Comment by m0nastic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by m0nastic | Hacker News Reader

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I think there's a good discussion to be had about what the future of VR means to advertising-based social networks, even if I don't share the authors cynicism.

I think their argument about the technology is batty though. It's the same argument that gets made every time a new creative medium is created. People making early motion pictures were basically filming plays, it took a while before the specific affordances of the medium become realized.

I fully expect that there will initially be a lot of shitty VR games. First there'll be existing games "re-skinned" to have VR support, and they'll mostly be terrible. Then there will start to be games that are designed specifically for VR. And most of those will be terrible too. But eventually game designers will discover what makes VR attractive as a platform, and generations of game developers will be born into a world where VR is actual practical tech; and they will make wonderful things.

The first generations of "tablet-optimized" games are awful too. Developers spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to superimpose a control pad on a touch screen that doesn't have any feedback (and obscures the screen when you use it). There will eventually be games for tablets that make use of the benefits of tablets (I think there's actually already a few of those).

I don't know what is so special about VR tech that would preclude that same thing from happening.

Their argument about the technology is perfectly fine in their personal context. The point at which it gets batty is when they presume every single person is like them and will suffer the same consequences.

Personally, I feel terrified any time someone raises an argument resting upon the idea of homogeneous people. I'm me and you're you. You don't like VR and find it isn't for you. That's fine. There's this plant I can't eat - I'm not allergic, it just tastes awful to me. They say it's good for you, but I just can't stand it. I also can't socialize around sports - the kind where you sit down in front of a large screen and watch a game, whether at home or in an establishment serving food and drinks. I've never been able to understand this model. Of course that's the problem - you can't understand it, you just get it or you don't. And I don't. So I don't do that.

I do like MMORPGs though. I've made a lot of friends who I know just by their self-picked handle. For some of them I don't even know what they look like at all. I've met with a few of them though, they're nice.

Spending 5 or 6 hours per day in a virtual world might be bad for you. Or it might be all right for you. Depends on the precise you. It's definitely not "wrong", in a moral or legal sense (IANAL, IMBW). It's wrong when you give up on someone, or let them down, or tell a lie, or desert them ... when you hurt them.

The one thing you can say about all people is that they're different. When you look at them, they look all the same, but the more you look, the more different they are. Kind of like grains of sand.

further reading/tl;dr:

http://xkcd.com/1314/

http://xkcd.com/1311/

http://xkcd.com/1289/

http://xkcd.com/603/

http://bit.ly/U7tyNe

Well as far as mmorpgs go, the point isn't to sell ads. The point is to get customers hooked up and then gradually make them more frustrated so that they have to pay real money to alleviate the frustration.

I see someone has played SW:TOR recently (or something like it). It's shocking seeing my brother go through the exact same motions. Much like myself several years ago, beat for beat. Also surprising that it's so much worse. Much more aggressive with punishment of non-payers. To the point of the game design being egregiously jeopardised to make the game simply unbearable. Being quite committed at this point, you cave into this user-hating community of managers abusing design. All for the sake of selling subs.

If the future truly was anything like this, I would want out, too. Just awful.

>I think their argument about the technology is batty though. It's the same argument that gets made every time a new creative medium is created.

I'm not too off put by that argument, as there are plenty of technologies that have high hopes, but have always been 20 years away because it frankly the experience just sucks, or the problem is harder than anyone actually understands. Such as, 3D Pictures/TV, Paper-thin displays, Graphene Transistors.

Sure I'd love to eat my hat on most of these, but as some of these technologies are, they still just suck or don't provide a good enough experience to upgrade over the less-tech experience.

I'd agree completely, but your timing is off. We're several years into what I'd call "tablet-first" gaming (I would nominate 2011's Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery as the standard-bearer) and there is a good handful of (mostly independent) games in development that are indeed "VR-first," such as the atmospheric thriller Technolust or even the major-studio space combat title EVE: Valkyrie.

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