What is virtual reality and what should it be?

Virtual reality is a topic that has been up for discussion since computers existed, most would argue that virtual reality or VR means to be in a computerized world, a computerized plane of existence, others would argue that VR is being immersed in a game or movie. The possibilities for VR are seemingly endless and go far beyond the uses for only games and movies, it has been proven to be useful in many ways, one most notably, a way of allowing a blind person to see again using a VR headset, a lot of people would say that this is what VR should primarily be used for, there are many sides the VR argument and what it’s future should truly be. Right now at the head of the VR would and what its future is going to be more and more is in the video game industry.

The idea of VR has been around for decades now and in this day and age is being showed that it is most definitely possible and can be made and even though it is in its early stages, has been made. There are flaws in today’s VR though, even though you wear it over your eyes and control it with your hands VR can still be difficult to become immersed in, it has been shown that to be completely immersed in say a game, all it really takes is a good story, beautiful world and characters you connect with and seem to have something in common, usually a common goal. Examples of this come in many forms of games, in particular RPG’s with their vast world and ways to interact with it, countless characters you may come across and the ability to shape and create your character the way you want. One other example is horror games, more notably their ability to immures you in the game with things as simple as sound and visuals, they usually create a massive sense of terror, being alone and helplessness, this is usually achieved not with VR but simply a headset and a screen in front of you is all that seems to be needed. As well as an interest in what game you’re playing whether it be a slash and hack medieval RPG attempting to save the fair princess from evil, or surviving in a zombie world filled with death around every corner and you need to find just one more can of food to eat in order for your character to survive. Immersion in games today depend of the games just as much as the player and their preferences, and so far playing on a screen with a story the sucks you right in seems to be all that’s needed and could may just be what VR already is. 

At this time VR is a screen that fits over your head and in front of your eyes, as well as either a controller or mouse and keyboard, the games that go with this aren’t exactly the best unfortunately, what should be the ultimate tool for immersion seems to just be a screen right in your face and some badly made games with little to no story. And on top of that the structure of the game and using of a mouse and keyboard take you out of the immersion as well, VR or at least the games for VR still have a very long way to go when it comes to immersing you in a game. In this moment of time, VR can only invoke the feelings of auditory and visual sensations. To have the full effect of VR, you’d have to have all senses present, sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. With technology growing day by day the possibilities of VR is endless. Could future gaming have a way to trick the human mind into having all senses fully activated? Giving the user and complete experience of “being there”. As games will soon to be able to have more richness and vividness, it will allow the user to have much more of a “presence”. Presence being a realism feeling coming from a computer generated environment. 

One other side of the VR argument is that VR should be and defined as a different plane of existence and not something the simply sits over your head, that VR is going to be a separate world or separate “reality” one in a computer that when you’re in makes you feel as if you’re in the real world. You can feel a breeze on your face water splashing on you or even pain, if you say stub your toe while in this different plane of existence. Unfortunately for people who hope for this and believe that it is the future of VR, it is very far away, and isn’t very close to becoming reality. Though there are some forms of VR that have been able to simulate the feelings you would feel in the real world because this virtual reality is in the real world but is overlooked due to what is used for at this time and because it isn’t what the world thinks it should be. This form of VR is mainly used in theme parks and comes in the form of a moving machine with a massive screen in front of you. Say the screen was showing a point of view shot of being on a ship, the machine that you’re sitting in will gently rock with the crashing of the waves. The smell of sea water filling the room would arouse the sense of smell, at that same moment, lightly sprinkled rain drops trickling down your face giving you the sense of touch. You taste the saltiness from the sea water on your lips. All this will simulated all feelings of reality. It is at that moment you would feel as if you really were a pirate sailing the seven seas.

All and all the Virtual reality argument is one that seems to have no end at this point and no limit to different sides of the argument. What is certain is that VR whatever form it will come in is going to happen, what shape or form of reality it comes in is coming, and so far it looks to be rather promising whether it be a head set form of VR, that of course after some more time will have far better games that you will be able to fully immerse yourself in, or if it comes in form of a completely separate world that you plug yourself into and somewhat seems and feels a bit like the real world. Only time will tell and we rather far off from knowing exactly what VR will be, all we have to do now is wait.

-Lloyd Clasby

http://motionographer.com/2015/08/03/virtual-reality-is-not-filmmaking/

http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~ruth/Papers/narrative/VRTowardsNarrativeTheory.pdf

http://ww.cybertherapy.info/pages/telepresence.pdf

http://excelsior.biosci.ohio-state.edu/~carlson/history/PDFs/p62-bryson.pdf

http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~brooks/storybiz/immersiveNotVirtual.pdf

http://motionographer.com/2015/06/10/the-mill-tackles-monstrous-vr-challenges-for-google-atap/

What is virtual reality and what should it be?

Virtual reality is exactly what it says it is, it's a form reality but virtual or computerized, though lately it has been hyped up quite a lot, it is still in it's very early stages and in development. From what we've seen so far though it looks to very much change the very face of the computer world as well as parts that most would think it wouldn't effect.

Virtual reality even in it's early stages has shown to have the potential to do some serious good in the would in many ways other than increasing your gamer score. It has show to have applications in the medical industry to help better train doctors and nurses without the serious risk of losing a patient, or training soldiers to better survive battle by fighting in a simulation and increasing their survival chances in a real battle.

The future of virtual reality is blurry and unknown at this time but what is certain is that is coming and coming fast so we need to expect it and be prepared for some big changes in the world.

Game "Addiction"

Game "addiction" as so many people are calling it now, is unfortunately a real and growing problem in the gaming world, but first before we get into that area I'll talk about what game addiction actually is.

The word addiction means to have an uncontrollable craving for a substance you inject, inhale or how ever you can get into you, making the term game addiction moot.
Yes you have cravings to get back into a game and level up and make your character all the more stronger but the word "addiction" doesn't apply here, so we'll call it "a sever love of video games" for now.

Now this is a serious problem in the world and it does affect people's lives in a shockingly negative way and does have long term after effects such as anxiety, depression and other rather negative mental health issues. They effect diet as well but I personally don't think that's as big a problem as depression and anxiety, so we'll stick to these fun topics for now.

When a person plays games in order to escape your reality then it is a problem and will lead to more problems and more and more, there aren't many ways we know of as yet to combat this issue, it's mainly up to the player to overcome this problem, but there is support for these people and people that care for them that I'm sure will help them.

In the near future at the rate of this problem is going, ways to professionally combat this issue further will appear it's is simply a matter of time.

-Lloyd Clasby

Violence in the world of games.

What makes a game too violent? Is it when there is simply too many deaths and guns? Is it when the motivation behind the violence makes it too much? Or is it when angry parents (over baring mothers) and large religious organizations say "it's too much".
This is a subject that has been plaguing the game industry and their developers since the early days of gaming.

On one side we have a massive amounts of people claiming violent video games cause violence and even to go as far as to claim they are used to train to use guns and ways to kill people, none of these claims have been proven to be true, in fact the have been proven wrong multiple times by countless studdies.

The studies into wether or not games cause violence have shown that games do quite the opisate and lower violence and the aggression people feel every day.

There is a fine line between real violence and video game violence, our brains are wired to tell the difference, no matter how "realistic" game violence is, we as people will be able to look at it and think "that's not real".

Sexism in the gaming world

Sexism in the gaming world

Sexism has existed in the game world as long as both genders have been playing video games, it is one of those few controversial subjects in the gaming world that a lot of the time goes unnoticed and unfortunately unchecked.

Most men who have been caught making sexist comments towards woman in the online gaming world claim they were simply making harmless banter and joking around, if this is true then it is as equally as bad as if they were purposely making sexist comments.
On the other side of all this woman say they do notice the negative comments being made and a lot of the time just brush them off and don't bother repodning to who said them in the first place, a lot also said that the problem itself is due to the design of some mmo games where woman are depicted as sexual objects a lot of the time, as well as some actions they can perform in a game such as dancing in an mmo, is highly sexualized.

Thankfully there is hope to this issue that some games have been tackling head on to try and resolve.
One game in particular is in fact a game called leuge of legends, where a person's gender is not disclosed and when playing players are unable to tell the gender of there fellow team mates or enemy team mates, as well as that there is no in chat options and the typing options filter out any negative banter, this takes away most negative ways bad players can negatively go about saying awful things, this is a tactic most other could and should use, it works and makes the game more enjoyable for everyone, hopefully we'll be seeing this tactic used in more player based games in the future.

FALLOUT 3

Fallout 3 is one of those games that comes once in every year or so that launches a ridiculous amount of copycat games that try to reach the height of popularity that it did, only a few other titles have and only a few have surpassed it in its genre and one of those was its sequel’s Fallout New Vegas. I have chosen this game for a few key reason’s, both personal and for the fact that the game did so well for so many more reasons, the first is because it’s the game that got me into full on gaming and made me fall in love the post-apocalyptic genre and for me most importantly the art of the post-apocalyptic world. The main reasons for why I chose this game are because of the incredible amount of stuff you can do in the game and the different ways you can play the game not to mention the amazing story of course.

In the game you are placed in the somewhat unfortunate shoes of the lone wanderer, don’t let the name deceive you, you start out as a vault dweller which is a reference to the original game, but after the your father, the vault doctor leaves the vault which no one has ever done so in over 200 years not since Armageddon occurred, so you are told, and you are forced out of the vault on your own accord to a certain degree to search for your father and what happened to him and most importantly why he left in the first place, your journey takes you out of the vault and back into a few other ones, and out into what’s left of Washington DC or at least what’s left of it, at the start you charge head on into the quest to find your father but are very quickly side tracked with helping others, or joining their rival to rob them or just plain kill them and their rival. The many quests you’ll undertake range from a whole variety of things and come from a colourful range of people, some quests are questionable morally and others are clearly for the greater good, and almost all have repercussions no matter what choice or side you chose, above all one thing is clear, all roads will eventually after hours and hours of playing will lead you to your father, after you as the player actually realise that he was the person you were looking for in the first place you angrily ask him why he left you and his reasons are pretty dam just, what happens next in the game can range from too many options, so I’ll leave it to you the reader to discover what happens next.

The mechanics of the game are also what makes the game so legendary in its own right, the first thing most player realise at the start of a game is that you can play it as either a first person shooter or third person shooter, which is different compared to other games that don’t have “mmo” at the start of their titles. On top of that, the gameplay itself is fluent, fast paste and above all engaging, it also introduced something that hadn’t been seen before since one it’s more original titles back in the 90s, a little something called V.A.T.S, V.A.T.S allows you to in a way pause the games to select an area of you opponent to possibly land a critical hit on, the parts you can shot are pretty basic and where ever you hit will have a different effect, say you choose the leg to shoot and the opponent survives, for the rest of the gun fight or melee fight that opponent will be limping, or if you shoot an arm, this may have the chance for them dropping whatever weapon they are using and possibly even break it if you choose to shoot the weapon itself, but there’s a catch to all of this and that is there’s a chance you will miss or the opponent may even dodge the shot, it also depends on your positioning too, if you plan on shooting them in V.A.T.S you need to have a clear shot of the target, and if you do, the results are very much satisfying.

All up the game delivers as something to keep you entertained for hours on end, whether you play it for the in depth story or the fluent gameplay or just to explore the wasteland to see what there is to be seen, no matter the reason people play fallout 3 either way you will get sucked into the world as the lone wanderer.

By Lloyd Clasby

Genre

The subject of genre is a broad and wide subject that applies to many different things in a game, unlike most things in the game industry though it affects the very core of a game, the very essence of a game is what genre it is.

The base meaning of genre is what kind of game it is in the first place, is the game something that will shock you and have you jumping out of your chair? or is it a run and gun shooter where if something moves in the game the first thing you think to do is shot it.
Genre also affects the environment and general setting of the game, it may be in a lush jungle or a barren wasteland, but in some cases a game includes a bit of everything in a game and that too is a genre all on it's own on a whole other level, and is yet another example of  how broad the subject of genre is and will continue to get.