I've wanted to write about gaming for a few months now.
I largely fell out of love with it during my time in Japan. You're in the wrong time zone to play with friends. Oh, but your friends are all almost 30 so they stopped playing anyway. PC gaming is a thing among expats, but I only had space for a laptop and no time, inclination or cash to build a PC. Consoles can be hard to come by if you're anti-region-locking or were ever a Microsoft owner. And the games cost $70-80 at retail even long after release.
No wonder all anyone over there plays are crappy Android social games or portables. They're the only things that make any sort of economic sense by American standards. A shame, too, since the broadband is blisteringly fast everywhere there.
Upon my return to the States, surprisingly little changed. I've now rid myself of a PS3 and a 360 on separate occasions out of complete frustration with their hideous user experiences. I have two friends who play PC games and they play a game I'm not interested in. So, I'm left by myself with Nintendo machines that just turn on and play games.
Ennui sets in. When was the last time a genre was invented? My latest fascination is the latest Mario Kart. Where's the Metal Gear Solid that invents new gameplay and makes me rush out to buy a PlayStation? Where's the Gran Turismo quality racing sim that satisfies nearly every part of my car fetish and forces me to get a PlayStation 2? Where's the Yakuza that makes me get a PS3 to enjoy 30 hours of truly unique story? Where's my second rebooted Deus Ex game that's soaked in style?
And that's just gameplay itself, to say nothing of the great disconnect that exists in gaming communities. Reddit's r/gaming is a hellhole unless you are really into dudes whose girlfriends make them Portal cakes. Online chat systems are clinics in racism and ignorance from 10 year olds. Watching games socially has awesome potential, as the great Barcraft meets and modern eSports tournaments show, but most people are just watching Twitch by themselves most of the time.
This is the Jaded Gamer Problem. The novelty wears off permanently by age 30, and the gamer retires as his free time subsides. I was about ready to retire from gaming until I have a child of Minecraft-playing age.
But then came the research.
Michael Abrash came out and revealed the results of a lot of VR research that had happened at Valve and Oculus. Abrash, by the way, is a name a certain group of gamers know well, as he was one of the two main guys behind the Quake engine.
His recent presentation is required reading, but here's the gist: we've figured out VR in a way that gives people visceral experiences. We can instill fear of heights in a completely virtual environment that can even look unrealistic or fictional. The technical requirements are X, Y, and Z. (Note that nobody had disclosed the X/Y/Z before.) We'll see consumer-grade hardware that meets the technical requirements in roughly two years, and software is in the works.
That created a lot of believers very quickly, myself included. I, for one, was sold on the visceral aspect. Imagine playing Assassin's Creed with a fear of heights. Or Portal. Or Shadow of the Colossus and seeing just how huge the Colossi are. Or simulating Le Mans in Gran Turismo. Or hang gliding in a new Pilotwings. Everyone has a dream scenario, and suddenly it's in reach.
That is the game-changer. Any gamer will endure whatever interface is attached to VR software or hardware for the sake of that experience.
But things have moved incredibly rapidly. Abrash's presentation was in February. Since then - and I started writing this in mid-April - Facebook already bought the company and Abrash joined the company afterward, reuniting him with Carmack (already Oculus CTO).
It's so easy to be optimistic and pessimistic all at once.
On the down side
Facebook's purchase is ridiculous. One of my favorite doom-and-gloom posts about the acquisition came from an old games industry hand, Raph Koster, who always has something thoughtful to say at industry conferences like GDC and DICE:
Facebook’s purchase of Oculus is the first crack in the chrysalis of a new vision of a cyberspace, a Metaverse. It’s one that the Oculus guys have always shared. It wasn’t ever about the rendering for them either. Games were always a stepping stone. It was about placeness, and Facebook is providing the populace.
There are a lot of naive thoughts about the acquisition, and I think Koster comes the closest to giving us pure truth: that the Metaverse, as created by Oculus, is inevitable, and therefore Facebook pre-emptively bought it so as to own the Metaverse.
In this day and age, we do think it's inevitable. The English-speaking world started with the novel Snow Crash in the 90s (where the word Metaverse comes from), created a new image of the world in The Matrix at the turn of the century (similar idea), and most recently published Ready Player One as a new take that presupposes American decline. And in 2009 Japan gave the world Summer Wars, a wonderful and accessible animated film that presupposes that a single company takes over the world of social networking and digital identity, and marries it with pervasive VR.
The Summer Wars version of future events is as far as Koster reaches:
Either way, no matter who wins out, it was never about the rendering. All ... of these visions have one thing in common: the servers.
It’s about who owns the servers.
The servers that store your metrics. The servers that shout the ads. The servers that transmit your chat. The servers that geofence your every movement.
The astute commentators get this far, and the ones who don't come from the world of sci-fi/anime/games instead put it in the context of Facebook's post-IPO business moves. As that story goes, FB "missed out on mobile" because revenue on mobile was down as the device ratio shifted (because Facebook's expansion was in the mobile-heavy South East Asia region, duh). Never mind that it's now 2014 and Facebook is making investors happily specifically because the company "figured out mobile." The acquisition was to make sure that Facebook doesn't "miss out on" a platform ever again. Because VR is just another platform. It was PCs, then laptops, then smartphones, then tablets, next is VR.
There's a dystopian vision that follows, and it's tempting. Joshua Topolsky, one of the net's better gadget writers, took a stab at short-form fiction and imagined life with Facebooculus:
"Go Offworld with Coca-Cola today!" bellows a voice from a loudspeaker high above your head. "The adventure of a lifetime awaits... and all you have to do is say yes!" Offworld huh? You haven't been off of Planet Facebook yet — that could be fun. You raise your hand to the sky, pointing a clenched fist towards the blimp above. You extend your thumb upward, offering your endorsement of Coca-Cola. A simple thumbs-up. A like.
It's equal parts Blade Runner, The Circle and Ready Player One. All of which are dystopian. You already get the idea: the Facebook of today is applied to the technology of tomorrow.
Gamers are upset with the acquisition because in this scenario they lose out on their games of today with the tech of tomorrow. Gone are the Assassins and the Colossi and Le Mans - all gamers get are more branded "experiences," with a bit more Hollywood and all the product placement we're already used to. If you see an angry gamer, understand him.
On the up side
But there are two pieces left hugely missing from the picture and all the analysis up to now.
First, gadget writers like Topolsky, smart though they are, never went to business school. They'll remain blissfully ignorant of the fact that Facebook is now a multi-billion-dollar public company with investors, thousands of employees, and entrenched revenue channels. The entrenched revenue is from advertising. That is to say, Facebook is an ad company. They don't do Offworlds. They create paid installs for Candy Crush Saga. That's what investors look for now and will look for in the future.
Second, gaming must lead the way. VR is innately interactive. Suppose Peter Jackson shot Lord of the Rings in VR and you could look in any direction at any time. Where do you look? The answer is where Jackson encourages you to look, but how does he accomplish that? And what happens if you steadfastly refuse to look in the direction of the action? These are the sorts of problems that game design is used to solving.
Moreover, gamers adopt devices much more rapidly than general consumers. GPU computation is now a field because Quake drove the adoption of the GPU. GLQuake was released in 1997, and within 2-3 years we had a recognizable GPU industry and a glut of 3D games. Video game consoles reach their adoption inflection curves on the same scale of time. Compare that to mass-market devices like DVD or Blu-Ray players. The adoption rate hits peak acceleration closer to a decade post-release.
So, compare the two "flavors" of VR. On one hand we have gaming VR, which already has work done by Valve, Oculus, and Sony and Nintendo, companies with business knowledge in interactive experience, marketing to early adopters and technical knowledge in 3D graphics. On the other, we have a hypothetical mass-market VR industry with Coca-Cola Offworlds dominated by a web advertising company with business knowledge in advertising and technical knowledge in database performance.
One vision is more credible than the other.
In the same way Google looks stupid chasing Facebook using Google+ when it still owns search, Facebook will look stupid chasing whatever company ultimately dominates VR when its shareholders watch for monetized app installation. If Facebook exercises control over Oculus, that company won't be the dominant player. If Oculus independently becomes the dominant player, activist shareholders will demand that Facebook spin the company back out.
The really up side
The best news possible came at the end of our news flurry: that Michael Abrash rejoined John Carmack at Oculus. Abrash and Carmack did something truly incredible back at id when they wrote the Quake engine. And, according to Abrash that work had been inspired by Snow Crash:
Sometime in 1993 or 1994, I read Snow Crash, and for the first time thought something like the Metaverse might be possible in my lifetime. Around the same time, I saw the first leaked alpha version of Doom. ... [Carmack didn't offer me a job at id] until after he had talked for a good two hours about how he was going to build cyberspace, and by that time it was hard for me to imagine doing anything else ... It's amazing what a team of ten mostly untrained twenty-somethings in the Black Cube in Mesquite, Texas, managed to accomplish – but it wasn't the Metaverse.
So now, as the story goes, the two of them are back together to achieve that dream once and for all. Abrash and Carmack both spoke independently on the capital investment required to finish the job and that Facebook can definitely provide that.
Abrash:
For example, there are half a dozen things that could be done to display panels that would make them better for VR, none of them pie in the sky. However, it's expensive engineering.
I have a deep respect for the technical scale that FB operates at. The cyberspace we want for VR will be at this scale.
The fact that the dream is alive and kicking for Abrash and Carmack, and that they're working together again, should create gleeful, bounce-off-the-walls, best-E3-announcement-ever levels of hype.
There's no reason to think that these two guys won't give the world the Metaverse.
It will solve the Jaded Gamer Problem because it has to. Old gaming buddies will come out of the woodwork and reunite in whatever the first killer app is. It'll certainly be a game: a new Minecraft, a new Quake, a new World of Warcraft. Gaming is not only the most appealing application, but it's where the R&D has been done, it's where the creative knowledge lies, and it's marketed to the group most likely to rapidly adopt new technology.
Inevitably, it will slow down and start to get boring. Think of early Facebook. Every day on the service was exciting. New people joined or a major new feature would appear. But the potential at the time felt endless. (Especially because on a college campus it was a free dating service. That helped.) Now Facebook is something we like to disconnect from, like email. Things that we once specified as hobbies (usually to the ends of the dating service) are now Liked Pages, just another ad delivery channel. VR will commercialize and get stale. Carmack put it best:
The experience is too obviously powerful, and it makes converts on contact. The fairly rapid involvement of the Titans is inevitable.
Our generation, at least, will want to occasionally disconnect from a commercialized virtual world. We'll all go back to being jaded gamers.
And if Abrash's dream comes true, the Metaverse in VR form will be "the final platform." The Jaded Gamer Problem will be made permanent.
So, gamers: we may have only one great platform launch left in our lives. Get hype.