“VR Game of the Year” Reads a Fading Neon Sign Outside of a Dying Mall
I was initially compelled to write this article because I saw the “VR Game of the Year” nominations for The Game Awards and assumed, for a moment, that someone was playing a prank on me.
The Game Awards and its ilk are invariably a pretty insipid, grim spectacle — looking at their nominations as providing valuable data on the state of the art, rather than the industry that surrounds and often chokes it, would typically be a mistake. They choose award candidates from the largest producers or publishers autonomically, trying to coat themselves in a faux patina of “prestige” to show that they (and their partners!) have a vested interest in Cultivating The Arts… insofar as The Arts remain appealing for advertisers.
But talking about VR presents a challenge for Geoff Keighley and the other assorted clowns wrestling around in his car. Plenty of VR games are ludicrously popular! But they aren’t new games: Beat Saber, VRChat, and Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Handgrenades among others still stand as the eternally revisitable pillars of the medium. The Game Awards has no interest in celebrating these things, because they didn’t come out this year and relitigating something more than a year old on their stage (outside of the usual live-service culprits) doesn’t serve any of their particular, bizarre ends.
So they have to find not just one, or two, but five new VR games to nominate. This isn’t actually hard, save the artificial precept that their choices have to look acceptably professional and “nice” on a giant auditorium screen, lest their blood begin to curdle. For the last few years, the result has been the product of a hilarious, implied panic from within the voting committee to find anything deemed salable enough for the mulch machine.
Let’s see those nominees!
If you don’t know what you’re looking at, this seems… fine. To look “fine” has been the only real intent of the award since its inception in 2016, when it was seen as VR acquiring a specific kind of “legitimacy” (the kind only a kitschy ceremony can provide) from a wider audience. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone care about this award; Beat Saber getting beaten by Astro Bot Rescue Mission in 2018, only to somehow come back in 2019 and immediately win, feels like it should be a source of routine mockery, but it never comes up. Beat Saber players, who were too busy trying to finish Reality Check Through The Skull on Expert in 2018 to vote, might not even be aware it happened.
So what makes this really funny? Well, Sony (and PlayStation by extension) has an 80% chance of winning this award — only Humanity is playable in VR on PC. The rest are exclusive to PlayStation VR2, which can only be used on the PlayStation 5. Consequently, almost none of my VR enthusiast friends have played any of these games in virtual reality — the $550 accessory that would allow them to is even more expensive than the PS5 itself. Humanity is great, but may have only been nominated by the committee to prevent the award from looking like a farce.
I’m not sure when “irrespective of platform” was added to the award page, but the end result feels like triage.
“What else could they have nominated from 2023?” is the meaty question here. I would certainly nominate Vertigo 2, which is great. There was a new Assassin’s Creed game released for VR, but it was exclusive to the Meta Quest 2 and 3 so you might not know anyone who’s heard of it. The Light Brigade looks cool! Attempting to curate a “Best VR Games of 2023” list is stymied by Google searches which always lead you to articles cultivating the best VR games since 2023, with no games from that actual year. Sushi Ben looks really cool, but will remain exclusive to Quest hardware until next year. I just found out they’re doing a Stranger Things VR game? That one is also going to be Quest exclusive.
Huh.
Didn’t Facebook — you know I mean Meta, but they’re henceforth Facebook in this article because I don’t care — invest around $10 billion into VR a few years ago? Where’d that go? Did they make anything?
Oh. Uh.
Oh. Ohhhhhh.
I see the problem.
I like virtual reality, which is an opinion that virtual reality forces me to be increasingly embarrassed for holding. I still think it’s still an exciting new way to create and experience art, full of all the potentiality that encompasses. This isn’t just wishful thinking — I continue to see cool (new!) stuff being made for VR. The more recent games that are already out there, from Bonelab to The Last Clockwinder, represent a wonderful display of craft. It’s how I know that faith, as a mental resource, is not misplaced in the medium.
But you feel it too, right? Even a bit? That sensation you get when the vibe shifts? When the local mall, once the coolest spot in town, gradually becomes something else entirely? It’s that moment when you don’t recognize any of the employees anymore; when the stores feel like they’ve been entirely replaced with franchises; when the music, once cool and inviting, takes on the nothing quality of white noise. It’s the moment when, all at once, all the little changes add up and you realize the framework of everything has been supplanted by something else.
It’s not entirely a death knell, of course. You can continue to hang out at the mall, no matter how uninviting it becomes. Maybe your friends will join you. If you keep the cool people congregated, there’s the chance you can fight back against the shift from culture to commodification. This all sounds good in theory, but is humiliating in practice — there’s nobody new worth meeting anymore, and you can’t even buy a drink at the food court without feeling like you’re part of the problem. The space, once full of possibility, seems to shrink and become more dreamless by the day.
More than likely, all of this only prolongs the inevitable. When a limb becomes gangrene, there’s a point where the best option is to cut it off.
It’s a story as old as capitalism, and consequently one that has never been entirely free of it. There are lingering questions that follow a dead mall to its grave: Sure, the mall inarguably got worse, but was it only sabotaged into becoming more like itself? Did the mall, which was always a compaction of easy commerce and frictionless artificiality, just learn to become what it really was?
Did it die, or did we just watch it grow up?
To me, the medium of virtual reality is currently that mall. Not the whole story, mind — only the story about the mall has an ending. But the signs are here, and we have to assume the patterns that follow them will remain consistent. Like the mall itself, none of this stuff was ever without flaw. But there was light there, too; the ineffable passion of great artists and tinkerers spreading their wings and getting to make interesting, bold, and exciting things that nobody had been able to make before.
Many of these people are still here, and I hope they’ll continue to be. But the energy that surrounds them has shifted and suffocated everything around it through no fault of their own. The walls that once opened for them are beginning to close. I have recently seen that light, so bright only a few years ago, do little more than fizzle and shrink.
This is not an exhaustive report on What Went Wrong, because I think if you have any adjacency to this stuff you get the gist. The relevant history began spinning when Oculus hit Kickstarter in 2012 with a project to fund the first iteration of their Oculus Rift dev kit; the eventual promise of the kit, to provide the first truly immersive virtual reality device and the tools to create stuff for it, roused enough excitement to octuple their $250,000 funding goal.
It’s important to understand right away that the floors were always rotting. Palmer Luckey, then CEO of Oculus, was always a stupid piece of shit and has only become a larger, dumber, and more deplorable piece of shit since leaving the company (now owned by Facebook). He’s an insipid, Republican techbro who, post-Oculus, currently runs a defense contracting company that builds autonomous murder machines for the military. The guy who built this thing in his garage now has tangible liters of blood on his hands.
I’m out of things to say about him that are legally permissible, except that “putting up with being adjacent to a stupid piece of shit and hoping they don’t tank your work” is both the miserable reality of creation at this scope under capitalism, and the running theme of virtual reality.
Oculus was bought by Facebook in 2014. The move was criticized immediately by Kickstarter backers and industry figures alike, who had no way of knowing a year prior that they were giving seed money to Mark Zuckerberg. An official Oculus version of Minecraft was, at least for a period, cancelled. Markus Persson, founder of Mojang, shared some incisive words about it before his brain was destroyed from within — a process which would ironically begin after he sold his own legacy to Microsoft a few months later:
Facebook is not a company of grass-roots tech enthusiasts. Facebook is not a game tech company. Facebook has a history of caring about building user numbers, and nothing but building user numbers. People have made games for Facebook platforms before, and while it worked great for a while, they were stuck in a very unfortunate position when Facebook eventually changed the platform to better fit the social experience they were trying to build.
You may notice that this quote casually and succinctly predicted the next decade of virtual reality. This stuff doesn’t often come as a surprise to people who know what they’re talking about, and Facebook in particular is an easy read; the ways in which they’re terrible now are only a little removed from the rote stupidity they were already bumbling through when I was ten years old. Either way, it didn’t matter because Oculus (now Facebook) already had your money. The resulting tumor, then benign, was a cancer waiting to happen.
By 2016, the consumer version of the Oculus Rift was out. Others followed suit, from Valve and HTC’s Vive to Microsoft’s Windows Mixed Reality. Games really started coming out! Experiences like Job Simulator, Superhot VR, and Thumper’s VR mode felt like an enchanting glimpse into the future of a burgeoning medium, one that was quickly becoming accessible to individual developers and small teams through increased support in engines like Unity.
But one of the more exciting prospects was provided by The Lab, Valve’s own experiment. It was a simple, free game with a bunch of different experiences packed in, and it had this undeniable energy to it. Between their own headset and SteamVR software, Valve was a key company in all this: a veteran studio responsible for titles like Half-Life, Portal, and Left 4 Dead clearly showing a vested interest in virtual reality as a platform for actual first-party video games.
“Maybe,” said with the same kind of cursed wink that Gabe Newell once delivered upon saying that Half-Life 3 could be revealed by the holiday season of 2008, “we’ll even make one of our own.” At a time when most AAA studios were content to inundate the platform with little five minute fidget toys and slapdash ports of their own games, the thought of a new Valve game developed exclusively for VR seemed not just incredible, but as critical as Halo: Combat Evolved was for the original Xbox.
The intervening four years gave rise to a lot of the pillar VR titles we’ve already mentioned, and was probably the best “era” for VR as it currently exists. From 2016 to 2019, it felt like big corporations enabled the space without deciding to take it for a spin and crash it into a tree. Stuff like PlayStation VR was bad, but not notably so — like a Virtual Boy, it just wasn’t catching on with anybody. Virtual reality took on the best qualities of what a niche, hobbyist community of passionate users can be: creative, clever, and thoughtfully building on each other’s work until the result is the unique product of open collaboration.
At the same time, people were waiting at least a little for the other shoe to drop. When Valve debuted their newest headset in 2019, the Index, that seemed to be it. By quality and quantity of features, it was the best headset yet. It was manufactured entirely by them, and consummated what appeared to be their full commitment to everything the device represented. And, it came with a promise: in the near future, it was going to herald a new Valve game.
The result was Half-Life: Alyx.
This was the highest profile launch for any virtual reality game ever for a few reasons: it was Valve’s first proper singleplayer game since Portal 2 in 2011, it was the first Half-Life title since 2007, and it just generally looked fucking amazing. Watch the reveal trailer again! Valve just knows how to make a video game, provided they’re making any in the first place. If you didn’t care about VR and weren’t paying any attention to it, this certainly got your attention; if you were already a card-carrying user, this was like finding out that your God of choice was actually real.
Alyx came out in March of 2020, and it truly is an exemplary game. The level of craftsmanship and care it represents is remarkable, and it is still the game you get if you have the setup to play it. It is so good that, were I to consider how much use I’ve gotten out of the headset I bought for $300, I would hardly consider the money wasted even in a situation where Alyx was the only game I ever played on it. VR getting something as “killer” as Super Mario 64 or Breath of the Wild feels like a techbro prayer that would never be answered, and the fact that it was is nothing short of a miracle.
And it worked! The Valve Index was the most luxury of luxury goods, with the full package costing over a thousand dollars, and they still sold an insane amount of them purely on the promise of Alyx. The nice thing about the game, and what made VR seem appealing to folks who couldn’t afford something that expensive, is that Valve stressed full compatibility with every kind of headset, including significantly cheaper models from years prior like the Samsung Odyssey+.
What really sold audiences was the idea that this was just the beginning, and that Alyx as a killer app was only going to herald more games like it — even if those games just came from Valve and a handful of partners. Killer apps move hardware, but folks also get an innate promise out of them. If VR is still in its infancy, then Alyx has to be the moment that urges it forward.
That was 2020. Alyx is still virtual reality’s “killer app” and supports a semi-active mapping and modding scene. Cool! Nearly four years later, and it stands alone — everyone I know, once incredibly confident in Alyx as a kickoff, no longer has the conviction to believe that Valve is going to release any kind of follow-up. The other big-budget experiences it was meant to attract have never really materialized, save on walled gardens like PSVR2. Instead of attracting large studios to the platform, Alyx has almost had the opposite effect: scaring off anyone with the money to make something like it without the necessary care to actually pull it off.
I was actually at the epicenter of the Half-Life community when Alyx came out, and later had a small hand in fostering the game’s modding ecosystem, helping manage mapping competitions and occasionally serving as a liaison for folks interested in the scene. Mind you, I didn’t even have a headset yet — I just felt that strongly about this stuff being cool.
People were always making incredible stuff, even exclusively in the framework of the game’s existing assets and systems. The tools, which were mostly excellent, enabled folks to kitbash incredible environments and gameplay spaces together with all the technical interactions and fiddling already done for them. Alyx as an engine and set of tools allowed folks to make good shit very quickly. People noticed! We occasionally heard word from artists in wider mediums, like music and film, who wanted to know if X thing was possible, or if anyone had tried doing something like Y yet.
A few years later, these same spaces were pretty quiet. Part of this is invariably a result of the fatigue we’ve already touched on, and yes, part of it was because it was always going to be a bit of a passing fad for people. I don’t think it had to be this way though; the rest is a consequence of Valve’s classic pattern, which is a state of frenzied, seemingly sincere care followed by a surprising and continuing period of extensive apathy. I wrote at length about Valve’s tendency to behave like this in a previous article, which doesn’t touch much on VR but provides a decent explanation for why seemingly obvious gambles for a post-Alyx ecosystem didn’t really work out.
What occupied the space they left behind was not great.
I don’t want to minimize the exemplary work that indies have done since 2020, because their work is what’s really important here. I’m sure more than a few were attracted to the medium because of Alyx, and to them, it didn’t really matter whether corporations kept making cool stuff for virtual reality. They can make cool stuff for virtual reality and hopefully make a comfortable profit by selling it to the owners that already exist. If the ecosystem continued as it had in previous years, we might have an interesting case of something not quite catching on with the general public (which it was never going to), but we wouldn’t have a nadir.
What surrounds these artists now is an increasingly vast cloud of black, corporate smog: Facebook’s continued dominance over the market, PlayStation’s own insistent gizmo walling off even more VR games behind absurd prices, and Valve’s own noncommittal shrug in a post-Alyx world. The most value-additive corporation left the room, and then a bunch of quarterbacks charged in chasing a leprechaun that nobody else could see. Because it wasn’t real.
I’m not going to spend a lot of time talking directly about the Metaverse. I don’t want to spend a lot of time talking about the Metaverse. Typing the word “Metaverse” makes me feel like a demon lives inside my house and puts chemicals in the air that make me confused. It is idiotic on a cosmic level, and all sane thinkers know it and have known it from the beginning. It is so prolifically stupid that it has, in fact, blotted out the sun. Ask a random person to visualize a virtual reality game, and there’s a real chance they start thinking about Meta Horizon Worlds, Facebook’s multi-billion dollar money fire made of screams, thanks to pure saturation.
Here is a very good video about the conceptual and physical failure of all this garbage. The important thing for our purpose is to understand that Facebook, correctly predicted as a mindless force driven by useless data and the whims of rich idiots, did the thing everyone thought it was going to do when they bought Oculus in 2014. The resulting projects have smeared shit all over the room, so concentrated in some areas that you would assume it was an act of deliberate sabotage. Facebook is, impressively, as actively malicious as they are plainly stupid.
In the wake of the consequences (we’re getting to them) of Facebook’s attempted domination of a market they either misunderstand or approached with the dilettante care of a bored child, everything around them has been forced to suffer a share of the consequences. In four short years, VR has gone from something I’d champion to something that feels… gaudy, like a Super Bowl ad for cryptocurrency. If you were sitting here, right now, and your predominant perception of the medium was coverage of Meta Horizon Worlds, why would you ever bother to make anything for it? Why wouldn’t you run across the room screaming?
I bought a VR headset in 2022, having spent years feeling excitement at the prospect of finally getting to really be a participant in what I viewed as an art on the cutting edge, finessing around the limitations of its canvas with the grace of an old silent film director. I was 18 and living (still) in an apartment with only a singular source of income and a certain amount of space, so my enthusiasm was limited by the depth of my own pockets. I think I serve as a good case study for what it’s like to “enter” the medium as it currently exists, which is a perspective that’s easily lost when you can just as easily continue to use a headset you bought in 2016.
We need to start by talking about the Quest 2, a device I am genuinely embarrassed to say that I own. It is a Facebook hell machine probably comparable to an Amazon Echo, and when I look at it, shame radiates from my body. I have genuinely considered hiding it when I know guests are coming. It is the closest I have come to feeling like I own a soul-removing magical artifact that makes me imperceptibly less human. I am cursed to know what the device is for, what it represents for the company that made it, and why they want as many people to own them as possible.
There is no real argument in my favour here: I bought it because it was cheaper than the other options, because people recommended it, and because I was worried that I’d regret getting anything secondhand. Most will not have feelings this strong about owning the Facebook goggles — they’re the highest-selling virtual reality gizmo by a huge margin, having pushed over 18 million units. According to Valve’s own tracking through Steam, over 40% of VR users are, at any given time, using a Quest 2. I assume most buyers have followed similar reasoning, thinking they would get the cheapest, easiest, and least invasive chance to play some new video games.
Buying an older headset instead of a Quest 2 seems like a great idea on paper, and it could be. But the potential pitfalls are alarming. Such headsets were frequently “dropped” by companies like Oculus/Facebook or Microsoft after only two or three years, becoming deceptively cheaper but potentially more expensive. My girlfriend owns an Oculus CV1 she bought a few years after launch, which works completely fine! The cable, however, is basically the physical manifestation of a threat — the connector is proprietary, and they didn’t want to expend the effort required to make more of them after a few years. If her cable ever stops working, that’s potentially a hundred dollars down the drain just to replace it with another secondhand cable that could just as easily break even faster. Bit troubling!
This next little bit is going to be about my experience with the Quest 2, and not a wider look at individual headsets, including the one you might own. I’m not a tech reviewer, and I don’t really have any vested interest in becoming one. Your device of choice is probably better than the Quest 2! Roadkill is better than the Quest 2, but there’s still a lot of it either way. I think it’s important to specifically interrogate the device introducing the largest number of people to VR, and then realize why we’re all a little screwed.
To me, the function of a VR headset is very simple but perhaps controversial: it is a viewing screen wirelessly attached to a number of very advanced controllers. It is a conduit through which art of a particular sort is experienced. I like thinking about how stuff works, whether that stuff is my computer or the particular kind of paper in a book I’m reading — but I like to stop thinking about that as soon as I’m actually sitting in front of someone else’s work, unless they intend to draw attention to it. So long as I know my television has a good resolution, and won’t sabotage the experience with motion smoothing or some other garbage, I don’t really want to be consciously thinking about the physical screen while I’m trying to watch a movie.
This is to say that, the less friction generated through the simple act of using one of these devices, the better. The thing about consumer electronics is that they all want to be black boxes that the user doesn’t have to think about. The majority of people don’t know how their phones work, which is fine if they do and aren’t marketed or designed to prey on that naivety. They always are though, particularly Apple-type products, which are designed above all else to befuddle their owners into thinking that nobody knows how they work except Apple: if something seems bad or inconvenient or just prone to failure, even if the problem is a piece of software, there must just be no other way to do it.
Depending on your headset, and particularly if that headset is a Vive or Index, your VR experience is probably off to a better start. The immediate problem is that the Quest 2 requires (or at least did require) a Facebook account to function at all. Making such an account obviously feels uncomfortably insidious, because it’s Facebook. The rollout of this feature (which transitioned existing Oculus accounts to Facebook) was terrible, everyone hated it, it provided no value to the end user, devices were rendered functionally bricked without a factory reset if their associated accounts were banned, and the eventual removal of it heralded a $100 price bump for the hardware — one can assume the data harvesting was what allowed them to be that cheap in the first place.
Why does my peripheral need a Facebook account? What purpose would it serve the end user that an Oculus account didn’t already? Even the Oculus account should be optional, because I don’t need it if my only purpose is to plug it into my computer and play a Steam game. These are all just general problems with the way everything works now, though companies like Facebook are (as coined by Cory Doctorow) “terminally enshittified” by huge decisions that exclusively benefit a single digit percentage of their users and themselves, at least in the short-term.
From here, you can buy games from the Quest 2 store and play them, but more on that later. Assuming you want to use the device with your computer to play the other 90% of virtual reality games, you’ll need a specific cable. This cable is sold by Facebook for an extra hundred dollars, which is miserable and thankfully the only part of this process we can make easier. You can find link cable equivalents by other manufacturers for twenty-ish dollars and they’re all seemingly fine. If you know someone who already paid full price for one, I would save them the grief and just lie.
Now we can play a VR game on the computer! You just need to download some bloatware Oculus garbage and it should, in theory, just work. Are you surprised that I’m going to tell you it doesn’t?
The Quest 2, especially in regards to PCVR, fucking sucks. It is one of the most unpleasant, unwelcoming, and kafkaesque devices I have ever had the displeasure of using. All it has to do is plug into my computer, interface with some basic middleware, and let me use the peripheral with the software of my choice. The actual process, repeated multiple times a year, feels like listening to the braying screams escaping out of a cartoonish lunatic asylum: it does not know what my computer is, it does not know what a computer is at all, and it will never learn until you switch to an experimental update, flip an obscure setting, fuck around in the headset until your eyes hurt, and finally launch SteamVR Home (for as long as the device will abide you to) with whatever physical energy remains in your body.
The entire byzantine process, extended by constant detangling of controllers and wires and goggles from your own skin so you can desperately Google whatever is going on, is so hellish that I would probably hesitate to inflict it upon my worst enemy. After that, it works… for a bit! It always comes back, each subsequent torture session arousing the possibility that the device in your hand has just become a $400 brick. For this, and many other reasons, I would liken the Quest 2 to sending unanswered prayers to a dead God in a pillaged, empty heaven.
All of this solved by someone with too much patience, an okay amount of computer literacy, and a friend who uses their own Quest way more than me and actually keeps on top of this shit. If you have less than two of these things, you’re fucking doomed; I would’ve just assumed it was broken.
You get the impression that Facebook wants to sell you the overpriced ability to connect the headset to your computer without the pesky promise of letting you actually fucking do it. With how often the feature simply breaks, outside of their presumed incompetence, you have to assume they just don’t care very much about it. Why would they? They want you spending money on their store to play games on their services, almost all of which are intended to be accessed through the headset itself.
This is where I get into a specific, unfortunate casualty of all this: Resident Evil 4 VR is one of my favourite VR games, and I don’t know anyone who can play it. It’s just a professional port of the original Resident Evil 4 to the Quest 2 hardware, and it’s great! It turns out the original RE4, a game built around the rhythm of stopping in place and shooting while enemies run towards you, inching slower and slower and they get further into your space, is genuinely perfect for virtual reality. I enjoyed it so much that, when I played RE4’s remake earlier this year, I just kept remembering how much fun the original was in VR. The team behind it, Armature Studio, did an amazing job.
But the game is only available on the Quest 2 store. It runs exclusively on the hardware inside the headset, and I’m not aware of any successful efforts in running it on regular computers with other peripherals. If you don’t own that specific headset, you can’t play Resident Evil 4 VR, which is forever at the mercy of a company whose other exclusive games library (for the discontinued Oculus GO) is neither backwards compatible with the Quest 2 or offered on a regularly functioning store within the GO itself.
But at least you’ll be able to play Resident Evil 4: VR Mode for the remake! As an… exclusive for the PlayStation VR2, a device exclusively available for use with the PlayStation 5 with zero compatibility on any other machine, including your computer. The latest iteration of this initiative, the VR2, also isn’t compatible with any games made for the VR1, rendering that entire library functionally lost on your $550 machine that connects to your minimum $500 entertainment box. There’s an official VR mode for Resident Evil 7 on the VR1 there. Sounds great! Won’t ever get to play it, though.
As for the VR2, exclusives like Horizon Call of the Mountain and Synapse might finally be the sort of big-budget “killer apps” that folks were hoping Alyx would herald. They’re just not on any of the devices they bought to play Alyx, and likely never will be. They will almost certainly remain stuck on the VR2, even if a VR3 comes around before the end of the decade, until the doomed machine limps to the end of the hardware generation with a bunch of near-launch titles that will remain locked inside of it forever.
The mere existence of exclusive titles on bespoke video game hardware presents a giant can of worms that I don’t even have time to open. Exclusives on virtual reality hardware, however, are a much simpler situation: why the fuck would there be any? Why would you take a hard sell — an already inaccessible medium with inherently significant barriers of entry — and make it a harder sell? When I talk about any of this, I feel like I exist in a world where NVIDIA and AMD both make their own computers with big “exclusive” games that refuse to launch on the other graphics card. In other words, I feel like I’m in Hell.
I bought a PS5 because, in addition to being an entertainment center, it allows me to play dozens of unique games I would have a more difficult time playing on a computer, even with emulation; I bought a virtual reality headset because the entire back catalog of games, which has been building for upwards of eight years now, was really appealing to me; I would buy a VR2, significantly more expensive than the headset I already own, to play upwards of four exclusive games in a walled garden doomed to inexorable decay and abandonment within the next five years.
With proper research, I could probably go on similar tirades for thousands of words. Things are not good, have been steadily getting worse for years, and they don’t seem to be getting any better. The current paths of the largest virtual reality vendors are all individually fraught, and a medium that once desperately wanted their attention is now obviously better off without it — Valve, the sole exception, can only be relied on to continue manufacturing the most expensive consumer equipment while keeping their middleware updated.
Valve will continue to not really care (or care in bursts that come too infrequently to make a difference), Sony’s efforts will continue to be of very little benefit to anybody, and Facebook will continue hemorrhaging money. All of these initiatives, in their own way, will end with failure. I say this with varying levels of satisfaction combined with a kind of vague sorrow. It rules that Facebook can fuck around and find out, because any world in which Horizon Worlds succeeded is a far worse world than this. It’s just that every dollar they waste to make nothing is… nothing, or less than nothing. They are squandered resources; sickening amounts of waste; money that would naturally find a better purpose if you threw it down at the street.
What could’ve happened here was cultivation, but all that’s left is salted earth.
Many people have always been very skeptical about VR, and they’re right to be! It’s a visibly goofy gizmo that requires physical space, the ability to surmount the (still steep!) price of entry, the ease of body to operate it, and typically another high-end expensive machine to tether it to. The resulting mess of wires, goggles, cameras, and controllers looks tacky and, imperatively, has always been adjacent to the machinations of corporate suits who alternate between burning people for profit and burning people for negative profit — just a reminder that the founder of Oculus now gleefully runs a company that builds robots the American military uses to kill human beings.
If the only way you could watch a movie was to build a semi-expensive home theater, and the most readily accessible theater equipment was sold by a company founded by someone who currently works at Lockheed Martin, you probably wouldn’t like movies very much.
But this isn’t the end of the story. Under this thick blanket of inane stupidity exists the people that Make The Art, and their lack of individual control is the perpetual horror they face. It’s like how the machinations of box office profits, the effect of a Rotten Tomatoes score on executives, and thoughtlessly disgusting studio gambits only really exist to fuck movies up before, during, and after you see them. This is the friction of capitalism meeting art and aggressively shaking it upside down to see if any coins fall on the ground.
Improvements are held hostage, and usually have to be coerced out of suits by the people that actually need them. Such is the nature of strikes and collective action, which become a difficult proposition when VR is concerned. How does an artist rally against the gradual corruption of their canvas? Is the worry then, when so few alternatives exist, that the corruption was inevitable?
VR has problems. The industry behind it has always had problems, and the medium itself comes packaged with a ton of issues already: some easily solvable, some not. But the previous problems were normal, or at least understandable, with regards to what VR was. The modern problems, which have really taken hold over the last few years, are not. These problems are the specific cause of malpractice, stupidity, avarice, and apathy. Their consequences are extreme, corruptive, and borderline irreversible. It becomes increasingly impossible, thanks to destructive marching orders from those who deigned the area to exist in the first place, to detangle the neighborhood from the bulldozers tearing it apart.
Bulldozers don’t make art, but they have the potential to thoughtlessly clear new land in which art could potentially exist. Everything after that is owed to the people who file in, each with the beautiful ability to turn nothing into something wonderful and human. Often, the bulldozers come back and take credit for whatever they find — but a bulldozer doesn’t create much of anything, save an empty canvas or a miserable pile of debris. It is the existence of the latter that proves the former to be a happy accident.
Virtual reality could become more accessible, and more readily claimed by the people who actually give it any value. Such a process is ongoing, from open-source VR headsets to efforts that allow you to use a PSVR1 with your computer to various jailbreaking techniques that allow you to kick as much Facebook out of your Quest 2 as possible. These efforts remain equal parts difficult, technical, or heavily fought against by the companies that would prefer to keep hold on these things until they no longer breathe.
But they exist, and that’s the important part. I think it’s a safe bet that they’ll continue to exist and evolve, no matter the pushback and effort required. They will still exist in a world where these same corporations consider the headsets a failed venture. They will still exist when their makers disintegrate. Companies can decide to stop caring, but they cannot convince people to exist within the margins of their incurious failure.
Virtual reality, like so much of the novel intersection between technology and creative expression, is fundamentally driven by the art of tinkering. People will figure out how to build computers in pizza boxes and capture timeless film with thrift store equipment. They’ll do it in the end with whatever is in arm’s reach, for no larger reason than because it’s in them and it wants to get out.
I keep thinking about that dead mall. It literally died in the end, of course — they don’t always, but that one did. When everything shut down, they just kept it there, locked and empty. Those same kids who frequented it, or their own kids who heard that they did, decided to visit it one day, They broke the lock off easily enough, or smashed the glass that kept them outside, and were surprised to discover that the mall was suddenly theirs.
They played their own music, and made their own rules: no cops, no fascists, that sort of thing. The returning crowd eventually drew more people, and the mall became a place to hang out in again. It wasn’t the same, because it wasn’t meant to be. Commerce changed first. People sold things that were homemade, or they traded for what they needed, or they just shared what they had to share. People painted on the walls, and rearranged the space however they wanted it.
Sometimes there were problems. They were dealt with, most of all, by a desire to be kind to one another in the pursuit of something new.
There are a lot of headsets that already exist, and plenty of them are Quest 2’s. These devices will come secondhand, and ideally much cheaper — they might come dusty with cracked shells or fraying cables, but that’s okay. Their imperfections will make them human again. New vulnerabilities for them will inevitably be found. Free of Facebook’s intervention, these devices will be jailbroken and modified until they hardly resemble the form they came in. You’ll sideload what you want on them, and use them as you’d wish.
They will allow you, simply, to put them on and experience another person’s art.
To an artist, creation in the face of adversity is an act of spite.
Debris is just the next canvas, ready to become something new.
