VR is the Wii for Self Described Gamers

Were you paying attention to the video game enthusiast press when the Wii launched? It's an odd time to go back to. There's some mild excitement based on overestimating the technology but the second the thing actually launched there was an immediate cry of, and this is almost a direct quote from a mainstream game podcast, "if that's the future of gaming than I'm out." The reaction when it became a success was immediate and viscerally defensive. It helped reinforce roots that had been planted for decades of a deeply ugly "this is our medium and the people who don't already like it can't have it" attitude. I'll be talking a lot about the reaction to the Wii and not a lot about VR to start here, but that's because the reaction honestly feels like the biggest contrast.

Let's contemplate the platonic ideal of a circa 2007 Wii game. Chances are it was a pretty simplistic affair, relatively low budget (or at least low budget looking) even if a major studio with tons of cash to blow had financed it. It probably had simple mechanics to work around tech limits. Maybe a light gun game, maybe a mini-game collection. Something you can get into and out of pretty quickly. Very occasionally you'd see a slightly more traditional product that kinda tended to eat dirt because the mechanics of how to use motion controls didn't have a lot of design vocabulary built up around them. If you've played many VR games (admittedly unlikely) this is probably not that unfamiliar of a setup. Over the past few years there have been a lot of VR minigames, tech demoish experiences, and a handful of products that feel like they use the potential of the technology. While you'll get the occasional Half-Life Alyx or Resident Evil 7, the appetite to make truly expansive VR content is hardly there, there's the occasional VR port of a larger product, but these are rare because... the design vocabulary isn't well worked out and they run the risk of working poorly or making the audience nauseated. In general though the tenor around VR experiences is that they just need to work the kinks out and then they'll be amazing. There's a well of patience for them that motion controls by themselves were never allowed.

Given how much they were and are both reliant on unproven technology whose suitability for any given genre is often not yet well defined, given that VR in fact uses motion controls a lot, the reason for this feels like an interesting but sadly obvious answer. VR games were and are always aimed at capital G Gamers. VR was and has been marketed at the technophile market. The kind of person who has been routinely upset when a game launches on PC without the option for an uncapped framerate. Certainly not everyone into the tech is this way, but by subsuming that audience as part of the marketed demographic they turn away some of its ire against the tech itself, the devs are less lucky. That said, my thesis here is obvious. The Wii was an existential threat to be treated with disgust not because it was a success, but because it attracted the wrong people. The same way mobile games were a threat to be attacked not because their monetization was predatory, but because they were "low effort" and attracted the wrong kind of people. VR can be gaming's failson for years, producing little more than novelties time and again, and be still treated as on the cusp of being the future.

Why is that though, how does a technology get pigeonholed like that? Price is, honestly, a factor. The technophile sees a low price and assumes that key components were skimped on. That every extra dollar they expected to spend would have made the product exponentially better. You can see this attitude in the enthusiast market (though thankfully less so the enthusiast press) even now. In the 00s it was considered a valid question to confront a developer making a handheld game or a Wii game "Why isn't this a PS3 or 360 game" the very notion that it was not on the most bleeding edge of hardware required an immediate justification. The amount spent and the budget of the product bleed into an idea that anything less than top dollar is a waste. This is an attitude that the AAA game indsutry does a lot to encourage but that's for another day. Put simply though, the fact that 5 years on from the initial release of the now completely disappeared Oculus Rift the entry level is still 300 dollars and the fancy headsets clock in at 1000 dollars or more really tells a certain kind of person that this is an enthusiast product worthy of their respect.

Another way these things get pigeonholed is, of course, aesthetic. Smartphones, the Wii, they were designed to have an aesthetic that was forward-looking but friendly. They were designed to give the appearance to those who were not already keyed into technology that they could still use them. Any appeal to the mass market requires the indication that even though this is new tech it's instantly understandable. VR setups immediately not only were expensive, not only initially demanded a very capable PC, they also just didn't tend to communicate an aura of being immediately understandable. I don't mean they had to be instantly understandable, I mean what marketing existed didn't seem to really push the idea that these were going to be easy to use. Even if that had been a lie, that lie exists as a marketing signal to what kind of consumers you intend to attract. The aesthetic of VR quickly became that it was expensive and complicated.

Between these factors, VR quickly became a tech that signalled it was for the "core gamer" set, it could never be a threat, it was for them. No amount of fairly bare bones mini-game collections and tech demos could hurt that aspect of its reputation, and so 5 years on VR remains "the future" to be evangelized, whereas 5 years into motion controls the lessened hype was proof that motion controls served little if any purpose in any genre. That this was the earned end of catering to people who didn't already invest their beings into video games. The subtext of all these being, aiming games at anyone who wasn't a white dude somewhere from 13-mid 40s.

That's the ugliness that underscores all of this. The "core" audience is a very limited selection indeed. I've got a few essays about that in stages of writing but they'll be limited by the fact that I am the white guy these are ostensibly aimed at. Still, even though I'm ill-equipped to address the issues I see, I still feel it'd be a disservice to not speak of them as best I can. There was continually and undercurrent of most prominently misogyny but many other ambient bigotries in the hatred of the "casual" game market of which motion controls were a key vanguard. The ways this has evolved over the years deserves a more long form series of writings but suffice to say that a key reason VR got a warmer welcome from the most toxic part of the core gamer set is that it was not associated with women and minorities. I could go on a long tangent about Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey's ties to Trump and general hellish Republican party apparatuses and how that may have influenced the way the technology was presented and marketed when the Oculus Rift first arrived, but suffice to say the kind of person who feels most directly at home harassing women and minorities found a technology company that, surprise surprise, wasn't going to try to curb that to latch onto as the front-runner in the VR race.

There's a lot of other related concepts I may go into later about how the concept of marketing to everyone is cynically capitalist in its own way, just less inherently regressive, but that's a broader post on PR and courting the audience that sounds too exhausting and out of focus here. VR and the Wii are both fundamentally designed around incorporating a great degree of sensory feedback into video games, they are both technologies that are highly experimental, the difference is mostly around audience response, and the source of that response remains deeply ugly. Even if this essay got away from me, these thoughts I stand by.