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When I was younger I wanted to try Virtual Reality more than anything else. I’ve always enjoyed games for the escapism they offer; the opportunity to live as someone else in what is generally a much more exciting world than the one I’m in and to do so without risk of serious harm. VR offered the possibility of taking that to the next level.

I don’t consider myself a ‘gamer’ exactly. I love games and have spent many many hours exploring different worlds on different platforms, but it’s not the ‘game’ part that appeals to me. I’m not that interested in the mass slaughter of NPCs, winning epic races or battling space aliens. I’ve always preferred the quiet moments, like driving a truck through the countryside between cities on GTA: San Andreas or exploring the surface of a barren planet on the first Mass Effect game. I like the character moments too, when they work. Games can provide such a strong sense of empathy or connection between audience and character, even the poorly written ones. Most of all I like stories. I like being taken on a narrative journey. I will never skip a cutscene to get to the action.​

I’ll write more about my relationship with VR in a later post but for now just know that from the moment I first tried on the headset I realised there was so much more going on than I first anticipated. Sure, on a basic level virtual reality is simply putting a screen really close to your face and tricking your brain into perceiving depth, but when you add in the scope of the 360 degree view, the sounds, the way you interact with the experience, the memories it generates, the physical effects it can have, not to mention the way it allows you to connect to a narrative, it becomes clear there is so much to talk about. Of course, people do talk about it on review sites and subreddits and YouTube videos but what I find lacking is anything other than vague descriptions of how these experiences feel.​

There’s a reason I think this is important. I recently visited Whitechapel Gallery with my wife and a couple of friends. It had been some time since I’d been to a gallery and I’d kind of forgotten how to do it. You have to commit to art in a gallery. You have to look at it and clear our everything else until you feel something. What you feel will be different from what someone else feels, there’s no “right” way to feel despite the artist’s intention and that’s what makes art special. What you feel may not be positive but as long as you feel something the art has done it’s job. All art has the capacity to make you feel something, you just have to commit to it.

Video games demand commitment by their very nature. You can’t check your phone while running from the law in Red Dead Redemption 2, not without pausing and breaking the flow. Putting aside online gaming, games are also primarily solitary experiences. They may play for an audience, that’s why Twitch happened, but ultimately the game is there to connect with the person holding the controller. VR games take this even further, making the experience even more solitary and making it even harder to look away. Like it or not, when you play VR you are committed to the art. What that art has to reveal is what I intend to explore in this blog.

This is not a review site, I have no interest in whether VR experiences are “good” or “bad”. Nor is this an academic study, although I am interested in academic readings of VR and may explore this area further in the future. Imagine instead that this is an old-fashioned adventurer’s journal with scribbled notes and diagrams on frayed pages between a worn cover.

This is an account of my adventures in VR and you are more than welcome to join me.

PSVR Worlds: Scavenger’s Odyssey

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The first thing you notice in Scavenger’s Odyssey is that you have a body. You notice this immediately because when the game starts you are looking at your hands, except they’re not “your” hands because they’re blue and only have three fingers and a thumb. You’re in someone else’s body and that feels like a huge revelation. Video games nearly always put us in control of another body but in VR the implications of occupying another form are immediately apparent.

One of the first VR experiences I ever tried was ABE VR, a short horror experience in which you are kidnapped and tortured by a psychotic robot surgeon. The first thing I noticed in that experience is that I was in a woman’s body. The gender (or in the case of Scavenger’s Odyssey the species) of the body isn’t important but what’s interesting is that in these experiences I was faced with the fact that the body I saw when I looked down was not my own. There is something jarring and also fascinating about these moments of realisation. They raise all kinds of questions, like “Who am I?”, “How did I get here?”, “Did I choose to be here or not?” and so on, questions that we should be asking as we start any interactive experience but we don’t because usually the cut scenes tell us what we need to know and that’s enough. There are cut scenes or narrative elements in VR too, but when you are looking down at the body you are inhabiting and asking those questions of yourself there’s a level of connection and engagement that traditional games simply don’t encourage.

Scavenger’s Odyssey adds another level to this sense of being someone else by connecting your head to the body. If you look down you see the torso the arms are connected to and if you lean forward as you look down the alien torso moves forward as well. For comparison, if you look down in Ocean Descent you see the base of the cage but you don’t see your own legs and that lack of a body does take you out of the experience slightly. The knowledge of your own physical form is particularly important in this experience because Scavenger’s Odyssey is all about connection.

As with Ocean Descent this VR experience uses an audio Guide to explain what is happening. In fact, the Guide here is very similar to the one in Ocean Descent – female, American, clearly your superior in this scenario. The first thing she does is connect you to the machine that you find yourself sitting in, which it transpires is a robotic, spider-like vehicle. There are now two levels of connection to another body, first you inside the alien body then the alien inside the machine, which now acts as the body. When you move the sticks on the controller both the alien hands and the scavenger vehicle move; the three separate bodies (player, alien and robot) move as one.

The story concerns a scavenger mission in an asteroid belt in which you are tasked with retrieving an important artefact from the wreckage of an abandoned starship. This involves navigating the wreckage by leaping from surface to surface, often changing direction in mid-air in truly motion-sickness-inducing manoeuvres. Along the way you have to blast alien insect creatures of varying size. None of this is all that interesting except for the motion sickness, which I feel is worth talking about.

Having clocked a handful of VR hours by this point without experiencing any kind of motion sickness I was optimistic in thinking it didn’t affect me. I’d even played Scavenger’s Odyssey briefly before without experiencing any adverse effects. However, on a full playthrough I definitely felt it and a brief search reveals I am not alone.

Motion sickness is thought to be caused when the brain senses two conflicting types of movement. For example, if you are below deck on a boat you appear visually to be static but your body is sensing the up and down movement of the boat on the water and this sensory conflict causes nausea (more comprehensive and accurate explanations of motion sickness are available online). In VR your brain is tricked into thinking it is moving when it is actually still, so naturally motion sickness can occur. This can be really off-putting in a game where you’re supposedly walking around when you’re actually standing still in your living room. However, in Scavenger’s Odyssey it’s not exactly that the VR body is moving and your real life body is static, it’s that your alien body is static and the robot body is moving. This is closer to being on a boat and feeling sea sick than just general VR motion sickness and therefore feels totally appropriate. This physical sensation of feeling sick adds to the immersion because the character you are inhabiting would no doubt feel the same thing.

This brings us back to levels of connection and there is another layer to this that is worth exploring. As mentioned above the game uses a Guide as with Ocean Descent. There is also a Tether, partly through communication again but we are also tethered to the Guide in that she controls the systems in the scavenger robot vehicle. From the little background information provided it is apparent that your species is treated as an underclass in this world and you are forced to go on these dangerous scavenger missions because you are presumably expendable. However, there is another voice. At key moments in the game a second Guide cuts communication with the first and then gives you a vision of the artefact you seek. This second Guide, also female but with a British accent, presumably for contrast, provides a back story about how your race is somehow connected to the beginning of all life in the universe, or something equally 2001. The second Guide establishes a new Tether, which the first then attempts to cut as the game progresses. This use of two Guides in conflict comes up a few times in VR and is a key part of the other major PSVR Worlds experience, The London Heist.

In comparison to the other PSVR Worlds experiences, Scavenger’s Odyssey gives you a huge amount of control with the ability to run, jump, shoot and move objects in the environment. However, in terms of the story the level of control is actually very limited and while I suspect the reasons for this were due to software limitations the consequence is that you feel entirely secondary to the narrative. The scavenger character is unable to truly influence the narrative and becomes almost like a pinball being bounced around a machine by two flippers, which both ultimately have the same goal. The narrative places the Guides in opposition, one instructing you to retrieve the artefact and the other urging you to protect it. In reality there is no decision to be made here and no autonomy. For example, at one point you are attacked by a giant space worm. The first Guide tells you to destroy it because it stands between you and the artefact. The second Guide at first defends the creature and tells you it is only trying to protect its young. Then she tells you that you have to protect the artefact from the creature. Whichever side you’re on you have to kill the space worm to progress and as a result any sense of agency in this world is taken away. Once again VR makes the player a captive spectator, this time with an illusion of control but ultimately unable to truly affect anything in the game world.

I recently completed Red Dead Redemption 2, and it could be argued that despite the open world and endless opportunities for procrastination in that world you are still bound to a set path. It could be argued that all games have a set narrative path of varying degrees. However, like noticing you are not in your own body there is something about being presented with a set path in VR that seems more stark. The worlds we explore in VR feel more real so our inability to change them feels even more hopeless.

Disney Movies VR

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My primary reason for starting this blog was to keep a log of all the VR games and experiences I’ve tried. I was always intending to include Samsung Gear VR experiences as well as PlayStation VR although when I actually picked up my phone and looked at a few of the apps in my library I did wonder if there would be enough to write about. The Gear VR experiences tended to be short, occasionally experimental but more often than not promotional and yet there is something unintentionally weird and fascinating about even the most mundane experiences in VR.

Disney Movies VR is a perfect example of a VR oddity. This free app is mostly a collection of 360-degree trailers for Disney movies that are a few years old now (The BFG, Pete’s Dragon, Rogue One etc) although there are a couple of interesting experiences. Some of these are unintentionally creepy, like Lumière’s Dress Rehearsal in which you are sitting in the dining room from Beauty and the Beast and Lumière sings “Be Our Guest” at you while furniture and plates dance in front of your eyes. There is something about being unable to move out of the chair that makes it seem more like a surreal kidnap scenario, which I suppose in some ways it always was. There is one particularly terrifying moment where something I assume to be a tall wooden hat stand leans in front of you to feed you soup. This experience does have some interactivity so you can grab things like plates and spoons as they pass by but the limited control available makes you feel ineffective and adds to the sensation of being bound to the chair. In a desperate attempt to escape I tried throwing a candle at Lumière but it just dropped pathetically to the table, adding to the pervading sense of uselessness.

Then there are the two Jungle Book experiences, which are entirely intentionally terrifying. In one you are eaten by a giant snake. This really made me question who these experiences are aimed at but at the same time it’s this apparent lack of direction that embodies everything I love about these odd little moments in VR. They play like experiments, most not entirely successful but all at least trying to provoke some kind of reaction. It reminds me of the early days of CD-Rom software, when my favourite band The Residents briefly became tech pioneers and created The Residents Freak Show, which remains one of my favourite PC-related experiences of all time. If someone could recreate The Residents Freak Show in VR that would be something to see.

There are also a bunch of Star Wars experiences, the most interesting of which is surprisingly the behind-the-scenes footage from Rogue One. It’s purely a 360-degree video and I’m not a fan of the film but the sensation of being there on set as they shoot a couple of battle scenes is actually quite impressive.

However, the most interesting section of this app for me is the menu area. You stand at the entrance to the Disney castle. To your left is Stark Tower, home of the Avengers, although no Marvel experiences have been added to the app to date (and given the general lack of updates I’m not sure there ever will be). To your right are AT-ATs and various other Star Wars vehicles. The interesting point about this location, and it’s a recurring feeling in VR, is that it comes with a profound sense of loneliness. I assume this area is supposed to recreate the experience of being at Disneyland and the various experiences are the “rides”, but there is something deeply unsettling about being in a theme park alone at night. This feeling is amplified when you finish an experience and return to the menu area, which is now silent except for the sound of the odd, distant firework, like you’ve left the theme park then snuck back in after hours. I was briefly obsessed with watching urban explorer videos on YouTube and my personal favouites were those in which people broke into theme parks, ideally those that have been closed down and left to rot. There is something about seeing a place that was designed to be full of people and their associated noise suddenly quiet and empty that is inherently creepy. That’s the feeling the Disney Movies VR app creates and again, probably not their intention, but it’s there.

In VR creepiness is never far away.

PlayStation VR Worlds: Ocean Descent

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Ocean Descent is, and was presumably designed to be, the perfect introduction to PlayStation VR. It consists of 3 stages that are essentially three parts of the same experience. All three place the player inside an underwater diving cage. In the first episode, Coral Reef, you watch as angel fish and turtles swim by. This is fundamentally a 360-degree video with little movement and certainly no sense of peril.

In the second, Wildlife Tour, the same thing happens except this time the cage descends into a cave where you encounter stingrays and glowing jellyfish. It’s a perfect visual analogy for how far you as the player are willing to go with VR. The second stage introduces the movement of the cage and as the cage descends there is a sense of potential danger lurking in the unknown darkness of the cave. There are also some light narrative elements here, just by virtue of the movement itself and also with a clever use of visual foreshadowing. If you look down through the floor of the cage you see the darkness of the cave below and within that darkness a single, glowing light. As you descend further the light is revealed to be a jellyfish and moments later you are surround by dozens of them. It’s a simple technique but what it achieves is that it focuses your attention. Once you’ve spotted the jellyfish you know it’s there and you know it’s coming so even if you look away you are aware of the jellyfish.

This notion of focusing attention can be a real issue in VR storytelling, which is why this single moment of the one jellyfish appearing before the others is so important. Immersive theatre productions face similar problems. I saw Punchdrunk’s production of Faust in London around 10 years ago, which took place over several maze-like floors of an abandoned archive building. Left to wander and discover the narrative at our own pace, I distinctly remember feeling that I was constantly missing something more interesting elsewhere. In VR you can choose where to look at all times and it can sometimes feel that you’re missing important parts of the experience by not looking at the right spot at the right time. The single jellyfish is an elegant solution to this problem.

The mild sense of peril established in Wildlife Tour sets us up perfectly for the third stage, Shark Encounter. In this stage the sequence repeats again only this time two remote-controlled drone subs are floating around outside the cage and the experience is accompanied by the voices of two technicians, presumably watching your progress from the ship above. The technicians explain that this is a salvage mission although no one seems sure what the object of that mission is. As the descent continues you discover a sunken nuclear sub and the drones retrieve a radioactive MacGuffin from inside. However, before the cage can ascend it is attacked by a large shark who rips off the front grill and tries his hardest to force his way in before the cage is thankfully hauled back up to safety.

This episode introduces a number of key elements of VR experiences, which I’ll cover individually below:

The Guide

The technicians communicating with the player act as a guide through the experience, setting the scene, enhancing the narrative and adding a further assist to the issue of focussing the attention of the player as mentioned above. The writing in Shark Encounter is actually quite effective and sets the scene efficiently without taking anything away from the experience. It also sets up an interesting premise, prompting me to wonder what was going to happen next in the story once the experience had finished. As a player it makes you feel included and part of the narrative rather than an observer, despite the fact that when you really think about it your involvement in the mission is fairly redundant. There is another aspect to the guide that I think carries through into other VR games and experiences. They act as a ringmaster. VR, more than any other gaming experience, is primarily concerned with spectacle and putting on a show. In the circus the ringmaster’s function is to introduce the acts in a way that builds expectation, and the same can certainly be said of the way the technicians foreshadow the appearance of the shark in this experience.

Atmosphere

Added to the visuals and the communication with the technicians above there are also a couple of key elements in Shark Encounter that help to create an atmosphere. There is dramatic music at key points in the story and there is also the sound of your own panicked breathing. Obviously, such techniques are not specific to VR, but the way they are used and the decision to use them does raise some questions. Firstly, music in VR could in theory take some of the realism away from the experience. We don’t go through life with a soundtrack so being in a first-person viewpoint with a soundtrack playing can seem a little disorientating at times. That said, the music in Ocean Descent is subtle enough to work for the narrative. The breathing is more interesting because suddenly you become aware of inhabiting a character. Sure, I may be breathing heavily in real life as I play but certainly not as dramatically as the sound implies. It’s an interesting choice because it both increases the immersion of the experience and distances us from it at the same time. If it’s not me in the cage, who am I?

In Shark Encounter the atmospheric elements are used to heighten the sense of excitement and dread and for all my concerns it does work, so much so that even on my third playthrough I still backed away from the shark as it came towards the cage. It’s interesting that what was intended to be the first VR experience for the majority of players turns from a tranquil, visual experiment to a full-on horror-themed roller-coaster by the end. Shark Encounter plays like a nightmare and like a nightmare if you die in VR you are mercifully fine in real life. If things do become a little too intense you can always press the PS button and instant transport yourself back to the home screen as if waking from a dream. Dread and horror come easily to VR, as the plethora or horror experiences available clearly demonstrate.

Limited Control

As an introduction to VR, Ocean Descent naturally limits the player’s input to the movement of the headset only. You can, as I discovered on my third playthrough, move around in the cage by walking around IRL. In fact, the cage is around the same size as the field of movement allowed by the PS4 camera. This changes the experience immensely as suddenly you can approach the front of the cage and lean over the railings to steal a closer look at the shark. It also means that this is no longer a 360-degree video. The simple experience of movement within the virtual world that so closely mirrors your own movement in the real world is thrilling and vastly increases the sense of immersion. That said, we are still simply witnesses in this experience. We have no weapons, no way of fending off the shark, no agency.

In VR there will always be limits to what the player can do in the VR world. I can move around the cage, for example, but once the shark has ripped off the front of the cage, I can’t make a break for it and swim to the surface. My interaction is limited and here the developers have used this to their advantage. There is a sense of helplessness in Shark Encounter that while created by limited control is also perfectly suited to the experience.

The Tether

Taking into account all of the above it’s interesting that the designers are able to maintain a balance between the fear and the limited control. They achieve this via a tether, another common feature of VR experiences. This tether takes two forms really, first the physical line between the cage and the boat above that pulls you up from the depths to escape the shark, mirrored by the physical wire that connects the headset to the PS4. More importantly and in some ways more calming is the social tether, the voices on the radio reminding you that you are not alone here. And yet even with this tether established the designers couldn’t resist cutting communications at a crucial moment. This teaches us another important lesson for anyone playing VR.

VR is not to be trusted.