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.