Making VR his bitch —

Doom co-creator John Romero skeptical of virtual reality “fad”

Unlike Carmack, Romero sees tech as isolating, constraining, and inefficient.

Romero chats with Ars' Sam Machkovech at this year's GDC.
Romero chats with Ars' Sam Machkovech at this year's GDC.
Kenneth Lucas

Id software cofounder John Carmack has probably been virtual reality's biggest booster in the wider game industry, championing the Oculus Rift long before he officially joined Oculus as chief technology officer last year (much to the chagrin of former employer ZeniMax). But fellow Id co-founder and Doom developer John Romero seems much more skeptical that the new wave of virtual reality headsets will really be as revolutionary as developers like Carmack seem to think.

Speaking at an event at the Strong Museum of Play's eGameRevolution exhibit (as reported by GamesIndustry.biz), Romero did say that he was "blown away" by the quality of the head tracking and immersion in the Oculus Rift when he got to try it out. Still, he said he thinks virtual reality is going to have trouble gaining mainstream acceptance in its current form, largely because it "encloses you and keeps you in one spot."

Romero echoed comments from Nintendo executives that have criticized VR as isolating and out of step with the trends in the wider gaming industry. "VR is going away from the way games are being developed and pushed as they go back into multiplayer and social stuff. VR is kind of a step back, it's a fad. Maybe in the future there will be a better VR that gets you out of isolation mode."

Romero went on to compare VR headsets to other nonstandard peripherals that have had trouble catching on because they are not included with the base hardware, and he suggested that head-mounted displays and VR controls require too much physical work for many users. "Really the best optimal design for games is minimal input for maximum output," he said. "That's the way that games work best. When you watch people playing with a mouse and keyboard, you see them barely moving their fingers and hands, but on-screen you see crazy movement and all kinds of stuff. Everyone always goes for the path of least resistance, and that kind of input is it. Until it can fix the path of least resistance, I can't see how VR is going to be something that's popular."

Romero isn't the first in the gaming industry to dampen the hype and enthusiasm for the new wave of virtual reality devices (some of which has come from our corner of the Internet, admittedly). Xbox cofounder Ed Fries said in April said that the failure of glasses-based 3D TVs in the marketplace makes him "skeptical that general users are going to be strapping [the Rift] onto their face any time soon." Engineer Fabian Giesen, who worked on Valve's "VR room" concept, recently posted an extended diatribe detailing why he thinks virtual reality is "bad news." "The endpoint of VR...seems to be fundamentally anti-social, completing the sad trajectory of entertainment moving further and further away from shared social experiences," he wrote.

Then there are the people who are newly skeptical of the Oculus technology now that Facebook is involved, from developers like Minecraft's Markus "Notch" Perrson to gamers that reportedly sent Luckey and his team death threats over the deal.

Oculus told Ars at E3 that it expects to sell just a million units of its first consumer Rift and that the second version of the headset coming a year or two down the road will be the one to attract a "console-scale market" of many millions of users. Looking out further, though, Oculus obviously sees the Rift as world-changing technology, with founder Palmer Luckey suggesting that VR displays will completely replace flat panel monitors within 20 years.

The truth of VR's eventual adoption probably lies somewhere in the middle of the "fad" and "monitor replacement" camps. One thing's for sure, though: the idea of viable virtual reality getting so much serious discussion among developers and gamers would have been practically unthinkable just three years ago. Now, Oculus and its imitators have thrown the concept back into the spotlight before they've even released a consumer-facing product. Regardless of the eventual fate of virtual reality in the marketplace, that's a victory for a concept most had recently written off as a technological dead end.

Listing image by Aurich Lawson

Channel Ars Technica