July 21, 2016  

The Future of Tactics: VR

Virtual reality is the next frontier for games that have been traditionally hampered by interface. Think Starcraft: the ability to fingerdance across the keyboard is just as vital of a component of a win as picking the right cheese strategy. Think X-COM: an errant mouse-click easily leads to disaster. Think Tropico: wouldn’t it be easier to look through the eyes of a cop loyal to the corporate state than awkwardly float around a mafioso from a bird’s eye view trying to make sure it’s him that your goons execute, rather than his cousin’s milkman?

“All the information you need is conveyed to your simulator and appears in the display. So you give your orders orally as well as manually. Just assume that you will be obeyed. Your teachers will be monitoring the orders you give to help you learn to be explicit and immediate. You will also have to master the technique of switching back and forth between crosstalk among yourselves and giving orders to individual ships. It’s quite simple, you see. Turn your heads to the left or right to speak to each other, whichever is more comfortable for you. But when your face is pointing straight at the display, your voice will be carried to whatever ship or squadron you have selected with your controls. And to address all the ships under your control at once, head straight forward and duck your chin, like this.”

“What happens if we raise our heads?” asked Shen.

Alai answered before the teacher could. “Then you’re talking to God.”

After the laughter died down, the teacher said, “Almost right, Alai. When you raise your chin to speak, you’ll be talking to your commander.”

-Ender’s Shadow

This is only the beginning. Fully immersive virtual reality tactics has the potential to bring about a revolution in emotional gameplay mechanics. People that enjoy character-driven strategy games like Fire Emblem are already familiar with the pang of losing a beloved characters that not only resonated with the word ‘badass’ but also benefited from hours of extra in-game attention from the player.

That’s but a taste of the emotive gameplay of the future. Emotions cannot be forced out of a player, but they can be used as a bargaining chip. In current strategy games, information gathering (that is, clicking around the map to figure out why you’re losing) is a free action, or in an RTS, costs only time. By requiring the player to solicit information through the first-person perspective of their troops under fire, generating intelligence will tax the psyche as well as the clicker-finger.

Better and better haptic technology working in tandem with virtual reality displays will make this emotional cost nearly non-negotiable. Cold gaming hearts may be able to resist visuals and audio that tug at the heartstrings, but current VR headsets will inevitably extend down the body as developers survive a few marketing cycles and will be forced to create add-on wearables to validate their job to stockholders. A virtual reality vest that squeezes the chest and electrically stimulates the pulse (that’s what the Kinect is gathering data for, right?) will be designed to cause panic in any veteran.

What do you think?