Spencer Yan

As a game developer, one of the most interesting developments in the

industry from both a practical and philosophical standpoint is the emergence
of VR. Much of the philosophical discussion surrounding VR rests on notions
of how and what exactly it will do to the way people view the world: some
say that it will herald in a new age of technological marvel in which, freed
from the constraints of the physical world by the limitless affordances of a
physio-digital interface, people will be able to experience a sense of
unparalleled freedom like never before; those far less trusting (and perhaps
naive) seem to think the exact opposite, that it will enslave us into the
confines of our own minds and that we will grow first blithe, and then
altogether anathema of this 'external reality' in favour of digital escapism.
From a technologically determinist perspective, VR emerges as a natural and
organic growth of a long history of human communication through artificial
representation - starting with the crystallisation of basic phonemic audio into
language; to the reproduction of the audiovisual world through visual
interfaces such as art, photography and later cinema; to attempts to
recreate the complex nuances and convolutions of social dynamics in
massive online communities such as Second Life and its latter-day
predecessors in social networks. Technology has (seemingly) captured and
reproduced all other forms of perception to a relatively faithful degree; VR
simply exists as one further step in eliminating the barrier between reality as
interpreted by human perception and reality as interpolated by machine
perception, by reducing the users ability to perceive the interfaces which
branch the two. In this process of reduction, eventually peoples perceptions
of reality shift as this attempt at reconciliation directly moulds the users
understanding of the world around her to accommodate this new paradigm.
From a humanist perspective, VR emerges as a direct response to a
particularly audiences demands for certain trends within the industry. In
context of games specifically, one of the most salient opinions amongst
gamers (here, I mean the vocal minority, since this is the segment of the
gaming population which most greatly determines the direction its producers
take) is that there must be constant, and visible improvement for every
iteration of a product; nearly fetishistic fixations with technological inanities
such as frame rates (I know plenty of people for example who, regardless of
the quality of the game itself, will automatically dismiss and bash any game
that runs beneath a stable 60 fps), graphical fidelity (same scenario as

before, now with 1440p as the new onanistic standard), particle counts and
population densities have lent themselves to constant and ever-diminishing
attempts by those in productive roles at making tiny and practically
insignificant attempts at making games feel better by bringing them closer
to real life in terms of the various effects and processes used to render the
respective engines. What, then, is closer to real life than just removing the
very notion of the interface itself? Now that the technology is readily
available, and rapidly advancing everyday due to user demand, VR evolves
directly in tangent with peoples desires for even greater and more
expansive attempts at verisimilitude in the games they consume.