Video games have a shared language that we all understand. We know that in any given shooter game, we will be holding down the left trigger to aim, and the right trigger to shoot. There's no logic to this - real guns only have one trigger - but we understand, in the same way we know that the 'k' is silent before an 'n' despite the same lack of logic, that left trigger is aim and right trigger is shoot. We know that the bottom of the four face buttons is jump, and that the right face button is cancel. Much like the triggers, each genre and platform have their own conventions too. But while reviewing the PS VR2, a wide range of VR titles in a short amount of time, I realised that VR lacks this consistent dictionary.

Virtual reality should be the easiest medium to translate across games. The act of movement is very physical. To climb, you reach up with your hands in the real world and must grab the ledge and pull yourself up. To pick something up, you must lean over and take it by moving your arms. Firing a bow and arrow consists of holding your left hand out with the bow, and then reaching your right over the shoulder to grab an arrow before pulling back, aiming, and letting go. In a video game, you would climb by pushing the analogue stick upwards and (possibly) tapping the climb buttons. You would pick something up by moving near to it and tapping the interact button. You would fire an arrow much like shooting a gun; aiming with left trigger and firing with right trigger, although it may mean holding and letting go rather than tapping.

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However, each game interprets this shared physical language very differently. It's like how cultures around the world use similar words for the same thing, because of some shared origin that has been spun out in different directions. In English, it's 'tomato'. In Spanish, French, German, and Portuguese, it's different pronunciations of 'tomate'. In Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian it's 'tomat', and in Dutch 'tomaat'. In Turkish it's 'domates', which is still pretty close, and in Italian, for some reason, it's 'pomodoro'. VR has too many pomodoros.

Horizon Call of the Mountain Thunderjaw Boss Fight with a bow

Movement is the obvious one. In-game, the characters move their feet, but the player stays rigid to the spot, so developers must invent a new way for us to move. Some use the sticks, where the left stick is movement and the right spins the camera, which we can also move by rotating our heads. Others require you to move your arms forward and backwards to simulate moving. Others still further complicate this, asking you to hold down specific buttons while swinging your arms backwards and forwards, which ensures you never move by accident, but also adds in extra steps that you both need to learn and feel different to everything that came before.

Specific movements are even more complicated. Some games allow you to strafe, dodge, duck, presumably dip and dive, and jump, but none have agreed on how this might work, and many of them struggle to do it consistently at all. There's the question of button pushes again, specific movements (these are harder to simulate as you can't actually jump across your living room), and how much control we might be offered. In games with combat sections, some games will take away your full agency to move to allow you to focus more on the task at hand, offering only evasive manoeuvres instead of complete control to run wherever you please.

shooting zombies in resident evil village vr
via Capcom

Because of the high price, VR is yet to burst into the mainstream, and that likely makes it harder for developers to collaborate across releases on figuring out the definitive answer to these questions. Conversely, until they find them, VR will never be quite as intuitive as it should be.

VR is the most active and immersive form of gaming, but it is also technically limited and so it has to place roadblocks in the way of this immersion, and it's still serving up pomodoros when console gamers want domates. Playing each VR game feels like an entirely new experience, and in ways that are far more frustrating than they are rewarding. Veteran players can jump into any console game and feel they have a decent understanding of how the game works and will speak to them. VR needs to start providing that experience, especially for something as easy as walking around or side-stepping an attack.

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