http://time.com/39577/facebook-oculus-vr-inside-story/

It had been dawning on Luckey and Iribe and their colleagues for some time that they might not be as clear as they thought they were on what virtual reality is actually for. It began as a gaming technology, but it turned out first-person shooters weren’t the killer app they expected. “Pretty quickly we realized, ‘O.K., maybe running down hallways at 40 m.p.h. isn’t exactly the most comfortable thing to do in VR when you’re sitting in a chair,’” Iribe says. “As we started to build these made-for-VR experiences, we started to realize that intense gaming, where there are bullets flying at your head, can be actually a little too intense.”

So they started thinking more broadly about what exactly it was they were building. Iribe mentions virtual vacations and a 3-D VR encyclopedia as future possibilities. Mitchell describes a “magic school bus” that could take a bunch of kids on an instant field trip to Florence to look at Michelangelo’s David. But the really big opportunity, the mainstream, billion-user opportunity, was in virtual reality as a next-next-generation communications medium. “When you add other people to it,” Iribe says, “and you can actually see somebody in that place and you can make eye contact, and you can look at them and they can look around, you can now have this shared sense of presence in this new gaming experience, entertainment experience or just social experience that really starts to define what virtual reality is all about.”

Must say I'm surprised (if) you guys aren't all over this.

Very interesting, the reaction to the news of the Facebook buyout.

The game nerds are sputtering. The rage is rather incoherent as usual. Their one possible good point is that Facebook will turn Oculus into a closed platform. But that's highly unlikely at least for several years. The number one effect is unlimited funds and instant global brand recognition. VR is a household term now.

And I'm pretty sure that's precisely the real main reason they're so angry. Simply because facebook is associated with non-nerd ("casual") games and gamers. And of course a host of uses apart from gaming that appeal to normal people more than nerds. Look at the number one complaint: "They will put Candy Crush on VR".

So the game nerds hate it. On the other hand, it seems like everybody's talking about it now.

Facebook VR right as of this instant appears to command a higher mindshare than gaming as a whole.

Compare this with the console launch which was a complete non-event even among semicasual gamers, let alone the masses.

Still think VR is narrow?

Apparently Zuckerberg doesn't think so either...

No, do you? Why??

It's much less narrow in itself than all the consoles put together. Tens if not hundreds of millions of non gamers will buy one of these sets. That's before you even consider mass marketization of immersive videogames.

VR is the essence of the medium. A videogame is not something that happens on a screen, it's a virtual world. Until now we've been looking at these worlds through the window. The whole evolution of the medium has been about improving the simulation to build presence, or if we follow Abrash's definition, proto-presence. But now with genuine VR presence you can literally trick the lizard brain into thinking you're there.

IMO, immersive 3D videogames played on a screen are obsolete.

You've tried it right? What do you think?

http://www.businessinsider.co.id/oculus-rift-crystal-cove-2014-1/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAC5SeNH8jw

You could have pathetic failure, in the sense of you sympathising with a character who goes through a failure.

But can't you get that from a cutscene, or indeed any other medium? I don't see why you need a notgame for that.

This works for fiction as a whole... You are right about personal failure, which is part of the ladder of Starcraft

Failing at Starcraft is just failing at a game. It has little in common with failing to overcome some serious real world problem.

but the actions of characters in games is not really something that I feel translates well to 'personal' failure.

Just some hypothetical examples off the top of my head:

-Failing to get a job
-Failing to get popular at your school
-Failing to preserve your marriage
-Failing to prevent the suicide of a loved one

I don't see why you couldn't make the player feel personal failure by simulating such events?

My personal problem is that challenge as a form is hard to integrate with narrative (if failing a challenge creates a narrative branch) or exists as a meaningless bubble where narrative laws are suspended and resumed. In both cases I am not sure I truly feel the challenge added anything to the game. I am personally a proponent of 'meaningless interaction' as a way forward- i.e., the player performing actions which have no 'large' consequences and rather just serve to increase engagement, presence, &c.

A valid position, although not the only possible one. I think both Heavy Rain and things like DayZ and Crusader Kings (the latter two in a much less purified notgame state) show that challenge and failure can be powerful narrative tools. The unique strength of the medium is to immerse people in particular states of mind by letting them do stuff in a virtual world which would trigger that state of mind if they did it in real life. Quite frankly, if you want to give the player a sense of failure, what better way to do so than to let them fail? It may be hard but that doesn't mean it's not worth trying.

I should say not - you can be an audience in a game as much as a player or a participant. I want to sympathise with characters more than I want to have the illusion of responsibility.

Fair enough. I'm not insisting you have to provide the option to both fail and succeed at some goal, as opposed to having the player go through a linear interaction that simulates failure. All I'm saying is it's a valid component part of notgames in general.

I do not see challenge as an essential part of games at all.

Allow me to rephrase: Challenges are a perfectly valid component of the medium of videogames. They do not have to be in every notgame but nor should they be excised from them. The key is that the virtual world should not be structured as one big challenge; challenges (if they exist) should preferably exist in pockets within the larger world which operates on different logic. And of course there should be more meaningful results of success or failure than getting or losing some points. This is how challenges work in the real world - a world without any challenges is just as unreal as one where time stops if you fail a challenge. (And traditional challenge-worlds that work entirely on game-logic can also be perfectly good, if abstract, art - see Rohrer's work - but that's the constricting standard we're trying to get away from)

How else would you instill the feeling of failure (the actual emotion, not the gamified facsimile) other than allowing the player to fail?

The skill challenges in Heavy Rain, for instance, I thought tedious and annoying

I agree, but I would argue that the problems are more a matter of execution than design philosophy.

and reminded me of being a player, rather than an audience.

Isn't that the whole point of this medium?

Thinking about this some more, I've come to the conclusion that denouncing challenge and failure as such is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. The problem is not challenge but gamified challenge. Take Heavy Rain. This is pretty much a notgame, but it still has plenty of skill challenges. It's just that the world doesn't end if you fail. Even if you die to one of the copious numbers of serial killers, the story goes on without that character. Any other title would force you to replay some awful death sequence again and again until you pressed the right buttons, but not here. These work like challenges do in the real world or in fiction. And the dramatic tension is much greater than in a gamified challenge, since you know that if you fail you cannot (or rather, must not) try again until you succeed.

In truth, the whole complaint about failure in games is rather hilariously misplaced. We act like the big problem with games is that they have too much failure. But in fact, there is no failure in games! And this is one of their biggest problems! In reality, if you fail, you have to deal with it. But games don't let you deal with it, they make you start over. Games do not allow failure! And this despite the fact that failure is one of the main sources of both comedy and drama!

It's clear that challenge and failure are absolutely key to videogames as to all other fiction. You just have to degamify them. It's the same as with all other gamified interactions.

This guy got fired for making a notgame about his shitty job. Has anyone been fired for making a game?

http://www.polygon.com/features/2013/3/7/4071136/he-got-fired-for-making-a-game-i-get-this-call

Games like these often ignore the sort of hooks and feedback loops that game designers know so well and that deliver that intangible quality of "fun." They can sometimes feel like hard work to play.

But they exist because games are a great way to create empathy between the creator and the audience. Reading a blog post about working in a call center is not as personally affecting as pretending to be a call center worker in a staged simulation. Hearing someone tell a funny tale of the shit that call center workers deal with is not as powerful as dealing with that same shit, even in pretend form, yourself.

The game ($2)

Welcome aboard!

You must have more mainstream industry connections than others here. To what degree do you think the industry is receptive to notgames thinking?

I would say Heavy Rain and The Walking Dead suggest at least one way forward here.

I'm thinking in particular of the scene in Heavy Rain where you're aiming your gun at Nathaniel, and liable to shoot him when he reaches for his cross. It's murder without gameplay, and as a result, the best murder simulator yet. (Of course, it's as flawed as the rest of Heavy Rain, namely there aren't really any consequences, but it still puts the player in the shoes of a killer in a unique way.)

The action sequences in TWD work similarly. You can technically die if you wait for too long, but your leash is so long that it doesn't really matter, and all you have to do is click on the target to attack it. It's like they took a FPS and stripped out everything except the immersion. It works very well.

So it seems like thoughts and emotions associated with violence can be generated by notgames as easily as other emotions. You just have to put the player in a corresponding situation. Games put players in such situations all the time, but the emotions are weakened because it's gameplay in immersion's clothing.

The Civilopedia from Civilization teaches you a lot about history without coming across as didactic. Maybe that could be emulated as a way to teach players art appreciation?

Hi there, I have been lurking for a while.

I played The Path and The Graveyard some years ago and liked them. But I didn't know there was a whole philosophy behind it until I found this site. All I can say is that the notgames idea has the potential to revolutionize the game industry. If only it was better known among developers... Not to be immodest, but I have some ideas for how to raise your profile which I will expand on shortly

I am currently dabbling with Unity and hope to be able to publish something, someday. We'll see

lophiaspis