
Virtual Reality Will Bring Back the Arcade - mfburnett
https://medium.com/@josh_taylor/virtual-reality-will-bring-back-the-arcade-16f3f92b52e8
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pjc50
Arcades were a product of a time when tech was expensive and real estate was
cheap. They're not coming back any time soon.

~~~
robotkilla
Article should be about how VR will be the final bullet in the head of IRL
social interaction.

~~~
kbenson
I don't think it will die off, but I think it will undoubtedly lessen. The
question is whether that's really a bad thing, when VR social interaction can
have much of the same benefits that used to be exclusive to IRL interactions
such as facial cues (we aren't there yet), the experience of shared locality
(arguably we've had this to some degree for a long time with MMOs), etc.

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TrevorJ
The problem is capital investment. A VR arcade will be cutting edge for what,
18 months at the _most_? After that the hardware is no longer better than what
you can achieve at a consumer level. That's not very long to make back your
investment.

I _do_ think there is a place for a third party business when it comes to VR
though in the realm of 'guided' RPG's and narratives. Imagine paying 25 bucks
for you and your friends to join a 3D D&D style adventure with a professional
DM and actors in mocap playing the part of the major characters. There's a lot
of compelling things that could be done in this arena, and it takes the focus
off of the tech and makes it more about interactivity and immersion. There's
also quite a lot of relatively cheap untapped talent in local improv/community
theater scenes to find some reasonable acting talent. Heck, mocap is getting
good enough that your actors could have home studios easily enough withing a
few years.

~~~
kistaro
There's one thing a VR arcade can have that very few consumers can have, in
areas where VRcades might be likely to thrive: physical space.

Immersive VR requires at least some space to move around in, or set up a big
omnidirectional treadmill in. As the human population grows but Earth stays
the same size, personal living quarters will always be at a premium, the rent
will always be too damn high, and space to set up this awesome VR rig will be
prohibitively expensive.

VR machines could be consumer-grade and still draw an audience, because of the
people locked out of the market due to lack of space to set up a rig. Consider
what we have now that isn't even VR- I don't have space to use a Kinect.

~~~
ObviousScience
Just one minor quibble: the reason we have density issues in cities is not
that Earth doesn't have enough space for humans to spread out -- even if we
only count the nice parts.

No, the answer is that we actually seem to enjoy living in really dense
clusters and spend a premium on trying to pile more and more people in to the
mess. (Well, there's some argument that wealthy people have had an undue
influence on the societal process of urbanization, but that's digressing.)

Other than that, I actually think that arcades are posed to make a comeback,
precisely because of the issue you highlight: the only way to have enough open
space in a building (in a major city) to really walk around in requires
splitting the rent or being really wealthy.

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m_mueller
I don't think cities form out of enjoyment (although this becomes a factor for
many people _after_ a city and its services have already formed). They form
because there is some infrastructure or geographical rarity that many people
can benefit from, thus they move there. Train stations, harbors, water ways,
airports, mines and castles come to mind as a seed. Once people move there,
more and more services become available, making the location more and more
attractive for employers, people seeking jobs and people seeking apartments. A
certain density is optimal for economic productivity, thus cities are usually
don't deviate much from that density, except in places where zoning is heavily
regulated. East Asia, especially SK and Japan, is a good place to see how
cities grow organically.

~~~
ObviousScience
My point, and perhaps I was unclear, is that people seem happy to exchange the
costs of density for the benefits of density (trains and airports; lots of
varied good provided; many different kinds of jobs from many different
employers; etc), ie, that there are no "density issues" with cities, it's just
that people really want to live on top of each other as much as the rapidly
rising costs seem to indicate, and we haven't adjusted to this idea as a
society yet from our older vision of sparse open West and the American
frontier (or pick your local myths). The post I was replying to implied that
people were somehow forced in to cities -- it's just untrue. They could be
lots of other places, they just choose to be in cities. (Nothing in my post
was about how cities nucleated, and was entirely about why cities have the
rising costs they do, which reflect a HUGE demand for more city rather than a
demand for out of the city.)

I didn't mean that if you found a unicorn, they wouldn't prefer it, just that
at the end of day, people made the compromise of plowing their fields with
horses, not narwhals.

Focusing on the horn as "man, that would be a great feature to add!" misses
something interesting in why they picked the horse to the (perhaps arguably)
more majestic narwhal. I would even argue that studying why the preference
when you split the unicorn in to extant beings is the paramount question about
the topic, since it gives us the seeds to move forward building more dense
(and enjoyable!) cities and societies.

I find it interesting that despite everyone lamenting how they wish they
weren't in cities, they don't take any of the many opportunities to move to
smaller cities or out of cities all together, despite there being many such
chances. (Some people do, obviously, and are quite happy with their choice. I
just meant that there was a net flow in to cities.)

In so far as you point out that cities seem to top out a certain size that
doesn't hit any inherent physical constraints, our daydreaming about unicorns
(and more importantly, our discussion of horse versus narwhal) serves to
improve these limits and let us move towards more focused centers of human
activity.

The information age (and really... modern humans for ~10,000 years) has been
driven largely by focused human intelligence, of which cities -- being a
natural focal point of human efforts -- have played center stage. The story of
humanity since the ice age can be glibly phrased as: we found a way to stay in
one place, and grew; we found a way to get power more efficiently, and got
denser, and grew; we made many theoretical breakthroughs about the mechanics
of getting, storing, transporting, and using power, and got denser, and grew.
The past few centuries have been a concerted effort on externalizing our
various faculties, following a series of breakthroughs on fundamentals, and as
a result we've been able to double the population in just the past ~100 years.
People have picked up on the narrative, even if they don't know why it's
happening, yet.

They enjoy getting to be part of the important cluster of human activity,
instead of relegated to energy production out on a farm.

tl;dr: You made an uncharitable reading of my posts, and failed to connect
that I was using "enjoy" as a euphemism for the idea of a "utility" function,
because I was talking in public, and wanted my idea to be generally understood
rather than technically sound. This error in parsing my post led you to make a
long rant -- concurring with me. Your violent agreement amused me, so I wrote
you a rant back. [Ed: Or just flat out missed I was talking about why the
skyrocketing prices, not the nucleation of new cities.]

Hope you're having a good day. (:

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Zikes
I think some folks are forgetting the benefits of an arcade that go beyond the
games themselves. There's an establishment near me called Arkadia Retrocade[1]
that's doing fairly well attracting customers by setting a flat entrance fee
with no charge at the machines. They have great atmosphere and are a popular
hangout for gamers of all ages. I've seen some people pay to get in the door
while barely touching the arcade machines.

[1] [https://www.facebook.com/pages/Arkadia-
Retrocade/29361913074...](https://www.facebook.com/pages/Arkadia-
Retrocade/293619130743490)

~~~
unwind
And that flat fee is $5?!

That sounds really, really cheap. I'm so jealous right now.

~~~
Zikes
And they recently announced they bought out the store next door! They'll be
knocking the wall down and expanding, I can't wait.

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bane
I'm reminded of a story I heard about some kind of VR experience at Disney or
some theme park.

He thought it was cool and got in line to use it. The guy before him was very
physical during his sim and sweated up a storm.

He put the goggles on, got immediately grossed out by the hot sweaty mess
inside and took it off before it had even started.

Gross.

~~~
josephpmay
Oculus and the like have developed procedures for wiping down the headset
between each use during demos. As long as there is a human operator (which is
somewhat necessary for this generation of VR experiences), this shouldn't be
too much of an issue.

~~~
bane
I grew up in the smoke filled arcades of the 1980s and think it's probably
likely that this procedure won't survive contact with lazy arcade operators
outside of the VR vendor's quality experience control.

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sayangel
Stuff like this will thrive: [https://thevoid.com/](https://thevoid.com/)

The VR experience has to be enhanced from what people will be able to get at
home. Having a bunch of VR headsets in a room and calling that an arcade will
quickly become obsolete. But what people won't have as much access to is
spaces that mirror the virtual world and allow you to "feel" the space. A 1:1
physical mapping with a virtual world has a very powerful effect on the
suspension of disbelief.

~~~
neuro_imager
That looks really impressive. How far away are these sites from being live?

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AdmiralAsshat
I thought emulation would bring back the arcade, but that failed to catch on.
A dying arcade I visited several years ago had a simple cabinet and a marquee
that said something to the effect of "500 Games in One!" After trying it, it
was pretty clear that it was running some kind of legal version of MAME. I
wouldn't be surprised if the innards themselves were just a PC tower with a
MAME-GUI loaded onto it.

The point being, however, it probably cost them less than $200 to put the
thing together assuming they had an empty cabinet, and you paid a quarter to
be able to pick from 500 games on which you could have a "vintage" experience.
It was cheap, it was space effective, and to be honest it was alot more
enjoyable than most of the other games they had there.

I kinda figured that would be the sort of thing that would survive in this day
and age. I came back six months later and it had been replaced by a "Deal or
No Deal" cabinet...

~~~
joezydeco
But a) 80% of those 500 games are garbage and b) even the 20% that are
enjoyable and/or "classic" are dated.

You can grab the older retro-loving crowd for a little while, you won't grab
the kids at all. If you were 12 which would you prefer to play for more than
10 minutes? Mario Bros (Arcade, 1983) or New Super Mario Bros (WiiU, 2012)?

~~~
damon_c
Mario Bros (Arcade, 1983) had concurrent multiplayer and was more like today's
Super Smash Bros. So maybe if I had two people...

~~~
TulliusCicero
Mario Bros really isn't that great of a game.

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Yuioup
Wow Déjà vu. For a second there I thought I was in the 90s when 'Virtual
Reality' was the next hot thing which never went anywhere.

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lhl
I wasn't very convinced by this article, and it took me until the end to get
to the punchline, it's written by a founder of "a startup that is bringing
back the arcade as a platform and marketplace for virtual reality innovation."

My main issues:

* The author talks a lot about arcades as a social environment - this is absolutely true, but when people are strapped into HMDs in 15'x15' rooms, I just don't see how those same dynamics come into play. Sure you could have displays of what people are experiencing, but it's not the same kind of visceral or fluid experience that the best arcades have. You can't drop in on a game, or even see multiple players interacting in a physical space - ironically (or fittingly) you'd have better social interactions virtually

* Yep, VR is expensive. It takes a fair amount of gear that will be obsolete in a year or two, and the author's argument that good VR requires 1:1 motion and a large amount of floorspace (individual 15'x15' rooms, conservatively) and it doesn't sound like a very palatable (or profitable) business venture to me.

I could see some aweomse social experiences like The Void that use VR HMDs for
shared mix-reality use (cavernous warehouses w/ redirected walking, practical
effects, etc), but that's pretty far from the author's suggestion of putting
regular consumer VR arcades up (I can also see existing PC bangs/KTV/room-
based Internet cafes in Asia transitioning to VR if there is demand assuming
that multiple people/headsets can interact in a shared space (otherwise the
economics still doesn't make sense), but IMO VR arcades that just house
regular VR experiences seem DOA.

~~~
josh_taylor
Your comments are not representative of someone that read the article.

Arcades as a social environment was not stressed in the article. On top of
that, 15' x 15' rooms were never mentioned in the article. That is currently
the dimensions that the Vive allows for. There is nothing that says that
virtual interactions could not also happen within an arcade.

Again what is with the 15' x 15' rooms?

Never once does it suggest that arcades should use consumer grade tech and in
fact that is the complete opposite of what the article says.

I think you have a vision of what a VR arcade is and that influenced your
thought process. Most of the points that you argue are of your own
construction.

~~~
lhl
Sorry, I must have been reading a different article. Good luck with your non-
social environment VR venture.

"People were comfortable playing at home but they would come out to arcades to
see the latest improvements in the video game industry. Arcades became a
location where people could meet other people with a shared interest in
gaming. Socializing was at the core of arcades."

"but with families and casual players looking for the kind of face-to-face
social gaming experience hard to find on this side of the Pacific."

"A contributing factor to the success of Japan’s arcades is the social
experience of watching people play games that are very talented and learning
from them."

"A lot of people will not be able to devote much space in their apartments for
entertainment anymore and instead they will start to look for entertainment
locations to gather socially, as we saw happened in Japan."

"Specifically within the gaming industry, Twitch has created an opportunity
for people to communicate and come together over a shared interest in games.
This is a deeply human need that we possess to socialize and group."

"The current gaming industry in North America is purely a home market but this
is limiting the possible games and experiences that are available and limiting
the socialization of a community."

"the arcade will provide the gaming community a place to socialize in person
in a way it has never been able to before."

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bobajeff
Part of the problem is games today aren't designed to be played in short
bursts. Casino's are still going strong so there is still a audience for these
kinds of distractions.

I think another problem could be that not very many games are geared toward
sharing you experience with others. So the experience is the same whether your
home or at a arcade because your secluded from everyone either way even if
it's multiplayer.

~~~
twiceaday
> Part of the problem is games today aren't designed to be played in short
> bursts.

Phone games?

> Casino's are still going strong so there is still a audience for these kinds
> of distractions.

That's a stretch.

~~~
bobajeff
Phone games are hardly big budget attractions.

~~~
jimmaswell
I went to a real arcade recently. There was a large Doodle Jump machine.

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drawkbox
No doubt they will be in arcades in bigger ways much like arcades today have
more physical and accessorized games than you can have at home (racers with
seats, bikes, guns to use, skee-ball like games etc), but the home experience
will be great because most markets are open now and anyone can publish.
Content will move very fast.

Plus, just like touch pads, VR headsets are pretty nasty after a while if they
are used in public by many players. Joysticks were really funky back in the
old blacklit arcades, now imagine putting that on your face/head.

~~~
derefr
> arcades in bigger ways ... but the home experience will be great ... because
> anyone can publish

I'm hoping against hope for the middle-way between those two, though: rentable
holosuites, like the VR equivalent of computers at internet cafes, where there
are a few titles preinstalled, but you can also run whatever titles you like
from the 'net.

(Or maybe it'll just let you log into your Steam account, where all your VR
games _and apps_ are. I could totally see Steam as becoming to thin-client VR
as Windows is to thin-client PCs.)

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rezistik
I've been talking about this with my friends. I think VR creates a really cool
opportunity for interactive events.

My favorite two examples to think of are Star Wars dogfights and fantasy
exploration.

I like to think about climbing into a scale TIE Fighter or X-Wing and pulling
down the helmet and bam dog fighting.

Or walking into a room that includes some jungle-y/forest-y smells and
humidity with the helmet. Being able to explore the scenery and maybe even
touch mocked plants/animals. Would create an insane level of realism.

Probably out of scope but cool to think about.

~~~
mng2
Your comment dredged up old memories about this flight sim pod place. My
friend (well, his dad) took us there a few times for his birthday. It amounted
to ten minutes or less inside the pod, with primitive graphics and kind of
twitchy controls, but it was pretty cool as a kid. Looking back, it's probably
the kind of activity you'd book for a teambuilding exercise; it likely cost
big bucks.

This would've been mid to late 90s, somewhere in the Bay Area. I did a cursory
google but didn't come up with anything.

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voyou
It would be interesting to see a comparison of today's possibilities for VR in
arcades, with the VR arcade machines of the early 90s [1]. VR didn't save
arcades then; are there differences in today's VR games (or in today's home
computing market) that make VR arcades a better bet now?

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuality_(gaming)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuality_\(gaming\))

~~~
tadfisher
The current technology is just loads better. I don't find myself longing to
get to an arcade to experience Gouraud-shaded polygons at 10 frames per
second.

Likewise, I don't want to throw on a head-mounted display and strap myself
into a movement pad just to play another Call of Duty iteration, either. It
will be interesting to see what new experiences indie devs can come up with
that aren't another rehash of the last ten years of AAA gaming.

(Although the crossbow game looks pretty fun!
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6t69mp0ZhE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6t69mp0ZhE))

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programminggeek
You know why people don't like arcades anymore? Per play session value is
super low. When it was like one quarter to play a game, it was fun, cheap
entertainment. When the per game cost jumped up to a $0.50 or $1.00, or even
more in some cases, it started to become a bad deal.

There is still a place for cheap arcade fun. It's just that arcade machines
aren't cheap enough to hook people anymore.

~~~
bryanlarsen
25 cents in 1977 and one dollar today are equivalent prices.

~~~
programminggeek
Yes, but they don't feel psychologically the same.

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duvet
Haven't read this just yet, but the title makes me think of Gmod. The theaters
people host usually include arcade machines alongside other activities that
you'd see at a regular movie theater.

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anti-shill
arcades just attract juvenile deliquents with their leather jackets and
smoothed back ducktail hairstyles...

~~~
yellowapple
And their Power Gloves.

