There are no prohibitions about where you can go in this virtual place. Want to ride to the river? Fine. Want to chase a train down the tracks? Fine. How about ride up alongside the train and then hop on and ride inside the train? OK! Or bushwhack across sagebrush wilderness from one town to the next? You can ride away from a woman yelling for help or—your choice—stop to help her. Each act has consequences. She may need help or she may be bait for a bandit. One reviewer speaking of the interacting free will in the game said: “I’m sincerely and pleasantly surprised that I can shoot my own horse in the back of the head while I’m riding him, and even skin him afterward.” The freedom to move in any direction in a seamless virtual world rendered with the same degree of fidelity as a Hollywood blockbuster is intoxicating.
It’s all interactive details. Dawns in the territory of Red Dead Redemption are glorious, as the horizon glows and heats up. Weather forces itself on the land, which you sense. The sandy yellow soil darkens with appropriate wet splotches as the rain blows down in bursts. Mist sometimes drifts in to cover a town with realistic veiling, obscuring shadowy figures. The pink tint of each mesa fades with the clock. Textures pile up. The scorched wood, the dry brush, the shaggy bark—every pebble or twig—is rendered in exquisite minutiae at all scales, casting perfect overlapping shadows that make a little painting. These nonessential finishes are surprisingly satisfying. The wholesale extravagance is compelling.
The game lives in a big world. A typical player might take around 15 or so hours to zoom through once, while a power player intent on achieving all the game rewards would need 40 to 50 hours to complete it. At every step you can choose any direction to take the next step, and the next, and next, and yet the grass under your feet is perfectly formed and every blade detailed, as if its authors anticipated you would tread on this microscopic bit of the map. At any of a billion spots you can inspect the details closely and be rewarded, but most of this beauty will never be seen. This warm bath of freely given abundance triggers a strong conviction that this is “natural,” that this world has always been, and that it is good. The overall feeling inside one of these immaculately detailed, stunningly interactive worlds stretching to the horizons is of being immersed in completeness. Your logic knows this can’t be true, but as on the plank over the pit, the rest of you believes it. This realism is just waiting for the full immersion of VR interaction. At the moment, the spatial richness of these game worlds must be viewed in 2-D.
Cheap, abundant VR will be an experience factory. We’ll use it to visit environments too dangerous to risk in the flesh, such as war zones, deep seas, or volcanoes. Or we’ll use it for experiences we can’t easily get to as humans—to visit the inside of a stomach, the surface of a comet. Or to swap genders, or become a lobster. Or to cheaply experience something expensive, like a flyby of the Himalayas. But experiences are generally not sustainable. We enjoy travel experiences in part because we are only visiting briefly. VR, at least in the beginning, is likely to be an experience we dip in and out of. Its presence is so strong we may want it only in small, measured doses. But we have no limit on the kind of interacting we crave.
These massive video games are pioneering new ways of interacting. The total interactive freedom suggested by unlimited horizons is illusionary in these kinds of games. Players, or the audience, are assigned tasks to accomplish and given motivations to stay till the end. Actions in the game are channeled funnel-like to meet the next bottleneck of the overall narrative, so the game eventually reveals a destiny, but your choices as a player still matter in what kind of points you accumulate. There’s a tilt in the overall world, so no matter how many explorations you make, you tend to drift over time toward an inevitable incident. When the balance between an ordained narrative and freewill interaction is tweaked just right, it creates the perception of great “game play”—a sweet feeling of being part of something large that is moving forward (the game’s narrative) while you still get to steer (the game’s play).
The games’ designers tweak the balance, but the invisible force that nudges players in certain directions is an artificial intelligence. Most of the action in open-ended games like Red Dead Redemption, especially the interactions of supporting characters, is already animated by AI. When you halt at a random homestead and chat with the cowhand, his responses are plausible because in his heart beats an AI. AI is seeping into VR and AR in other ways as well. It will be used to “see” and map the physical world you are really standing in so that it can transport you to a synthetic world. That includes mapping your physical body’s motion. An AI can watch you as you sit, stand, move around in, say, your office without the need of special tracking equipment, then mirror that in the virtual world. An AI can read your route through the synthetic environment and calculate interferences needed to herd you in certain directions, as a minor god might do.
Implicit in VR is the fact that everything—without exception—that occurs in VR is tracked. The virtual world is defined as a world under total surveillance, since nothing happens in VR without tracking it first. That makes it easy to gameify behavior—awarding points, or upping levels, or scoring powers, etc.—to keep it fun. However, today the physical world is so decked out with sensors and interfaces that it has become a parallel tracking world. Think of our sensor-filled real world as a nonvirtual virtual reality that we spend most of our day in. As we are tracked by our surroundings and indeed as we track our quantified selves, we can use the same interaction techniques that we use in VR. We’ll communicate with our appliances and vehicles using the same VR gestures. We can use the same gameifications to create incentives, to nudge participants in preferred directions in real life. You might go through your day racking up points for brushing your teeth properly, walking 10,000 steps, or driving safely, since these will all be tracked. Instead of getting A-pluses on daily quizzes, you level up. You get points for picking up litter or recycling. Ordinary life, not just virtual worlds, can be gameified.
The first technological platform to disrupt a society within the lifespan of a human individual was personal computers. Mobile phones were the second platform, and they revolutionized everything in only a few decades. The next disrupting platform—now arriving—is VR. Here is how a day plugged into virtual and augmented realities may unfold in the very near future.
I am in VR, but I don’t need a headset. The surprising thing that few people expected way back in 2016 is that you don’t need to wear goggles, or even a pair of glasses, in order to get a basic “good enough” augmented reality. A 3-D image projects directly into my eyes from tiny light sources that peek from the corner of my rooms, all without the need of something in front of my face. The quality is good enough for most applications, of which there are tens of thousands.
The very first app I got was the ID overlay. It recognizes people’s faces and then displays their name, association, and connection to me, if any. Now that I am used to this, I can’t roam outside without it. My friends say some quasi-legal ID apps provide a lot more immediate information about strangers, but you need to be wearing gear that keeps what you see private—otherwise you’ll get tagged for rude behavior.