Designing the breakthrough AR game: An extremely difficult challenge that’s already been solved
I’ll start with a tweet that I did not write.
I miss that too. I think it’ll be the norm within ten years.
In my opinion we are pretty close to a huge change in two markets: sports, and video games. Using AR (Augmented Reality), they’re going to combine and the world will become a much happier place.
Disclaimer: I have nothing to do with any AR company and I’m not working on any AR project at all; I’m personally excited to see this happen, and I’m writing this article in hopes that it speeds up the process.
AR in headsets
Last year AR and VR companies got a record $3B in investment. “Smart glasses” took about a fifth of that.
Since 2016 Microsoft has been trying to sell an AR thing called a Hololens. It’s a transparent screen on a visor which can give the illusion of a 3d thing appearing in your room. I would like these things if they were cheap, light, and durable.
Maybe the hololens is durable, I don’t know. I’ve never seen someone wear one in person because they’re $3000-$5000 ($5000 is for the ‘enterprise’ model).
Microsoft doesn’t know how to market this thing yet, because customers are not adopting VR at the predicted rates, and people think of VR as similar to AR, probably because of the name. Instead Apple and Google are slowly sticking AR capabilities into phones, thinking that the problem is the headset interface. Meanwhile AR smartglasses are still in early stages of development.
AR will go through a similar teenage exploratory phase as VR. However, that’s the only similarity I see. Unlike its underachiever sibling, AR will (In my opinion) make a huge impact on video games and sports by allowing people to play multiplayer team video games wearing these smartglasses, and it will probably happen very soon.
People have more fun when they’re outside and exercising. But since the 1970’s, fantastical worlds and complex strategy have dragged people indoors to play games on screens. Right now the video game industry is set to overtake the movie industry in global revenue ($82b and rising vs $94b and falling in 2017). Wouldn’t the world just be much happier if the people playing these games were doing it on an unused football field, getting a workout and meeting people in real life, instead of sitting in their garage like in Ready Player One?
Designing AR games will be hard
The problem is that every game has positives and negatives when it’s moved to Augmented Reality which are not immediately obvious. As an example, I’ll look at shooting games.
Most shooting games, such as PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and Overwatch, almost never involve a player standing still. In an AR shooting game you would be heavily encouraged games to sprint most of the time, which would be exhausting, and even when standing still it would be in your best interests to constantly wiggle around so you don’t get shot. PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds has less running than other shooters, but that’s because it takes place on a map that’s 6km by 5km where everyone you see is your enemy, and any similar game would require a large, empty space to play — and under its current rules, you’d have to leave when you die. Additionally, these games would only work if shooting was really accurate, and it’s going to be very awkward to aim a nonexistent gun.
There are lots of hurdles to overcome when designing a game for AR. Luckily, the most popular game in the world solved all of those problems years before they came up.
I started thinking about playing video games in the real world six years ago, when I was in college and regularly playing the team game League of Legends. After playing the game with friends I would go for a run in the sunny plateau by the beach in my college town. I thought to myself, why do I switch between playing games, spending time with my friends, and exercising, when I could do all three at once?
I eventually realized that League of Legends (the most popular PC game of 2017) is accidentally designed in a way that they would make perfect team AR games.
First of all, you usually aren’t running in the game. In the first phase of the game you stay in a small, designated area against 1–2 opponents and try to keep a safe distance from them, occasionally jumping forward a bit to collect some resources and then jumping back to safety. However, once every couple minutes you will need to sprint in order to chase down an enemy who is out of position, help a teammate, or to escape if you are yourself out of position. During the rest of the game you’re slowly moving around and taking objectives with your teammates, which create natural pauses.
Second, individual matches last between 20–60 minutes and each match you start with a new character. Unlike raids in World of Warcraft for example, games are short, your growth in power doesn’t persist into the next game, and games are usually five players vs. five players. As a result, matches in League of Legends already feel a lot like pick-up basketball.
Precise aiming and movement don’t matter as much as in other games like Overwatch or Starcraft; just pressing the right buttons at the right time is half of the game, which makes it a better fit for a fledgling technology. And like the caption above says, the map of the game is already a very similar size in scale to a soccer field. It would be a trivial amount of work to rebalance the game mechanics to work for AR.
Conclusion
There will be other games that use AR in wild and crazy ways that I can’t predict. I just think that this will be the first big example of AR in a multiplayer game that actually fits the technology well.
I don’t believe this will kill the industry of indoor video games or traditional sports. Lots of games, Starcraft for example, will probably have no reason to dabble in AR. However, I do think these games and their tiny hand-based interfaces like controllers and keyboards will seem less appealing.
I’ve convinced myself that the second a good, durable, affordable AR visor hits the market, it will be everyone’s holiday present for the year, a game like this will come out, and the next summer I’ll be more tanned than I’ve ever been before. I can’t wait.
