I Played VR Games at E3 and Found the Headset Matters Least

As long as the story works, visual polish usually doesn't matter

Going to E3 is a bit like going to a Disney theme park. Crowds, noise, bad food. You study the grounds beforehand, plan your route and decide which lines to join. You usually can't get to everything you want to try, and for some attractions even hours in line won't guarantee you a turn.

Comparing E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, with Disney is an interesting exercise. Both are based in Los Angeles, both are major parts of today's entertainment culture, and both are bound up with computer graphics. But their differences may be more worth thinking about. Standing in line at E3 over the past two days, I remembered the time Ed Catmull, president of Pixar and a pioneer of computer graphics, went to Disney as a student to make the case for his field. It was 1973, and computers were nowhere near powerful enough for what animators needed. The technology Catmull was developing at the University of Utah was ahead of its time, but Disney met it coldly. They didn't think computers could do anything for animation, and instead asked whether he would like to work at Disney Imagineering, the division that today runs Disney's theme parks around the world. Catmull wrote:

I turned it down without hesitation. A job in the theme parks would have meant abandoning the goal I had always had. I didn't want to design amusement rides; what interested me was making animation with computers.

In 1973, the amusement park in the physical world and the world of bits on a computer screen were sharply separate. Now, in 2015, the work of stitching the two together is slowly getting under way, behind ideas such as virtual reality, augmented reality and wearable devices.

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Today we use the terms virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) for two different approaches to media technology. The first seeks to "switch off" the real world entirely: everything you perceive is simulated by some output device. For the past several decades, the dominant visual form of that device has been the display screen. Now some people believe the future is a pair of glasses worn on the head. Augmented reality, by contrast, aims to "enhance" the real world by layering media on top of it. In other words, the information your eyes receive comes not only from an output device but also from the world around you.

The point of that dry passage is this: virtual reality is not the same thing as VR goggles. Nor, of course, is augmented reality just AR glasses. With everyone's attention fixed on the Oculus Rift, Sony's Project Morpheus, Samsung's Gear VR, Google Cardboard and Microsoft's HoloLens, it is easy to forget that most machines with a display as their output device are, in some sense, virtual reality. Today we debate how many fps (frames per second) a VR headset needs to keep players from getting dizzy, yet early computer games achieved deep immersion without any images at all. At the "Videogame History Museum" booth at this year's E3, I saw the early-1980s interactive-fiction game Zork. The inside of the box was printed with praise from various quarters. One fan, a thirteen-year-old from Seattle named Dean, put it this way:

All-text is great. My imagination is greater than any graphics.

You could argue that if computer graphics had then been as advanced as they are today, thirteen-year-old Dean would probably not have been drawn to a world made only of text. But the point here is to cut the link between sophisticated imagery and immersion, or virtual reality. Only on that basis can we fairly judge some of the products and games shown at this year's E3.

On the product side, VR headsets have been promised and not delivered for more than a year, and the major makers have finally, one after another, announced release dates. Sony's Project Morpheus and Oculus VR's Rift will both go on sale in the first half of next year, and Valve's SteamVR system will arrive by the end of this year. The first two have rich backers (Facebook bought Oculus VR last year) and are bound to turn up at every major game show and event this year. Oculus seems to be iterating faster than Project Morpheus. At the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in March, Oculus was still showing a prototype code-named Crescent Bay; three months later, what we tried at E3 was already an early version of the retail Rift due out next year.

The big companies all know that a pair of goggles alone won't lead players into the age of virtual reality. If a few killer games don't arrive at launch, these headsets will be like the first iPhone with no apps, good only for phone calls, or the first Wii without Wii Sports (that last example cuts both ways), and will end up gathering dust. Sony and Valve are game companies themselves, so they have little to worry about. Oculus has also invested in a number of independent VR developers and is working to grow a third-party market for VR games. The earlier Crescent Bay demo offered only non-interactive 360-degree footage, things like dinosaurs attacking a modern city, but the Rift demo at E3 this time used real games.

That is not to say games will decide whether VR products succeed. It is too early to tell, and John Carmack, chief technology officer of Oculus VR, said at GDC in March that more than half of future VR applications might not be games at all but purely visual experiences or educational software. Still, games are without doubt the medium that most fully shows how mature a VR system is. As before, Oculus ran its demos by appointment, and which game you played was entirely random. I was assigned Insomniac Games' action-adventure title Edge of Nowhere. The pity is that it doesn't use Oculus Touch, the controller Oculus built for the Rift, but a conventional gamepad. In the few minutes I played, apart from being able to look around a full 360 degrees, playing this kind of third-person action-adventure game (think Tomb Raider) on the Rift was not fundamentally different. The gap is a bit like the one between a 3D film and an ordinary 2D film: much of the time, the extra information and sensation just get in the way.

Project Morpheus was much the same. I tried Godling, a first-person game from the Icelandic studio Sólfar. You play a "god" no bigger than a baby, freely using various powers in a forest. You can pick up objects from the ground with the controller and, if you like, light the matches lying there and set a fire. Sony's other demos included a soccer game in which you score with headers and The London Heist, a first-person shooter in which two glowing controllers serve as pistols. Like Edge of Nowhere, Godling felt to me as if it had merely taken a three-dimensional scene on a two-dimensional screen and stretched it into a "real" 360-degree scene that wraps around you. It is the kind of thing that thrills people at a show trying it for the first time (and getting their first rush?), but whether it fundamentally changes the experience of playing a game remains to be seen.

At this stage, both the Rift and Project Morpheus have serious problems with fit. I have worn glasses for nearsightedness for years, and even the thin, light 3D glasses handed out at cinemas are not comfortable for me; a giant VR headset is close to torture. At the Oculus booth, it took me three tries, with a staff member's help, to get the Rift on and my glasses seated properly inside it, neither pressing into my eyeballs nor digging into my eye sockets. Even then, it was unpleasant overall. Project Morpheus is more considerate on this front, but it is still not something I would happily pick up and put on whenever I felt like it, especially since the current games don't offer anything truly different from non-VR games.

This is not nitpicking. At the end of last year I bought the first-generation Samsung Gear VR, a consumer headset also made by Oculus but sold under Samsung's brand. Weight and comfort were the biggest obstacles to using it. If every time you think about playing a VR game you remember your glasses digging into your eye sockets, the only choice may be to put the headset on a shelf and leave it there. The good news is that Oculus has clearly noticed. In the questionnaire after the demo, the question right after "Was the Rift comfortable to wear?" was "Do you usually wear glasses?" I expect Oculus to keep refining the hardware over the remaining half year or so.

The quality of VR games is the bigger unknown. While I waited in line for Project Morpheus, a giant poster for The Last Guardian loomed on the wall across the hall. Fourteen years ago, Team Ico gave us Ico, a PS2 game that defied genre, and followed it in 2005 with Shadow of the Colossus. Their third game was the troubled The Last Guardian. At E3 2009, Team Ico said The Last Guardian would come out on the PS3 in 2011. Six years of waiting later, the console generation has changed. The latest word is that The Last Guardian will reach the PS4 next year.

The giant poster for The Last Guardian at E3 2015. Team Ico's game, delayed a full six years, will finally launch as a PS4 exclusive in 2016.

People who haven't played Ico will find it hard to understand why The Last Guardian is so eagerly awaited. Watching the trailer for The Last Guardian now, every emotional swing and moving moment I lived through playing Ico came back at once. For seasoned players, Ico's controls and gameplay are so simple they verge on dull, and the story is flat and thin: the hero, Ico, leads a "princess" trapped by magic out of a castle, dodging mysterious black, vulture-like creatures along the way. But within that simple frame lie extremely fine animation and great emotional force, and the reversal of roles between Ico and the princess at the end is a classic of game design. It is the kind of game you don't want to finish. And it ran on the PS2, a console from fifteen years ago!

On grounds of technology, or even marketing, one could easily argue that a game released in 2016 should at least consider adding VR features. But given where VR products stand today, I am not sure what they could add to a game like The Last Guardian, just as a 3D version of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver would not make it any better.

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Recalling The Adventures of André and Wally B., a two-minute animated short he helped make at Lucasfilm, Ed Catmull wrote that because it had to be finished in time for the important SIGGRAPH conference, parts of the film were still incomplete. They had no color, and some images were only wireframe sketches, yet most of the audience at the premiere never noticed! "They were caught up in the emotion of the story and completely missed its flaws," Catmull said. "That's when I learned something that was confirmed again and again later in my career: no matter how much effort you put into artistic technique, as long as the story works, visual polish usually doesn't matter."

In the world of virtual reality, who will be the first to truly grasp this?

Cover image: Hellorf