Stories in Virtual Reality Scare Me

Video games have, in the past, always been a way for people to experience things they normally wouldn’t be able to. You can play video games and get a powerful experience all while knowing that it was not real then return to reality. Virtual reality allows you to almost live those experiences, leading to a much more personal experience, which is slightly terrifying to me.

Growing up my favorite video games were sports games. My dad would always say if you want to play football so bad why don’t you go play with your friends, but that wasn’t the experience you would get while playing sports games. Playing sports games allowed you to construct your own team and call your own plays. It was more like being a coach or general manager than actually playing the sport. I know that I will never be a professional football or hockey coach so I enjoyed this experience. If I wanted to play football I would round up some buddies and throw the football around. If I wanted to play hockey I would go to the rink. Virtual reality now actually lets you catch a football or shoot a puck via video game. These are both experiences that can be accomplished without video games leading me to think that these forms of virtual reality games make no sense.

Where virtual reality does provide an experience that you can’t achieve is in shooter or other fantasy games. Playing these games on a normal console provides a life like experience but still leaves a large gap between reality and the game. Playing these types of game can lead to players seriously immersing themselves into intense and violent scenarios, drastically shrinking the gap between reality and the game to almost nothing. These experiences could possibly be traumatic and lead to extreme behavioral issues.

This lack of a gap between reality and games can be particularly troubling once stories start to be introduced to virtual reality games. As stated by Ian Bogost in his article Video Games are Better Without Stories, the gaming industry has long dreamed of overtaking Hollywood to become the “medium of the 21st century.” He later says that, “you can tell a story in a game, but it is much easier to watch television or read.” While this I believe to be true for regular games, introducing stories to virtual reality could make such games more attractive than a movie or a book. Stories already have a way of connecting to people either watching on television or reading a book. Actually being able to put yourself into the story and being able to live them out is a scary proposition. Once the player takes off the headset and realizes he or she is in their own normal lives they could definitely feel a void after living such an extreme experience.

Where virtual reality really scares me though is in form of role playing games. Being able to control the storyline of a game is already a widely successful concept for games. Combining that with being able to almost live in that alternate, fantasy world you have created could possibly be even more enticing.

Although living in an alternate fantasy world wouldn’t appeal to everyone, as Bogost says, “If there is a future of games it is doing what they are already good at: taking the tidy, ordinary world apart and putting it back together again in surprisingly ghastly new ways.” This is particularly true in games like Sims, where you play out a fairly ordinary life where you can live in a giant house and do as you please. Combining a game like Sims and virtual reality would allow players to actually put themselves in this alternate reality that is in fact achievable for people in real life but far simpler to do in a video game. Would players ever want to leave this alternate reality?

While playing out lives in virtual real seems like an enticing option, maybe we should pump the breaks on virtual reality and focus on the reality we actually live in.

Works Cited

Boddington, D. (2017, January 23). Virtual Reality: Recognising the Risks. Science Focus.

Bogorst, I. (2017, April 25). Video Games are Better Without Stories. The Atlantic.