Some Kind of Horrible Pun On Virtual Reality

Trends cycle. Everyone knows that: we’ve seen it with the rise and fall and rise of the humble video games arcade; we’re seeing it right now with the ridiculous preponderance of RTS’s on the PC release schedule.

Genres and modes of gaming tend to follow a slight boom and bust pattern; given the commercially-charged nature of the industry, this is generally caused by a forward-thinking innovation followed by a rapid rush of frantic cloning once a market has been demonstrated. When Atari sold 150,000 Home Pong machines during a single season in 1976, no less than 75 electronics companies announced the launch of their own home television games in the same year. With the market saturated with samey tank games and the aforementioned slew of Pong, Mattel were able to leap in with the first handheld products, and capture the attention of bored gamers. After that particular avenue closed, 1978 and the release of Space Invaders in the arcades swung the emphasis in an entirely different direction.

We all know what happened in the portable, console, arcade and emergent PC markets since then, but reading some stuff from the mid-90s put me in mind of a now-forgotten trend which has never quite broken through and will eventually come back to take gaming completely into the mainstream.

Virtual reality. The words make you think: stupid hats; funny gloves; Neal Stevenson; Johnny Mnemonic; Lawnmower Man; that absolutely terrible BBC2 show with Craig Charles (sorry Americans). Basically, 1993 to 1996.

A great many things went wrong at that time in the games industry, not least the 3DO, but perhaps a salient failure was the fact that virtual reality never lived up to its own hype in any way. Basically, the games were weak, the interfaces were poor, nobody went to the arcades to play them, companies (*cough* Sega) suddenly realised that they’d wasted a great deal of invaluable development budget on stupid theme parks and pulled out leaving the whole area to crash horribly.

With the Wii, Nintendo have just realised an early-stage commercial success with the technological concept from the early-mid-90′s. During the development of the N64, they experimented with a fully-working wristwatch motion controller. They got to the stage of focus-testing with it, but gamers found it ungainly and irritating so they abandoned the idea in favour of the single analogue-stick design. Now, the technology has arrived to make motion sensing seamless and commercially viable.

Look at the evolution of internet-connectivity and consoles: remember the Japan-only SNES-downloading legends, and the crazy hypotheses about Megadrive downloading. Old ideas, from the 90’s, resurrected with a good business model and proper technology.

You see, what Nintendo have done is to make a quirky and cheap product with a very old technological idea just as soon as that idea is practicable. The “business class” Xbox 360 and PS3 may well not succeed against this upset: only time will tell. However, there is always a possibility to enter the market with an expensive product, should it prove to be sufficiently revolutionary.

So here’s a hypothesis: in about five years time we will see a new round of “virtual reality” products. By that I mean new forms of 3-D display coupled with new interfaces intended to immerse the player more. Such a product is highly likely to occur in an arcade format first, and to be expensive. We’re in Crazy Land now, but one strong possibility is the creation of interactive 3-D projections – this technology exists right now, but is not in a viable state for gaming both financially and in terms of usability.

Why will the return of virtual reality signal a return to the arcades? Several reasons: firstly such games will be highly visual; secondly they will be expensive to build and maintain; thirdly they will potentially take up an area larger than your living room.

I’ve waited until now to perform a necessary disambiguation for a reason. Virtual reality is often taken to mean “cyberspace”; “the matrix”; “the Grid”: essentially a society with a 3-D virtual topography. We seen the society aspect fissure off and fuse with existing gaming technology: manifesting as Second Life and MMO’s.

But social virtual reality will only come after that arcade revolution: the technology will start with action games and move into the social sphere when you can take it home; essentially, when someone figures out how to do the arcade thing cheaper and put it in a small box. It takes more time to develop a social network than it does to play virtual table tennis.

We might laugh at the failed business ideas of the 90’s now, but when we look at the games industry it’s actually being run by those very ideas in a more intelligent form. My fleshing out of the resurgence of virtual reality isn’t very fully formed, as I’m waiting for commenters to tell me, but to my mind the progression is there to be seen.

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This entry was posted on Monday, December 11th, 2006 at 7:17 pm and is filed under Monday Night Live. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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