In Play: Which moments in games do you really remember?

[Administrator]

I met a whale this week. I was standing on the creaking deck of a sunken ship, and I had been watching a cloud of manta rays drift past overhead when I sensed a disturbance in the water. I turned, and a whale was watching me: a vast blue whale, with that grumpy mouth and those huge, sad, very human eyes. Ancient eyes. I walked up close and peered at the whale. It filled my entire field of vision. Then it started to move on. I jumped back as its vast tail flicked, and it was gone.
All of which means I have gone through that barrier, from VR sceptic to VR convert, a path I've seen so many of my friends take. We've had Vive in the office, and a single go on the whale demo was all I needed to be left deliriously in love. VR isn't like normal games, I've suddenly understood - even though people have been saying this to me for ages. I don't think I'm going to want to explore open worlds in there, or level up, or grind for loot, or even pull off headshots. I think what VR is all about is going somewhere on your own, and meeting someone - or something - and then getting a sense that you've genuinely spent time with them. The killer app for VR, weird as it sounds, may be communion.
And that fits with something else that often gets discussed when VR comes up. How long do you want an experience to last? Two or three minutes was about right for the whale. Any longer than that and I would have been hunting for glowing weak spots. Afterwards, I watched John Bedford poke around in a kind of wizard's dungeon, and I reckon that would have lasted me five or six minutes tops. VR is going to require strange things from developers, in other words, because I doubt that the usual stuff is going to work any more. Weird as it sounds, from my - admittedly - brief encounter, it seems to require some kind of creative compression tricks. In an age of expansiveness in gaming, developers may have to find how to make something very small and very short feel very rich. Delight and bedazzlement are perhaps not states that can be extended indefinitely, and I'm genuinely excited to see how designers deal with that.
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