With movies/novels/etc., I've always experienced what you're describing as something similar to a feeling of loss--the world you experienced or the story you were involved in or the characters you cared about will no longer be there as a new experience, no longer have new experiences as characters, etc. That 'world' is gone.

With VR, even if I don't really miss the experience, I've experienced what I'd describe as a "readjustment" phase of between 10 minutes and a couple hours (depending on length of experience and how recently I'd been in VR) where the real world feels disconnected/less real. It's a much more intense and visceral feeling, and doesn't have the same undertone of 'loss' that movies/novels have. It isn't a "Man, I'm not actually a space pilot in the year 3000" feeling, or a "I'll never be able to experience that world again" feeling, it's more of a visceral disassociation from the real world, as though my senses don't feel like they can quite trust the inputs they're receiving anymore.

Real life is obviously the benchmark for immsersiveness, but we don't consider it possible to be addicted to living in the real world. We might consider some to be "adrenaline junkies" for pursuing dangerous aspects of real life, but we say they are addicted to a certain chemical the body produces rather than life.

Books are one of the least immersive forms of entertainment widely consumed in that the interface is through abstract symbols. Still, they allow us to experience things that we are unlikely to encounter in our own lives. They engage our imagination and are indeed addictive. A good book lets you almost live another life.

Theater and film are, in most ways, more immersive than books. Instead of forcing us to construct everything in our own minds, much of what we experience is constructed externally, just as in real life. An actor's performance may be completely different from how we might imagine a character to be, just from reading his or her lines, and this really fools our minds into thinking characters are more real. However, as in books, we are almost always passive observers. We have no agency.

Video games are now capable of offering everything that film does, but while granting the audience agency. We can perform tasks, affect the outcome of the story, etc.. As with film, technical limitations mean that suspension of disbelief is necessary for us to buy into a video game world, but when a game does make us buy-in it can be a place we'll live in for many hours before exhausting the content. It can be grueling to sit through a 180 minute film, but a 180 minute game would be considered far too brief. We also respond very differently to challenge when we have agency. Many films that challenge the viewer too much are considered "confusing", and rapidly tire audiences. A game that doesn't offer challenge is unlikely to be fun at all! Many of us enjoy conquering games where challenge crosses the line into frustration!

Many video games made today are modeled after books and film. You play a truly exceptional protagonist who is easily capable of things beyond anyone else in the universe. The game-world pivots and changes around this character, even if the user doesn't have a lot of control over it. These are highly entertaining, but probably the least immersive. Other games take a much more realistic approach, most notably MMO's. Users, by technical necessity, cannot change the world radically because other players share the world. Users become just one more player in the crowd. MMO characters have little power in the simulated universe, but users have complete agency over their own characters. The unpredictable nature of interacting with real humans, the necessarily insurmountable challenges of the game (in terms of time required to "beat" the game, if nothing else), and total user agency make MMO's the most addictive form of video game known.

If you're with me this far, kudos for being patient! VR is a means to interact with both pre-recorded films (think google-street-view cam on a snow-boarder) and video games that has been largely neglected to date due to technical barriers. Oculus and Valve are clearly on the verge of shattering those barriers. We're probably going to see media running the gamut from pre-recorded VR videos offering no user agency (other than turning your head) to MMO's where humans can interact with each other in simulated environments with complete agency. The level of addiction posed by these different recordings and games is going to vary wildly, just as the addictiveness of current games and media varies. VR is an exciting step forward for immersiveness, but we shouldn't expect anything VR to be an addiction problem!

> you couldn't possibly map them out on a VR controller

Hand tracking + 10 fingers, possibilities are endless! Like casting spells for real.

> Games played from a top-down view like RTS or colony/base/city builders

Fly over the map like some kind of a demigod and manipulate cities directly? Sign me up.

Lone Echo on Oculus, Farpoint on PSVR, and others. So blown away that certain geners of non-VR games are not completely non-compelling to me. Those 2 games, while not the best games ever, gave me the feeling of "being there".

The difference between playing games on a monitor and games in VR, the good ones, is like the difference between a picture of the grand canyon and being and the grand canyon. The picture does no justice. Sure it might be pretty but it gives no sense of the scale and presence. You don't feel that there's a mile deep canyon that's 20 miles to the other side. You just see a pretty picture. In VR though you do get that sense of scale. That volcano in the distance in Farpoint actually feels 3 miles high with a 20 mile high plum of ash. Hiding behind a piece of rock actually feels like hiding and not "pressing the hide button".

I used to be a 3d modeler, so I've found sculpting and painting in VR to be excellent. Tilt Brush, SculptVR, Gravity Sketch, Medium. To scale up what you're working on, sculpt out a building while truly feeling like you're inside it. It's great.

Then there's gaming experiences. The first game I tried was Vader Immortal. It was a surreal experience, by far the most immersive gaming experience I've had. It sounds insane, but the first time you encounter Darth Vader, it actually made me realize for the first time that this is a terrifying person in front of me. It was the first time I didn't think of him as a cartoonish villain, but an actual hulking presence.

Then I tried SkyrimVR. At first I was unimpressed, as I was playing a melee character. Swinging weapons that are meant to be heavy and attack with respect to their weight felt extremely silly when I could just wiggle them around as fast as I wanted. But then I tried bow and arrow, and the game did a complete 180. I became fully immersed and played all the way through. It was indescribable the degree to which I inhabited this world for about a month, in no way comparable to my previous playthrough a decade ago in PC.

Then there's Beatsaber. Best cardio I've gotten in years. It doesn't feel like exercise because it's genuinely fun and extremely hard, and you come out drenched in sweat.

The horror experiences, like with Resident Evil 7, absolutely terrifying. There is no genre more enhanced than horror.

And finally, the gimmicks. I brought VR to a few family events where kids and adults alike were trying the gimmick games. We cast the screen to the TV so everyone could watch, and they proceeded to try Richie's Plank Experience. Again, it's gimmicky, it's not meant to be lasting fun, but it was a great introduction for everyone, and they loved it. Watching adult men crawling on the floor out on a virtual plank.

I’ll be honest, I just don’t get people who say VR is amazing. I enjoy it. I’m developing games for it because I think the control scheme is innovative. But I don’t think we are close to something I would call immersive.

Conversely, if someone has bad experiences and tries to power-through them anyway repeatedly, it can build up an aversion similar to a "bad tequila night" and ruin VR for that person permanently.

Thanks for making Doom! :)

Like I just bought No Man's Sky since they added VR. I thought I'd only play it for 20 minutes just to see the algorithmically generated worlds but I ended up spending 20 hours in it in VR. I felt like a little kind full of wonder and glee everytime I jumped in a ship and took off. I felt like a little kind building a camp. I felt like a little kid when I found a water planet and launched and rode a submarine. Same with drilling through an entire mountain. It was amazing to "be there" instead of "looking at a picture of another character being there" (normal 3D games not in VR). It's not a great game yet IMO but just being in these situations in VR blows me away.

Breath of the Wild is my favorite game of all time but I was disappointed it was not in VR once in a while. I wanted to just be able to look around with my head not the R stick. I also like VR games where controls are in the world, not the buttons. Like reach over your shoulder to grab your sword and hold up your shield not press Y and old R.

I'm actually surprised Blizzard hasn't made VR WoW and hasn't either added facial capture attachment or pushed Valve/Oculus for one. If there was a low-res device that could capture your mouth shape and eyes so that your in game character could match your expression I'd think the enjoyment/addiction level of playing WoW would be 10x whatever it was at WoW's peak.

I agree the good content isn't there for VR yet and there isn't enough of it. I also agree there may never be a big market for many reasons. But, the moments VR's strengths shine I'm blown away and can't go back.

In "The Unincorporated Man" (set 300 years in the future) the VR technology interfaced directly with the brain, so it was indistinguishable from reality. That made it extremely addictive and had nearly destroyed human civilization.

But I don't think anything less immersive, even something like OASIS from "Ready Player One" would be dangerous, or would make us to not care about the "real" world.