You don’t need VR for board games, you just need to transfer the entire board game into a user interface, which very doable since board games are 2D. That said, Tabletop Simulator is a full physics-based board game playing environment, often played on desktop.
I think Among Us (though competitive) has shown that voice chat is all you need. Alternatively, you can lean into limited communication channels as a source of conflict, like Hanabi
If you have any skill at software, I actually think it is very simple to prototype simple tabletop games demos with any conventional web stack such as nextjs + firebase. My brother has done it before
I might be interested in doing that, but to clarify; the reason you need VR for board games is that VR facilitates the same kind of sense of shared presence and quality of audio conversation that playing in person does. I’m fairly sure VR boardgaming is going to be better than physical boardgaming (larger tables, no upkeep, more immersion, venues that can be teleported to from home so more repeat interactions so more legacy games are possible). That is the sense in which you need VR. But for prototyping, sure, developers have pre-existing buyin and can put up with the limitations of 2d.
2D is a limit. but there’s also more design language built around 2D UIs. I still think there’s a ton of unexplored design space around “tabletop games” that make use of modern web flows.
I agree shared presence is important. I also think it’s unsolved. VR isn’t fidelous enough to transmit sufficient social information and it’s still very inaccessible due to price & physical discomfort
Hmm but I think it’ll be solved like 5 years from now so I’d be eager to start working on VR boardgames/social role playing games today. I believe jon blow, when he says it usually takes that long to figure out what a really fresh kind of game wants to be.
And the first good VR RPGs are going to be really culturally impactful.
but there’s also more design language built around 2D UIs. I still think there’s a ton of unexplored design space around “tabletop games” that make use of modern web flows
Oh? I guess asynchrony is one of the things in that design language. And a web based game could leave players in a groupchat/forum after the game, they could make friends there. I used to play Neptune’s Pride, which I guess is an example of that kind of game. It was a… good game… I think. It was emotionally brutal.
Actually, that experience with Neptune’s Pride is probably a large part of the reason I want to make cohabitive games today. It was a game that forced you to forge friendships that were all absolutely destined to collapse. I forget whether there was any benefit to coming second or third, but if there was it wouldn’t have resonated with the narrative, it was a war of domination, the mechanics of the gameworld were such that anyone with an advantage would be able to grow their advantage until there was nothing left for anyone else (and there was no flourishing along the way, just war) so second or third wouldn’t have really meant anything within the narrative of the game. Honest negotiation wasn’t possible, every message we sent was laced with deception, and often the opponent would pick up on that and not admit it and that would be another deception of their own. This is the norm in diplomacy games. And I guess I became aware of how ruinously that misrepresents the diplomatic games we’re playing in the real world (at least, post WWII, it is a misrepresentation. Maybe when nationalism was more of a thing our game was really like this. But today global culture is getting everywhere.).
You don’t need VR for board games, you just need to transfer the entire board game into a user interface, which very doable since board games are 2D. That said, Tabletop Simulator is a full physics-based board game playing environment, often played on desktop.
I think Among Us (though competitive) has shown that voice chat is all you need. Alternatively, you can lean into limited communication channels as a source of conflict, like Hanabi
If you have any skill at software, I actually think it is very simple to prototype simple tabletop games demos with any conventional web stack such as nextjs + firebase. My brother has done it before
I might be interested in doing that, but to clarify; the reason you need VR for board games is that VR facilitates the same kind of sense of shared presence and quality of audio conversation that playing in person does. I’m fairly sure VR boardgaming is going to be better than physical boardgaming (larger tables, no upkeep, more immersion, venues that can be teleported to from home so more repeat interactions so more legacy games are possible). That is the sense in which you need VR. But for prototyping, sure, developers have pre-existing buyin and can put up with the limitations of 2d.
2D is a limit. but there’s also more design language built around 2D UIs. I still think there’s a ton of unexplored design space around “tabletop games” that make use of modern web flows.
I agree shared presence is important. I also think it’s unsolved. VR isn’t fidelous enough to transmit sufficient social information and it’s still very inaccessible due to price & physical discomfort
Hmm but I think it’ll be solved like 5 years from now so I’d be eager to start working on VR boardgames/social role playing games today. I believe jon blow, when he says it usually takes that long to figure out what a really fresh kind of game wants to be.
And the first good VR RPGs are going to be really culturally impactful.
Oh? I guess asynchrony is one of the things in that design language. And a web based game could leave players in a groupchat/forum after the game, they could make friends there. I used to play Neptune’s Pride, which I guess is an example of that kind of game. It was a… good game… I think. It was emotionally brutal.
Actually, that experience with Neptune’s Pride is probably a large part of the reason I want to make cohabitive games today. It was a game that forced you to forge friendships that were all absolutely destined to collapse. I forget whether there was any benefit to coming second or third, but if there was it wouldn’t have resonated with the narrative, it was a war of domination, the mechanics of the gameworld were such that anyone with an advantage would be able to grow their advantage until there was nothing left for anyone else (and there was no flourishing along the way, just war) so second or third wouldn’t have really meant anything within the narrative of the game.
Honest negotiation wasn’t possible, every message we sent was laced with deception, and often the opponent would pick up on that and not admit it and that would be another deception of their own. This is the norm in diplomacy games. And I guess I became aware of how ruinously that misrepresents the diplomatic games we’re playing in the real world (at least, post WWII, it is a misrepresentation. Maybe when nationalism was more of a thing our game was really like this. But today global culture is getting everywhere.).