JÖRG TITEL: VR IS HERE TO STAY
With not-one-but-two VR games released this year and a keen eye on the technology to
come from Meta and Apple, Jörg Tittel feels questions about the platform’s legitimacy should be consigned to the past. Richie Shoemaker is on board with that
F
Based on a Dreamcast cult classic, C-Smash VRS was released for PSVR2 last month
or Jörg Tittel, the writer and producer behind dystopian warehouse fulfilment satire The Last Worker and Dreamcast-era racquetball reboot
C-Smash VRS, virtual reality video games seem to be fighting the same battles they were ten years ago when Oculus was still reliant on its Kickstarter backers and Sony had yet to put its head in the game, so to speak. Despite the obvious success of Meta’s Quest 2 headset, soon to be superceded by Quest 3, and Sony’s renewed PSVR interest, it bothers Tittel
that journalists – even those that admit to being VR fans – keep banging on about VR gaming’s immersive qualities, as if the worlds that people enjoy are more closeted and their appeal is down to splendid isolation. Tittel insists that a game’s immersiveness is only a small part of their physical appeal. “The interesting thing about VR games is that
they are intense, but they also feel physical,” he says. “The one thing I’m preaching – or trying to – is that games have always been physical. They started out as a physical medium. The way you enjoyed it was physically - you actually moved your body across town to go to this dingy old arcade and smell the cigarettes around you, and you pushed your way through to the Street Fighter cabinet, or whatever, and then you stood at this thing and you’d physically manipulate things. It was a physical experience.” Usually, you would be meeting friends there, so
it was social too. “Bizarrely, it seems like we’ve been gaslighted by the big tech companies who have co-opted the games industry into thinking that it’s thanks to tech that games are social now. No, we started that way!” For Tittel, VR is a way of reestablishing how games used to be, immersive, social and physical, while
44 | MCV/DEVELOP August 2023
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