Non-interactive VR is what game developers call a "track ride". You're locked to a path. You can look around, and maybe stop, start, shoot at stuff, and solve puzzles, but you can't get off the track.
For a long time, game developers struggled with how to tell a story while not locking the player into a track ride. A movie is a story. A good game today is a place you visit. VR track rides are somewhere in between.
Getting a story line into a free play game is hard. But it's been done many times now. GTA V is a good example. The GTA games are open, free-play worlds. You're free to just drive around and sightsee, which is fun all by itself. The gameplay "missions" give the player goals and achievements, but there are many ways to achieve a goal. (Amusingly, the way to make the most money in GTA V is to speculate in the stock market, not steal cars. Score one for realism.)
The VR crowd now has to face that problem. Otherwise, they'll go down the same rathole as 3D TV and movies. (Yes, Avatar in 3D was good. That's because Cameron is very good at visual world-building. Almost every other 3D movie didn't need 3D or overdid it.)
Yes! I think that's a really good insight. I wonder if VR's "killer app" for consumer entertainment will be more closely related to travel than to movies. It's interesting that open world games, like GTA and Skyrim, are increasingly popular. At the same time multisensory-art-experience festivals like Burning Man are increasingly popular too. Being able to explore immaculately crafted worlds, enjoying beautiful sights and sounds, and getting the thrill of dicovery that comes with going some place new would be pretty awesome.
Non-interactive VR is what game developers call a "track ride". You're locked to a path. You can look around, and maybe stop, start, shoot at stuff, and solve puzzles, but you can't get off the track.
Kids a generation hence will think about games like this like we think of "classic" books. (One of them will reinvent the Mark Twain about a classic book being a book everyone says is important, but no one has actually read.)
We will further perfect an artistic and intellectual language of interactivity. (What we now call the medium of games.) On top of that, we will start to develop a language around emergence as well. The Minecraft generation will be the first generation starting fully down the path of emergent-world literacy.
This sort of thing was a big issue in game development about 10-15 years ago. It was just becoming possible to build immersive, big worlds, and Everquest-like games were seen as the future of gaming.
Then came "mobile", with casual gaming and much less immersive games.
Now the game industry has the Hollywood sequel problem. Looking at the list of AAA titles for 2016, there's a Doom sequel, an XCom sequel, a Borderlands spinoff, a Deus X sequel, a Mirrors Edge reboot, two Tom Clancy things, an Uncharted sequel, yet another Street Fighter, a Crackdown sequel, a Dark Souls sequel, a Gears of War sequel, and, inevitably, Final Fantasy 15. A big question is whether those will be better in first person VR than in the usual backed off camera view. Playing those in VR will involve a lot of head turning.
You make a great point about Avatar. After all these years, it is still the the only real 3D movie. It seemed like we were on the brink of great 3D, but no one else could even match Avatar.
But even these open world games are track rides, story wise. Sure you can get off the tracks at any time, but if you want to advance you gotta get back on the tracks.
Consider a game like Skyrim: oh no the world is ending very very soon! You gotta hurry and go save the world. Oh, you want to just do side quests for a couple of in game years before saving the world? All right then.
Games that can tell stories without using any "tracks" are really rare- think Dwarf Fortress.
Depends on what do you call the "story". In Skyrim in particular, I considered the main quest only a small part of overall game story, and not the most important one. Side-quests, random NPC dialogue, even books — they all build up the story of althe world together, and your experience with it is unique and definetly not a track ride. On the other hand, sequence of building a fortress in DF feels like a track ride after a while: first depot, first bedrooms, first food production, crafts, caves, military, trade, then CLOWNS and CIRCUS (as they're talked about to avoid the spoilers) if you're lucky enough. Procedural generation is fun for a while, but it has a limited amount of variety in it.
> A movie is a story. A good game today is a place you visit. VR track rides are somewhere in between.
I've always looked at it as a sort of spectrum of interactivity/freedom [0], and I suspect that as VR tech. and people's understanding/usage of it improves we'll see games across the full range - from movie-like experiences where the player doesn't even get camera control, to fully open worlds where the player can do basically anything.
I'd agree that the problem is largely the same as with 3D movies - designing a game that takes advantage of VR without it feeling gimmicky, or that it adds nothing to the experience, is a HARD problem; one that I'm not yet 100% convinced will be overcome.
[0] Something along the lines of (from least to most interactive): Traditional books/movies ; Choose-your-own-adventure books/visual novels ; Narrative/adventure games (something along the lines of Gone Home or the Telltale games) ; Story-driven open world games ; "Exploration" games (not sure of the right term, but something along the lines of Minecraft)
I would disagree that Avatar was particularly good. It did lots of annoying things that work for movies, but don't work for 3D (i.e. depth of field, fast-moving action). It also didn't seem to understand it's own medium at points - if you put a stand in for a polaroid photo in a 3D movie, it looks really tacky if the polaroid also has a perfect 3D effect to it.
It breaks my heart every time I see yet another VR Roller Coaster Demo, which seem to be all the rage with self-defeating VR evangelists trying to excite and educate ordinary people about its possibilities.
VR Roller Coaster Demos are the epitome of what VR is NOT about. It's the equivalent of setting a movie camera up in front of a stage to film a play. It's the antithesis of interactive simulation: No sidepaths. No exploration. No freedom. [1] It's literally railroading. [2] The worst thing that often happens after a VR roller coaster ride is that you take off the VR headset and say "thank God that's over!"
VR experiences with sidepaths, exploration, freedom, simulation, social interaction, and artistic content creation, gives you a much better impression and understanding of VR's capabilities.
You don't need to explore every place in GTA or Minecraft to realize that it's an open world. It's good VR if you walk away with the feeling that you haven't already been everywhere, done everything, there's more to see, things you still haven't tried, ways to create things, express yourself, interact with other people, and affect the outside world, so you want to come back later to see more.
It's not just about throwing in a bunch of navigable locations that are interconnected in a more interesting graph than a linear hallway. It's about simulation, where objects and characters in those places have rich interesting behaviors that interact with each other and the players, as opposed to a museum you can wander around but not touch or move anything or interact with anyone else.
The other sadly common VR demo that's the epitome of what VR is NOT about is literally the equivalent of setting a movie camera up in front of a stage to film a play, only worse: VR home movie theater simulations, like the Netflix app.
Sure, in some minor ways, watching a movie in VR might be better than watching it on a flat screen, but it's much worse in many other ways. How can you possibly win when you're using a VR headset to SIMULATE watching a movie on a flat screen? You can't see where your popcorn and soda are, you dip your chips in the ash tray, and you knock over your bong when reaching for your peppermint paddies!
For a long time, game developers struggled with how to tell a story while not locking the player into a track ride. A movie is a story. A good game today is a place you visit. VR track rides are somewhere in between.
Getting a story line into a free play game is hard. But it's been done many times now. GTA V is a good example. The GTA games are open, free-play worlds. You're free to just drive around and sightsee, which is fun all by itself. The gameplay "missions" give the player goals and achievements, but there are many ways to achieve a goal. (Amusingly, the way to make the most money in GTA V is to speculate in the stock market, not steal cars. Score one for realism.)
The VR crowd now has to face that problem. Otherwise, they'll go down the same rathole as 3D TV and movies. (Yes, Avatar in 3D was good. That's because Cameron is very good at visual world-building. Almost every other 3D movie didn't need 3D or overdid it.)