables. Even if it’s closer to the experience of typing with Strong Bad hands, it’s such a very different scale and perspective on what level of proprioception and imagined body we have in games.
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I really like the lack of priority on player character weight. running around in 3d games is all about being HEAVY and turning around slow and struggling with getting over and around objects
in vr you effortlessly float everywhere but spend ten minutes trying to sign a paper, but like your sense of self is so much stronger even though youre a ghost with haha strongbad hands
like the way ryo picks up objects makes so much more sense now that ive played VR. like how do we work this new thing? also thinking about the game shenmue as me actually BEING ryo shenmue playing vr for the first time kind of makes it better. im sorry ignore this whole paragraph these are first time thoughts
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that’s real interesting, because it’s both heavier and lighter
You have to move your body and getting under things and around things is so hard next to our normal abstractions that you realize just how far your arms stick out and how long it takes to duck down. There’s a stealth game, Budget Cuts, that’s all about crouching under a desk and I’m lying on the floor trying to hide my legs even as I know they don’t matter, and I’m under something. I don’t think I’ve ever felt under things the way I do in VR (it’s absolutely the game platform for small prey species).
Those movement methods are so different and more abstract than the real-deal body things otherwise and it makes it stick out more than movement in traditional games. So maybe I’m conflicted about that ghost feeling – there’s moods and tones that it’s great for but it’s so distinct and I don’t know yet if I just haven’t accepted it like I did a million other game abstractions.
Shenmue is a good thing to think about what VR is good at; we desperately Yu Suzuki, with money, to play around with VR. Maybe he can hang out with Mizuguchi and they can jam
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I guess its less being a bipedal living thing and rather a floating object that doesnt have to worry about leg placement. im always thinking about my characters legs in non VR games. is there a VR game about running down hills too fast and falling? i will eat my words if there’s specific leg games but theres probably not cuz you dont put the controllers on your knees and thats fine!
maybe a solid upper body with a magical skirt that gives you ghost legs
all the people im most excited to see do VR stuff dont have the budget for it yeah. im glad that its turning into a regular thing and not a trend so more people will eventually be able to make things in it
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I feel like my body (in addition to my head) is always going to prevent me from enjoying VR fully. For example, any VR game I have played that involves me dodging always feels like it thinks I have a much smaller body than I have, so I feel like I am hitting things that are not hitting me.
This kinda really sucks.
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see that’s interesting because I see VR exposing how clunky most of 3D character movement is and I just immediately want to go back to 2D for my quick cool action games and leave 3D to the goose games and skate and goat simulators
I want MORE space between the input device and the thing being displayed; I want more of that abstraction and more clunkiness and physics weirdness and whatever
because that space is where play is imo
and I’d be totally down for that stuff in VR but it also gives me motion sickness a lot and I like, work on making those games. so it kind of sucks that the thing I want from the platform literally makes it so I can’t play on the platform for hours
it’s really tough for me to separate the inclination toward immersion from like, the silicon valley tech bro culture that’s permeated all of it. I thought robert yang had a really good point when he was talking about VR being one of the ways that the medium could “restart” as far as being a good place for different games to come out - he also declared it dead on arrival because it was already moneyed in a way that prevents most of the interesting stuff from happening
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I hope PC headsets keep getting cheaper and the min spec stays leashed to modest 2016 GPUs so we eventually get more interesting ideas. I haven’t really gotten in to “art” VR things to be honest, though.
I liked what Will Smith/Foo were working on because it seemed like a platform you could do any kind of performance in eventually. The attempts to make actual video work are sorely wanting and I think puppeteering 3D models will eventually feel natural enough.
VRChat is a nightmare with public players but I adore the sort of anarchic self-expression when it’s good. I like watching Drumsy on YouTube because they have a sort of gleeful zoomer sincerity. You can be an absurdly buff Pikachu, a furry, an anime girl - whatever you want and can find a model for. For some people that might be closer to who they are than they could ever present IRL and with much more expressive potential than Second Life, etc.
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if I worked on bethesda RPG derivatives for a facebook platform I would hate the entire industry and not be able to give anything any credit unless it were remade whole too
this is a big deal and so many people in the VR space will frame this as a “problem” to be “solved” and it speaks to how tough it is to get out of the mindset of embodiment being the thing that VR does
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Also if any of y’all have trouble in VR, using an anti-emetic drug like dimenhydrinate or meclizine along with a fan will help considerably!
I use my 5’x7’ rug as the boundaries and put the fan blowing at the center from “forward” so I can stay oriented by feel with my feet and the air.
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or even just how many more assumptions VR has to make – the player can walk, stand, crouch, jump, use both arms, has a body shaped within a certain tolerance, has a head that can be fitted, well, into the headset, including any corrective lenses, is not susceptible to the motion sickness some 30% or so of people get
Like a lot of the tech solutions we’ve gotten recently, we’re into really hard and situational solutions rather than wide, easy ones – the tech of '90s Microsoft, and its modernist wide solutions to all problems for everyone
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yeah VR definitely is ignoring peoples body differences than anything else for sure. that does suck
psvr has the most NO BODY games
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also only half of these make you control a human body!
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Y’all are still just the most thoughtful people thinking about games - not totally dismissive of VR in part because @BustedAstromech has generously shared his kit for others to try, but also not in thrall to the illusory Real Game with Immersion that Skyrim modders have convinced money that people want, see: “you have to fix swords in VR! People want to swing a sword!”
It’s frustratingly hard to find anything between these poles!
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I’m glad a lot of VR games don’t revolve around killing people but I always have the thought that like other vidcons it will just become a platform for SHOOTING MEN IN TOTAL REALITY because that makes money
maybe not the most, but I’m willing to accept that we’re the best outside of actual rarefied design circles
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Yeah, if the PSVR set hadn’t been a blurry mess for me when I was playing Polybius (a game it almost worked for), it would definitely be the one I was most interested in, just because Sony realizes people don’t have a lot of space for this stuff (they have to, as Rudie’s Japan Kinect Adventure showed) so there is a decent amount more stuff that isn’t about having the body that I will never have.
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i dunno i have blown away big time game fuckers with opinions i have formed or straight up yoinked from here
like from an actual technical design perspective we’re not the most thoughtful as a group maybe, but everyone whos involved in design here can at least translate it from coding/development snooze fests
sb is never boring and that counts for a lot
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yeah I’m just thinking like
I see manbearcar every few months at events here and I always chat with him and I obviously respect that he spends more of his time noodling on this and iterating than we do and I do generally believe that most things are in the doing
so I wouldn’t come off like “oh we’re the best” when I know how much interesting work a very short list of folks put in
a lot of them came up through sb once upon a time though
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I think it’s like a lot of art criticism; the doing is not the talking, and the doing needs to poach and learn from the talking, and the talking is better when it’s done by a wide range of people with different levels of expertise – the doing is a lock as much as it is a key
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