Successful VR Games Won't Succeed Because of VR | Notes from the Game Developers Conference

As with film, this new language may take decades to evolve, and no one today can predict what it will look like when it matures.

What changed in virtual reality between GDC 2015 and GDC 2016? More demos, more talks — so much content that GDC had to open a separate "VRDC" track. With Magic Leap still lying low¹, all eyes remain on three players: Oculus, Sony, and Valve (HTC Vive). All three have now announced prices and release dates — $599 (about ￥3,895) at the end of March, $399 (about ￥2,594) in October, and $799 (about ￥5,196) in May, respectively — so gamers who have been teased for more than a year can finally look forward to something concrete.

Even the most optimistic VR believer can't deny that in 2016 and 2017 the consumer VR headset will remain a toy for hardcore gamers. Those prices cover the headset alone. The Oculus Rift and HTC Vive also need a high-end PC, which adds more than $900 (￥6,000) to the bill. Even Sony's PlayStation VR, the cheapest of the three, won't work without the PlayStation Camera — sold separately, yours for just $44 (about ￥280).

Still, Sony offers the cheapest way into virtual reality. By Sony's own figures, released early this year, the PS4 has sold nearly 36 million units worldwide. A PS4 owner needs only to add the PlayStation VR and the PlayStation Camera. Someone with no console or gaming PC who wants to try virtual reality in one go can buy Sony's complete setup for a little over 5,000 yuan. For the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive, the figure tops 9,000 yuan.

The three companies also brought very different styles to the show. Sony's presenters were the most polished, and their boyish excitement was infectious. Oculus played it straight: still a startup, it has already picked up some of the formal politeness of a big company. Valve, the company behind the most expensive headset, the HTC Vive, is legendary among gamers but far less known to the mainstream than the other two. Its booth sat in a dim, out-of-the-way corner — I found it by chance while buying lunch. The lights in the Vive demo room were turned low, lending it an air of mystery, and the people coming and going looked like serious professionals. Sony and Oculus, by contrast, felt like two small playgrounds.

The VR games at this year's GDC were far more numerous and far better than last year's, but it's still unclear whether 2016 will produce a landmark game — one that makes people buy a particular headset just to play it. (Plenty of people bought a PS3 or PS4 for The Last of Us.) Several VR developers told me that supporting more than one VR platform isn't hard — much easier than building a mobile app for both iOS and Android. Even so, most of the VR games we've seen so far are made for a single platform. All three companies clearly know that a platform lives or dies by its games, so each has prepared a slate of first-party titles that, naturally, will appear only on its own hardware. As for third-party developers, at this early dawn of VR hardware they usually choose to perfect the experience on one platform first.

Three games I played this week showed me what VR could become: Epic Games' first-person shooter Bullet Train (Oculus Rift), Sony's Playroom VR (PlayStation VR), and John Wick (HTC Vive), which Lionsgate and Starbreeze adapted from the film of the same name.

First-person shooters and adventure games match what people imagine VR to be, and they are the genres developers port to VR first. But as with any port, the hardest part is giving the game features that belong to the new platform — making it feel as if it grew there rather than being carried over. One detail in Bullet Train shows its designers thinking about exactly this. The player stands inside a subway station, trading fire with gunmen on every side. One of the biggest problems in VR games is the dizziness and nausea players can feel when they move through virtual space, and the problem gets worse when you're aboard a virtual train in motion. Bullet Train's answer is to replace walking with "teleporting." To get from point A to point B, you point the Oculus Touch, the Rift's hand controller, at a ring that appears at your destination and press a button to jump there. It's a clever compromise. Many people assume that the more your actions in virtual space resemble your actions in the real world, the more "complete" the VR technology is. But that is like saying a painting is better art the more it looks like its model — a naive, pre-modern mistake. Teleporting across long distances may feel "not real enough," but it is a sensible choice while VR hardware remains underpowered. And the extra action may itself become part of the fun.

At a talk on Tuesday, Bullet Train team members Nick Donaldson and Nick Whiting said the game was partly inspired by Asian action films such as John Woo's Hard Boiled and Park Chan-wook's Oldboy. The stylized gunfights that John Woo and action choreographer Philip Kwok staged have long had fans in the United States, and now the designers have borrowed them for Bullet Train. We all know the scene: Chow Yun-fat drops one man, picks up a second gun that for some reason happens to be lying nearby, and in a flash shoots another gunman in the opposite direction. Bullet Train's designers turned this routine into what they call "chaining actions." "Shoot a guy, grab another gun off another guy and shoot another guy — it makes you feel like a badass," Whiting said.

In the demo, the player seems to be immortal. Even when three or four enemies spray you with fire, the bullets switch to The Matrix-style "bullet time" slow motion just before they reach you. (Slow as they are, watching them graze past can still give you a jolt.) Better still, you can reach out with the hand holding the Oculus Touch, catch the bullets, and throw them back at your enemies! I look forward to the day Jeffrey Lau's black comedy 92 Legendary La Rose Noire becomes an interactive VR film.

Bullet Train's designers consistently trade VR realism for playability. History shows that wringing every last drop of computing power from a machine guarantees nothing in game design. Since Super Mario, many of the most inventive games have been made with very little computing power and very few designers. The first great VR game may well be made the same way.

Playroom VR is Sony's in-house multiplayer party game for the whole family. It is a bundle of mini-games and looks very much like a demo that will ship with the PlayStation VR. That sounds as dull as an appliance manual, but each of the four mini-games I played with three strangers made clever use of VR. In a cat-and-mouse game, the player wearing the PlayStation VR is the cat, and the other three, holding ordinary controllers, are the mice. The cat hides behind a curtain and, whenever it briefly opens, lunges head-first to swipe at the mice. In another, the player wearing the headset follows spoken directions from the other three to zap invisible ghosts with a laser beam.

To be fair, Playroom VR will probably end up as a party diversion for when friends visit. But more than 50 VR games will come out on Sony's platform by the end of the year, including big titles such as EVE: Valkyrie. One more point in Sony's favor: the PlayStation VR is more comfortable to wear than the Oculus Rift or the HTC Vive. If, like me, you're a nearsighted glasses-wearer, you may need to take your glasses off to wear the other two comfortably; in my testing the PlayStation VR had no such problem. With the Rift and Vive about to ship, this won't change now; we can only hope the second generation fixes it.

John Wick is an adventure shooter based on the Keanu Reeves film of the same name. Like the Oculus Rift, the HTC Vive comes with two controllers built for VR, which gives the game's adventure side — hunting for clues around the virtual space, examining and handling objects, interacting with characters — plenty of room. As with Bullet Train, the designers face a choice: make the game feel "more VR," or make it more fun? The two pull against each other because, for now, simply being in a virtual environment demands a lot of learning — or exploring. That exploring is novel and enjoyable, but it belongs to the rules of the game, not its core pleasure. A bridge player who spends the whole game learning the rules will probably quit before she ever feels the intellectual thrill of bridge. Oh, you can pick up this phone receiver. Wait — hold it to your ear like a real one and the sound actually gets clearer! That kind of fun is great for a WeChat Moments post, but it can't sustain a game. Thinking back on John Wick, I'm still struck by the odd sensation of riding the old elevator slowly up through the hotel and pulling its old-fashioned lever. But none of that will decide whether John Wick is good game design. Because the game won't launch until the film's sequel comes out early next year, the team has fairly ample time to refine it.

After repeated reminders from industry veterans, everyone now knows that virtual reality needs its own visual, sound, and interaction language. At this year's GDC, Max Planck — a ten-year Pixar veteran and now technical director of Oculus Story Studio — voiced cautious optimism about VR's storytelling potential. As with film, this new language may take decades to evolve, and no one today can predict what it will look like when it matures. But if Bullet Train and Playroom VR teach us anything, it is the old, unchanging rule: technology itself doesn't matter. Mario wears a solid-color cap in Super Mario because the hardware of the day couldn't render hair. In the same way, what game developers really compete on is turning technology — and its limits — into style. The "VR" in "VR game" stands for no more than what you see through a coin-operated telescope on the Empire State Building's observation deck. Successful VR games won't succeed because of VR.

1. On Tuesday night I had dinner with two games-industry people who had tried Magic Leap. Both said it really is magic.

Cover image from Visual China