Another Set of Eyes

As news stories in the gaming world go, one of the world’s wealthiest tech companies laying down $2 billion to buy up the most popular crowdfunded piece of gaming tech in existence is a pretty big deal. It’s an event which exists at the intersection of worries about big business, the nature of crowdfunding, and not just virtual reality as it relates to video games but the place VR is going to take in modern life as a whole. The Oculus Rift has been a remarkable piece of tech, not just because it is a virtual reality headset, we’ve had virtual reality headsets for a while now, but because it appears to be a virtual reality headset done right. Considering this device didn’t come from an Apple or a Microsoft it’s astonishing how polished, technically sound, and free of flaws the Rift has grown to be in such a short time.

Cyberspace

A familiar sight by this point.

The appeal of a good VR headset is immediately apparent, it’s summed up in that one word which keeps coming back again and again, “immersion”, and unlike a lot of new developments in game design and technology, we can apply the benefits of the VR to existing games. This isn’t like a more powerful console which we may have to see games heavily remade for, or a new design or programming technique which could only be applied to games we make in the future, virtual reality has the potential to change the experience we can have with existing games and breathe new life into old titles. That said, I think there are few ideas or technologies which you can just bolt onto any game and expect to have purely positive effects, and I don’t think the Rift is an exception to that. There’s a lot of learning to still be done with the technology and it’s likely that among other issues, games which include a lot of motion and action may be harder to play and more disorienting on the Rift than with regular TVs and monitors, that games with involved keyboard controls may only be capable of being played by those who can touch type, and that as the player now effectively has their face jammed right up against the monitor, that traditional GUI design doesn’t transfer to the Rift perfectly. All that aside though, it’s hard to deny the appeal of the Rift when just thinking about various games we like being used in conjunction with it is exciting.

It also represents a new frontier in game development. We don’t entirely know what having a high quality commercially available VR headset is going to mean for gaming, but that’s part of the beauty of it. Let me be clear, I’m sceptical of the idea that VR is “the future” of video games. While it could certainly be a big part of it, I have the same worries about future games being made for VR that I have with it being applied to existing games, and it may be that constant use of something like the Rift in video games would be a sensory overload. There’s probably something to be said for being able to sit back in a chair with some distance between yourself and the screen when playing. While it stands to benefit many different types of games, it also seems that the Rift has more to offer games in which we closely inhabit a single character’s body, like first-person or third-person games, than those in which we take a more disembodied or detached view, like games with top-down or side-on cameras.

I believe VR is its own experience, not simply a "video games but better".

Along similar lines I can’t agree with the idea that has been commonly spread in science-fiction, that VR is one step on the road to video games' ultimate goal of creating Matrix-like full-body immersion experiences. That’s not a criticism of sci-fi which uses this premise, but there have been people who’ve taken it as more than fiction. There’s a reason why people continue to play sports games even when they’re capable of going outside and playing real sports, or why every game doesn’t just have a first-person camera. Video games are not simply there to be approximations of real activities, this is part of that whole realism = good quality fallacy. Video games are there to engage the player through whatever means they can and while realism is one tool in the box for them to use, it’s far from the only one. It’s also hard not to wonder whether there could be some degree of dissonance created by situations in which players can see their arms, legs, or other parts of their body in-game, but are also aware that these are not their own appendages, especially when these body parts are moving. Despite all this, the possibilities and room for discovery in the field of VR games are still deeply appealing. One major potential advantage of something like the Rift is that just dropping someone into a virtual environment may be enough. Projects like Undercurrent or the rollercoaster demo suggest that VR could bring more room for and engagement from creative works primarily centred on us just experiencing worlds, regardless of if there’s any gameplay involved.

The Buyout

Just as it’s easy to see why people love the Rift though, it’s also easy to see why this Facebook buyout has rustled so many jimmies. Oculus were that cool underground indie band that everyone liked and then a man from the big record label showed up with a briefcase full of money and now they’ve “sold out”. Facebook more than most companies seems to have a way of bringing out people's distrust and paranoia. They’re a massive, impersonal corporation that knows who you are, who your friends are, what you do in your life, where you’ve been, and what you enjoy. They then use you as a kind of marketing tool or commodity, promising the opportunity to interact with you as a means to attract your friends and family to the site and make more money. Some people also just dislike Facebook due to their personal experiences with what other people have posted on the site. These aren’t necessarily rational reasons to oppose this acquisition or even to dislike Facebook, but I think these factors create a lot of stigma around the company for a lot of people.

There is something a bit dystopian about Facebook buying the company with the big eyeball logo.

On a slightly more tangible level there’s also a worry about how Facebook might infect the Rift as a platform. There’s speculation that they could make it more closed-off and controlled, add intrusive Facebook integration or adverts, or do any number of other things which could jeopardise the technology for developers and gamers. Not that I think there’s zero chance that these could become problems for the Rift in the future, but these are issues that have already been addressed by Facebook and Oculus. Facebook have declared their intention of maintaining a very hands-off ownership of Oculus, and between them and Oculus founder Palmer Luckey it has been confirmed that the Rift is going to continue being developed independently from Facebook, and that Facebook will not integrate their branding, advertising, or technology into the Rift. Is there some degree of possibility that these companies could go back on these statements? Sure, but I don’t think Oculus are any less trustworthy now than they were before and this does actually seem to be all on the level. For all the negative things that have been done to games and technology in the name of big business, many of the positive advancements in these areas have hinged on the involvement of large and business-oriented companies like Facebook, and as unintuitive as it may seem, Facebook might be the good guys on this occasion.

The idea we had of this huge new part of gaming coming from a tiny company with a Kickstarter was a romantic one, but the reality is that huge hardware rollouts don’t come from companies like this, at least not on their own. Oculus may have had $91 million to their name, but for a certain kind of project that is a small sum of money; there are individual video games that have cost more than that to make. It’s not yet been fully determined where their freshly acquired $2 billion is going to go (that’s about £1.2 billion for us in the UK incidentally), but as Luckey and a number of others have said the money they’ve received from Facebook gives them the potential to release better hardware on a larger scale, and the financial security that money provides means that Oculus are primed to make decisions which are less about just scraping together as much funding as possible and more about providing a good product. The recent announcement of Sony’s Morpheus VR headset also means that even in a worse case scenario, we’re not looking at a monopoly forming in the virtual reality market.

Obviously, there's some possibility this Facebook acquisition is just a VR simulation you're experiencing.

Of course, even if everything works out fine this is not a matter entirely free from complications. Anyone who has or will support the Oculus Rift is also supporting Facebook and there are some valid reasons to be adverse to that. Facebook’s long history of failures to properly protect their users’ privacy is no secret, and supporting Facebook also indirectly supports various disreputable game developers who use them as a platform; studios who have popularised and are making gargantuan sums of money from some of the worst practises in modern game design: bad microtransactions, exploitation of people unfamiliar with the medium, shameless plagiarism, and designing games with a primary focus on them manipulating people into spending their money rather than being engaging.

So yes, I can understand if you’re upset with or worried about the Facebook acquisition in a number of ways. I’ve also not been the biggest fan of some of the things Facebook and those using Facebook have done in the past. But a lot of the backlash over this business deal doesn’t seem to have come from an informed perspective and actually looking at what the parties involved have said, it’s been a knee-jerk series of “Big social media corporation is bad” rants and that doesn’t help anyone. Personally, while I want to reiterate that I don’t think VR is the be-all and end-all for the future of gaming, I’m still excited and optimistic about the direction of this technology, and I think the Oculus Rift still represents a large and positive part of this area of the medium. Thanks for reading.