Virtual reality has been a long time coming, and ever since we’ve known about the Oculus Rift being funded and well in-development, we’ve had time to ponder the different kinds of experiences that VR can offer. There are some inevitable uses that make me cringe. Pornography is one of them, and another is over-the-top horror. Some VR developers at GDC came together to discuss the latter, urging the developer community to use common sense and restraint.
The thing that makes intense VR horror problematic is the thing that makes VR so appealing: the immersion. The effect of being surrounded by a virtual reality while doing something like floating in space may be pleasant, but being virtually present in a room with a demon bent on terrorizing you certainly is not. Owlchemy Labs CEO Alex Schwartz quipped that he and his team would “…nope the fuck out of any jump scare kind of game.” “It’s really rough on the players,” he said. “VR is now making gaming and interactive entertainment more accessible than it’s ever been, and to throw someone into the most intense experience? We’re very against that.”
One of the developers behind HTC’s now-famous VR demo TheBlue: Encounter said, “I find that scary experiences, horror experiences need to be really finely calibrated. If you see a horror movie on a screen, you have the abstraction… We actually have a [development] rule that no creature should be larger than the size of a small dog. Anything above that and you get this primal, lizard-brain thing of, ‘Oh, this isn’t a fun scare. It’s a survival scare.’” It’s an interesting point, and this is a problem that I anticipate will have its time in the limelight in the near-future. Someone is going to publish a horrifying game, and it’s going to literally scare someone to death. No thanks; I’ll stick to RIGS.
Source: VG 24/7