The Future of VR Gaming is Social | Todd Hooper
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Virtual reality has the potential to make gaming social again by restoring some of the social cues lost in traditional video games. While early VR games focused only on the individual player experience, the future of VR gaming lies in social and shared experiences. Developers should plan from the start to support social presence through multiplayer interactions, avatars, voice chat, and integrated 2D and VR viewing options. This will allow for face-to-face gameplay as well as shoulder-to-shoulder audiences, restoring the social aspects that gaming used to have in its physical predecessors and that video games currently lack.
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The Future of VR Gaming is Social | Todd Hooper
- 1. The Future of VR Gaming is Social Todd Hooper CEO & Founder VREAL
- 2. The Past
- 4. P1: “It has alighted. Be happy my heart, for I shall cause you to see it taken away." P2: “You speak as one weak of tongue, for passing is mine”
- 6. Senet • Real world, physical game environment • Two players • Face to face • Voice interaction (important for emotional cues)
- 9. Go and Tabula • Real world, physical game environment • Two players • Face to face • Voice interaction + An audience
- 11. The Present
- 14. Video games – 1970’s to current • One or two players • An audience + Game is an 2D abstraction, behind glass + Controller and primitive avatar + Often shoulder to shoulder, watching a game not playing
- 15. Streamer Game content Social chat & community
- 17. Game streaming platforms • Game is an 2D abstraction, behind glass • Controller and avatar + Watching a game, not playing a game + Interaction model is one to many (at scale) + Text interaction (weaker emotional cues) + Audience mostly anonymous Q. Is this still a game, or has it morphed into a new form of media? A. It’s both!
- 23. Virtual Reality upsides + Return to the real world, physical game environment + Controller and avatar relate to players actual body + Voice interaction = “Social Presence” : Restores some of social cues that video gaming has lost
- 24. Virtual Reality downsides + Previous UX & interaction models don’t always work + VR to 2D interface is flawed – hard to share VR + Harassment –reward positive behavior and manage negative behavior
- 25. The ideal Social VR experience • Playing and watching • “Social Presence” delivered via environment, avatars and voice • Audience is present in the VR game, with their own POV • Audience controls who they interact with and how • Deliver a seamless way to share 2D and VR content
- 26. Streamer Game content Social chat & community Game content
- 28. Streamer Viewers
- 29. Viewers
- 32. Checklist for VR developers… • Gaming is social - the best VR games will be social • From day one, you need to plan for social presence in your game • Face to face – the players • Shoulder to shoulder – the audience • Avatars & voice go a long way • Deliver an awesome VR experience, with a 2D experience that tempts players to put on VR headset • Get ahead of harassment and culture issues early
Editor's Notes
- Hi everyone, I’m Todd, CEO and Founder of VREAL. We’re a Seattle VR startup. Today I want to talk about social interaction around games - how’s it happened in the past, how it’s evolved with the rise of video games and streaming, and how it might translate to the future of virtual and augmented reality.
- To understand the future, I like to think about the past, and how gaming has evolved.
- Social games go back to the dawn of civilization. One of the first board games identified by historians is called Senet. It’s an Egyptian board game, about 5000 years old, known as the “game of passing" and it was structured as a journey to the afterlife. It’s a two player game, and they made elaborate boards, some of which survive to the current day. This is a Senet board from 1300 BC, now in the Brooklyn Museum. You may actually see Senet in a game store today, but most of the modern interpretations are based on rules created in the 1940s by Parker Brothers. We don’t actually know the rule for Senet as it was originally played.
- Tomb painting from 2300 BC shows two people playing senet. The player on the left is boasting. "It has alighted. Be happy my heart, for I shall cause you to see it taken away." The player on the right responds, "You speak as one weak of tongue, for passing is mine.“ Apparently gamers have been trash talking since the beginning.
- I told you Senet was a two player game but this tomb illustration shows Queen Nefertititi playing solo and this was also a popular style tomb painting. Senet was a game with religious and ritual significance and historians think that you could play it against an invisible adversary - your own soul.
- There was a spiritual solo mode, but that’s a special case. A taunt like ‘You speak as one weak of tongue’ works better when spoken versus hieroglyphics.
- Let’s move on. This is Tabula, a Greco-Roman board game. Most people here will recognize this game – what is it? That’s right, it’s the ancestor of backgammon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabula_(game)#/media/File:Wurfzabel.jpg This picture from the 13th century shows physical game pieces, and two players face to face. One new thing here though - there is an audience here.
- This painting shows Go players at the Imperial court, Ming Dynasty with some of the same elements – game pieces, face to face, and an engage audience. I love the look of the audience around the Go board, obviously highly engaged.
- Of course, in the modern context all those elements still stand – physical games, two players face to face, speaking with each other, and an audience. Let’s skip forward a few years
- In the 1970’s we saw the first commercial video game, which ushered in a whole new set of ideas. This is a Japanese arcade with cocktail machines, which attempted to emulate the face to face nature of board games. Two big innovations here The game is no longer a physical object but an abstraction behind glass, and we interact with it via a controller. The other is solo play – you could challenge the computer
- This is an arcade here on Mercer Island in the 1980’s, and if you are my age, it’s a poignant reminder. The audience element is important here, because one of the ways you improved was by watching other players. This ended up with people standing shoulder to shoulder in arcades.
- The weaker interaction model and anonymity are two of the things that contribute to the toxic culture.
- If we assume
- Along comes virtual reality. Three big changes: Game is no longer an abstraction trapped behind glass, the technology is advanced enough to trick our brains into thinking we are actually in the world. VR still uses controllers, because they are motion tracked, any human avatar can closely emulate physical human movement, and once again our brains are tricked into thinking it’s real. You cannot see your hands, so text interaction isn’t going to happen. We are going back to voice.
- This is a VR game, Dungeon Chess from Experiment 7. They’ve taken the face to face aspect of board games straight into VR, and it’s a lot of fun.
- This is Rec Room, a VR game and social experience, that showcases all three of those items. You can play a variety of games with your friends and strangers. People often underestimate the impact of motion tracked controllers. When you motion track a real person’s head and hands, the personality really does come through I can tell people in our office just based on their physical motions even if their avatars are identical. Lizzie and Allie are always putting their hands in the air like they are at a concern. Sela likes finger guns. I’m told I do a lot of big circles. Of course, it introduces some potential issues as well. Because we are now represented in a virtual space, the potential for harassment and inappropriate behavior is high. To quote my good friend Eva, “Social VR won’t be awesome if it’s populated with assholes”
- We also have some limitations and ironically, the biggest one is that VR is tough to share. If you take the headset video straight onto a 2D screen, it looks like a drunk person moving around with a camera, and it’s nauseating. And it’s not immediately obvious how you share immersive content like VR.
- I borrowed this image from a VR promotional video. It’s interesting in that it shows a hybrid of the different elements of social and VR gameplay. The woman in the middle is immersed in the virtual world, but the social element is still in the physical world. Both parties are compromising their experiences in order to have the social interaction. The audience on the couch doesn’t get the full VR experience, instead they have to look across the room at a tiny screen. The player has to ignore the game to interact with the audience. This approach is necessary right now because hardware is limited and we don’t all have VR headsets. It also doesn’t scale because if I show up on a streamers couch they would probably call 911.
- This is a game from Bossa Studios called Surgeon Simulator. It’s a great VR title that we’ve been working with at VREAL for quite a while.
- In this shot in the Surgeon Sim lobby you can see three people – myself, Lizzie and Nikki. I’m the person playing the game on the right, Lizzie and Nikki are viewers that we’ve placed inside the game. They have complete freedom to move around within the constraints of the game.
- If they want, they can even hang out and socialize face to face – they don’t have to be 100% engage in what’s happening with the game. You might notice that Nikki has a camera with her. That’s one way to solve the problem of sharing VR content in 2D – simply give people virtual cameras and let them show what they want. Using a camera is very natural for most people and it’s easily understandable. One of the ways you can tell a streamer from an audience member? The streamer will turn the camera on themselves, the audience will point it at the game.
- Earlier this year we worked with a Twitch streamer who built an entire show inside Surgeon Simulator. In this shot you can see he’s set up ten different camera views of the operating room, so he can switch between them to show something really interesting for the viewers who are in 2D. This shows Lucas who is basically a camera operator inside the players game, sharing out to the Twitch audience in 2D. Of course, once you give cameras to creative people like Lucas, all bets are off.
- Turns out the Twitch crowd loved pandas so much that Lucas ended up wearing a panda suit while in VR.