Virtual Reality Will Bring Back the Arcade
medium.com
medium.com
Online play is probably what killed it off again. I think when there's a reason for people to show up somewhere to play games, they will.
I do think there is a place for a third party business when it comes to VR though in the realm of 'guided' RPG's and narratives. Imagine paying 25 bucks for you and your friends to join a 3D D&D style adventure with a professional DM and actors in mocap playing the part of the major characters. There's a lot of compelling things that could be done in this arena, and it takes the focus off of the tech and makes it more about interactivity and immersion. There's also quite a lot of relatively cheap untapped talent in local improv/community theater scenes to find some reasonable acting talent. Heck, mocap is getting good enough that your actors could have home studios easily enough withing a few years.
If everyone has a black box strapped to their face and can communicate sub-100ms, would people even know that they weren't in the same physical location?
Actually, it would be more interesting if they weren't in the same physical location. A VR arcade chain would be a great way to hang out with friends in other cities; you could all visit the local arcade location in your city and then hang out together in a shared virtual space. The game would almost be secondary. Imagine being able to play pool with your friend on the other side of the world, with a real pool table, real cue, and virtual balls. That would easily be possible with a VR arcade.
Immersive VR requires at least some space to move around in, or set up a big omnidirectional treadmill in. As the human population grows but Earth stays the same size, personal living quarters will always be at a premium, the rent will always be too damn high, and space to set up this awesome VR rig will be prohibitively expensive.
VR machines could be consumer-grade and still draw an audience, because of the people locked out of the market due to lack of space to set up a rig. Consider what we have now that isn't even VR- I don't have space to use a Kinect.
No, the answer is that we actually seem to enjoy living in really dense clusters and spend a premium on trying to pile more and more people in to the mess. (Well, there's some argument that wealthy people have had an undue influence on the societal process of urbanization, but that's digressing.)
Other than that, I actually think that arcades are posed to make a comeback, precisely because of the issue you highlight: the only way to have enough open space in a building (in a major city) to really walk around in requires splitting the rent or being really wealthy.
I didn't mean that if you found a unicorn, they wouldn't prefer it, just that at the end of day, people made the compromise of plowing their fields with horses, not narwhals.
Focusing on the horn as "man, that would be a great feature to add!" misses something interesting in why they picked the horse to the (perhaps arguably) more majestic narwhal. I would even argue that studying why the preference when you split the unicorn in to extant beings is the paramount question about the topic, since it gives us the seeds to move forward building more dense (and enjoyable!) cities and societies.
I find it interesting that despite everyone lamenting how they wish they weren't in cities, they don't take any of the many opportunities to move to smaller cities or out of cities all together, despite there being many such chances. (Some people do, obviously, and are quite happy with their choice. I just meant that there was a net flow in to cities.)
In so far as you point out that cities seem to top out a certain size that doesn't hit any inherent physical constraints, our daydreaming about unicorns (and more importantly, our discussion of horse versus narwhal) serves to improve these limits and let us move towards more focused centers of human activity.
The information age (and really... modern humans for ~10,000 years) has been driven largely by focused human intelligence, of which cities -- being a natural focal point of human efforts -- have played center stage. The story of humanity since the ice age can be glibly phrased as: we found a way to stay in one place, and grew; we found a way to get power more efficiently, and got denser, and grew; we made many theoretical breakthroughs about the mechanics of getting, storing, transporting, and using power, and got denser, and grew. The past few centuries have been a concerted effort on externalizing our various faculties, following a series of breakthroughs on fundamentals, and as a result we've been able to double the population in just the past ~100 years. People have picked up on the narrative, even if they don't know why it's happening, yet.
They enjoy getting to be part of the important cluster of human activity, instead of relegated to energy production out on a farm.
tl;dr: You made an uncharitable reading of my posts, and failed to connect that I was using "enjoy" as a euphemism for the idea of a "utility" function, because I was talking in public, and wanted my idea to be generally understood rather than technically sound. This error in parsing my post led you to make a long rant -- concurring with me. Your violent agreement amused me, so I wrote you a rant back. [Ed: Or just flat out missed I was talking about why the skyrocketing prices, not the nucleation of new cities.]
Hope you're having a good day. (:
[1] https://www.facebook.com/pages/Arkadia-Retrocade/29361913074...
That sounds really, really cheap. I'm so jealous right now.
He thought it was cool and got in line to use it. The guy before him was very physical during his sim and sweated up a storm.
He put the goggles on, got immediately grossed out by the hot sweaty mess inside and took it off before it had even started.
Gross.
The VR experience has to be enhanced from what people will be able to get at home. Having a bunch of VR headsets in a room and calling that an arcade will quickly become obsolete. But what people won't have as much access to is spaces that mirror the virtual world and allow you to "feel" the space. A 1:1 physical mapping with a virtual world has a very powerful effect on the suspension of disbelief.
The point being, however, it probably cost them less than $200 to put the thing together assuming they had an empty cabinet, and you paid a quarter to be able to pick from 500 games on which you could have a "vintage" experience. It was cheap, it was space effective, and to be honest it was alot more enjoyable than most of the other games they had there.
I kinda figured that would be the sort of thing that would survive in this day and age. I came back six months later and it had been replaced by a "Deal or No Deal" cabinet...
I think the same will go for VR arcades. It's gotta be more than a bunch of PCs running software. It's more about the experience.
Why would I play a MAME cabinet for $0.25 when I could do it at home for nothing? How many people actually even play a MAME game any where on any given day? They probably barely collected enough quarters to pay for the electricity to power the machine.
You can grab the older retro-loving crowd for a little while, you won't grab the kids at all. If you were 12 which would you prefer to play for more than 10 minutes? Mario Bros (Arcade, 1983) or New Super Mario Bros (WiiU, 2012)?
> I came back six months later and it had been replaced
are you sure it was legal? Seems unlikely.
My main issues:
* The author talks a lot about arcades as a social environment - this is absolutely true, but when people are strapped into HMDs in 15'x15' rooms, I just don't see how those same dynamics come into play. Sure you could have displays of what people are experiencing, but it's not the same kind of visceral or fluid experience that the best arcades have. You can't drop in on a game, or even see multiple players interacting in a physical space - ironically (or fittingly) you'd have better social interactions virtually
* Yep, VR is expensive. It takes a fair amount of gear that will be obsolete in a year or two, and the author's argument that good VR requires 1:1 motion and a large amount of floorspace (individual 15'x15' rooms, conservatively) and it doesn't sound like a very palatable (or profitable) business venture to me.
I could see some aweomse social experiences like The Void that use VR HMDs for shared mix-reality use (cavernous warehouses w/ redirected walking, practical effects, etc), but that's pretty far from the author's suggestion of putting regular consumer VR arcades up (I can also see existing PC bangs/KTV/room-based Internet cafes in Asia transitioning to VR if there is demand assuming that multiple people/headsets can interact in a shared space (otherwise the economics still doesn't make sense), but IMO VR arcades that just house regular VR experiences seem DOA.
Arcades as a social environment was not stressed in the article. On top of that, 15' x 15' rooms were never mentioned in the article. That is currently the dimensions that the Vive allows for. There is nothing that says that virtual interactions could not also happen within an arcade.
Again what is with the 15' x 15' rooms?
Never once does it suggest that arcades should use consumer grade tech and in fact that is the complete opposite of what the article says.
I think you have a vision of what a VR arcade is and that influenced your thought process. Most of the points that you argue are of your own construction.
"People were comfortable playing at home but they would come out to arcades to see the latest improvements in the video game industry. Arcades became a location where people could meet other people with a shared interest in gaming. Socializing was at the core of arcades."
"but with families and casual players looking for the kind of face-to-face social gaming experience hard to find on this side of the Pacific."
"A contributing factor to the success of Japan’s arcades is the social experience of watching people play games that are very talented and learning from them."
"A lot of people will not be able to devote much space in their apartments for entertainment anymore and instead they will start to look for entertainment locations to gather socially, as we saw happened in Japan."
"Specifically within the gaming industry, Twitch has created an opportunity for people to communicate and come together over a shared interest in games. This is a deeply human need that we possess to socialize and group."
"The current gaming industry in North America is purely a home market but this is limiting the possible games and experiences that are available and limiting the socialization of a community."
"the arcade will provide the gaming community a place to socialize in person in a way it has never been able to before."
I think another problem could be that not very many games are geared toward sharing you experience with others. So the experience is the same whether your home or at a arcade because your secluded from everyone either way even if it's multiplayer.
Phone games?
> Casino's are still going strong so there is still a audience for these kinds of distractions.
That's a stretch.
It should also be no surprise that most casinos around here have rather extensive arcades for kids to distract themselves with while their parents go waste their money on slots and poker. The article seems to leave that out (perhaps because casinos aren't commonplace throughout all of North America), which was rather striking to me, seeing as casinos are the most common places to find actually-popular arcades nowadays around these parts.
Plus, just like touch pads, VR headsets are pretty nasty after a while if they are used in public by many players. Joysticks were really funky back in the old blacklit arcades, now imagine putting that on your face/head.
I'm hoping against hope for the middle-way between those two, though: rentable holosuites, like the VR equivalent of computers at internet cafes, where there are a few titles preinstalled, but you can also run whatever titles you like from the 'net.
(Or maybe it'll just let you log into your Steam account, where all your VR games and apps are. I could totally see Steam as becoming to thin-client VR as Windows is to thin-client PCs.)
My favorite two examples to think of are Star Wars dogfights and fantasy exploration.
I like to think about climbing into a scale TIE Fighter or X-Wing and pulling down the helmet and bam dog fighting.
Or walking into a room that includes some jungle-y/forest-y smells and humidity with the helmet. Being able to explore the scenery and maybe even touch mocked plants/animals. Would create an insane level of realism.
Probably out of scope but cool to think about.
This would've been mid to late 90s, somewhere in the Bay Area. I did a cursory google but didn't come up with anything.
Likewise, I don't want to throw on a head-mounted display and strap myself into a movement pad just to play another Call of Duty iteration, either. It will be interesting to see what new experiences indie devs can come up with that aren't another rehash of the last ten years of AAA gaming.
(Although the crossbow game looks pretty fun! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6t69mp0ZhE)
There is still a place for cheap arcade fun. It's just that arcade machines aren't cheap enough to hook people anymore.