I got spooked while playing VR last night

I've been on a big Astro Bot kick with the release of the new game, and part of that included finally playing through the PSVR game Astro Bot Rescue Mission. I finished it before starting the PS5 game, but after platinuming the more recent one I decided to go back and so some more of the optional stuff I hadn't finished. What can I say, I like 3D platformers and in a year when I've been struggling to engage with gaming when I find something I'm enjoying I just kind of go with it.

Last night I strapped on my PSVR headset, which has clip on headphones, and dove back into the world of the Rescue Mission. This is, needless to say, not at all a scary game. It has a few levels with a cartoony "spooky" feel but overall it's quite cheerful. There's a reason they chose this franchise to celebrate PlayStation.

Anyway, I was in the in-game gacha machine grabbing random diorama parts when I head a knocking to my left. It was brief, but loud, and I couldn't tell whether it was in the game or in my apartment. In retrospect if I had to guess it was probably my upstairs neighbor dropping something heavy on their floor, which bounced. Or the neighbor kid on the other side bouncing a ball against the wall, which he does sometimes. Some relatively innocuous real life sound that comes with apartment living.

After looking around and determining nothing had happened in the apartment itself I tried to go back to the game but...I couldn't. I don't consider myself a particularly fearful person, I don't believe in the supernatural, and I am generally not prone to being spooked. The last time I felt truly scared was when a friend called me at 1 AM, told me he was under attack and he'd just been punched in the face, and then the line went dead, but I think that would freak anyone out (he's okay now.)

But there's something about wearing a VR headset that just makes me feel uniquely vulnerable. Losing all touch with the world, not having either vision or hearing unimpeded, it's a very compromised position. I've never had something happen while I was using VR, but after the knocking noise slightly spooked me I just...couldn't go back. I shut the game down and played something else before going to bed.

This is just another reminder for me about why I think VR is going to struggle to achieve higher adoption levels. Cutting yourself off from the world is impractical, and I think the people who really love it are people who have been comfortable doing that in other ways in the past. It has applications for sure, and I think will continue to be a product with a real niche, but we can't transcend our meatsacks yet and I don't think we will in any of our lifetimes.