18
Aug
RPG Musings
“As I learned more about how these early role-playing games [RPGs] worked, I realized that a D&D module was the primitive equivalent of a quest in the OASIS [a multi-user VR environment of the near future]. And D&D characters were just like avatars. In a way, these old role-playing games had been the first virtual-reality simulations, created long before computers were powerful enough to do the job. In those days, if you wanted to escape to another world, you had to create it yourself, using your brain, some paper, pencils, dice, and a few rule books. This realization blew my mind.”
Every medium is a context for a message, with characteristics that shape any narrative it conveys. At the same time, every medium has its own contexts: historical, cultural, and technological. These two assertions could not be more relevant in the case of what we call virtual reality – and an understanding of the various aspects of these contexts is valuable when imagining and designing VR experiences.
