After huffing and puffing through a 30minute VR shoot-’em-up, I’m starting to arrive at the conclusion that the entire category of “serious games” is a contradiction in terms.
Make no mistake, I totally enjoyed the experience. The graphics, game mechanics and immersive, multi-player environment were all novel and exciting. Even felt like I had a 3 seconds out-of-body experience looking at my virtual avatar and all that gear rendered in real-time on screen. The above being said to give credit where it’s due; having had literal, physical sweat through the game, a little voice in my head went like: you know what, if I wanted to sweat I would go to the gym. When I game, as a gamer, as far as I am personally concerned, it’s not reality as-is that I am seeking, right? If it’s something real that I want, it’s already right there #nofilter in front of my eyes. I can breathe it, smell it, touch it, hear and see it. At least for me, when I game, I’m looking for an escape, something fun to do. And it is just a lot more fun killing enemies off with my hands on the joystick to move and to fire while drawn into my chair, than to physically experience the strain of holding up and reloading so much metal on my hand. In short, there’s a limit to which how much I want to experience reality. I’d like a toggle for how much “reality” to dish me in a XR experience perhaps.
While I emerged from the experience full of respect for military service, to shoulder so much more weight and to trudge through literal mud in real-life, this first VR game experience interestingly allowed me to see the “light” as a friend who makes casual games was sharing with me, that you know what, when people play games we just wanna have fun. The artistic vision, the message, the deeper meaning may have their place but it’s not for everyone. There’s also a part of me that believes that by turning the world’s problems into a game, we risk trivialising their actual depth, if it makes sense. I think there can be gamification invoking our competitive spirits to do a lot more of things like — first thing that popped up in my memory was simply racing to the top in terms of number of books read over summer back in primary school — yet there is also a limit to how much we can stretch these things, right? Gamification can’t make a boring task suddenly become interesting. Serious games are an oxymoron to the extent that yes immersive experiences are possible and create tremendous value, but I’m not readily confident as to how we translate stakeholders and relationships into the boundaries of a game with predefined mechanics, winners and losers. How does one even win in a game of poverty? Is “To the Moon” a game game?
I’d take my games as escape cake and eat it. While waiting for the next game with a vision to flip my brain around.
