#431: A Professional Gamer’s View on VR eSports

missharveyStephanie Harvey (aka “missharvey”) is a professional eSports gamer playing Counter-Strike: Global Offensive with the Counter Logic Gaming Red team. I had a chance to catch up with her at PAX West to talk about the future of eSports in VR, the ecosystem of announcers and observers that makes games more entertaining for spectators, her training schedule and core competencies for maintaining a competitive edge, and all of the various ingredients that have to emerge in order to have a viable VR eSports ecosystem.

LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST

Subscribe on iTunes

Donate to the Voices of VR Podcast Patreon

Music: Fatality & Summer Trip


Support Voices of VR

Music: Fatality & Summer Trip

Rough Transcript

[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. My name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. So for the last three days, I've been walking around the expo floor at PAX West, and there's a lot of different esports gaming exhibitions that are happening with gamers that are playing some game competitively with announcers who are announcing and giving their commentary as to some of the deeper strategies that are happening. So there's a lot of things that have to come together to make a game interesting for people to watch as a spectator and to make a successful esports game. So today I'm going to be talking to Stephanie Harvey. She's a professional gamer for the Counter Logic Gaming Red, and they play Counter-Strike, which is a first-person shooter. And so I'll be talking to Stephanie about what she sees as kind of the future of esports and VR, and what are some of the things and competencies that she needs as a professional esports player, and how that might translate into VR moving forward. And so that's what we'll be covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. But first, a quick word from our sponsors. This is a paid sponsored ad by the Intel Core i7 processor. If you're going to be playing the best VR experiences, then you're going to need a high-end PC. So Intel asked me to talk about my process for why I decided to go with the Intel Core i7 processor. I figured that the computational resources needed for VR are only going to get bigger. I researched online, compared CPU benchmark scores, and read reviews over at Amazon and Newegg. What I found is that the i7 is the best of what's out there today. So future-proof your VR PC and go with the Intel Core i7 processor. Today's episode is also brought to you by VR on the Lot. VR on the Lot is an education summit from the VR Society happening at Paramount Studios October 13th and 14th. More than 1,000 creators from Hollywood studios and over 40 VR companies will be sharing immersive storytelling best practices and industry analytics, as well as a VR expo with the latest world premiere VR demos. This is going to be the can't miss networking event of the year with exclusive access to thought leaders of immersive entertainment. So purchase your tickets today while early bird pricing is still in effect at VROnTheLot.com So this interview with Stephanie happened at PAX West that was happening in Seattle from September 2nd to 5th. And so Stephanie and I were doing these Intel Core i7 processor recaps at the end of each day at PAX West and this happened right after one of those wrap-ups. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.

[00:02:46.543] Stephanie Harvey: My name is Stephanie Harvey. I'm known as Miss Harvey. I'm a professional gamer for Counter Logic Gaming Red. I play Counter-Strike. I've been playing Counter-Strike for a long time, like 13 years. Won five World Cups. I did a lot of things, but I was also a game designer at Ubisoft for eight years. I worked on Prince of Persia, Far Cry, currently on Sabbatical, trying to do the esports full-time, and I'm enjoying it.

[00:03:09.679] Kent Bye: Great. So I wanted to have a chat with you to talk about esports and some of your thoughts where VR esports is at right now and where you think it is going. And so why don't you share some of your initial thoughts of this idea of VR esports?

[00:03:24.464] Stephanie Harvey: I think that VR esports is not ready yet because of multiple factors. Basically, not a lot of people have VRs at home. And I think that to create a good esports game, usually you need a big fan base and a lot of spectators and stuff like that. I think the mass is super important for esports. And because there's not a lot of VRs, it's already a problem. Second, I think that the game that you play needs to be extremely competitive, extremely polished, extremely fair, which is something that VR is still exploring what to do. with the experiences, what to do with the games. So again, we're probably not quite there yet. But I believe that there will be probably a lot of VR esports showcase. game very soon. I'm sure a lot of companies want to push that side to sell VRs obviously for their other games or develop their expertise in multiplayer and online VR and that kind of stuff and I think it's going to naturally go to competition. As soon as there's game there's competition that somehow appears and like we were saying on the panel today I wouldn't be surprised if maybe next year at PAX there's going to be an esports VR demo with two pro teams that are going to be showcasing some game on stage. Like, I wouldn't be surprised if it happens, but I don't think that organically it's gonna happen yet.

[00:04:43.505] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I think that in talking to different game developers, one in particular was the Rigs from Guerrilla Games. The game was basically, it's like you're running around and you're jumping through a hoop, so you're in a mech and you have to, as a mech, kill somebody and then you have the ability to jump into a hoop and then whoever jumps through the hoops the most wins. So it's kind of like this mix between soccer and basketball, as well as a first-person shooter. So first of all, there's VR locomotion issues when you're moving around. It can make people motion sick. So for me personally, I got a little motion sick playing that game. Some people are kind of immune to that, so there's going to be a class of people that are able to withstand that type of stuff. The other thing that I've heard from both those developers and other developers is that it is a little presumptive for them to say that this is going to be such a success that people, first of all, even want to play it, that they want to play it competitively, and that it's going to be interesting to watch. And that, in talking to Ty Kelly, one of the things that he said was that it has to be open enough that it's got many different variations so that it's actually interesting to watch for spectators. In your experience, what are some of those key components of some of the existing esports games that you think have made them interesting or compelling for spectators to watch?

[00:05:55.793] Stephanie Harvey: I think it all comes down to the rules being very simple. One of the best esports games to watch are fighting games because it's so simple. It's two bars, when the health go down, you know who win in the end and who loses. My parents, I showed them a Street Fighter match for the first time a couple weeks ago and we were at an event and they started cheering at the end when one guy died because it was so simple. I didn't have to teach them, oh but Whenever he does a roll with his thumb, it creates this attack. Like, they didn't care. All they cared is that the guy from Montreal, which we were cheering for, won. And they cheered with me, even though I was able to see the subtleties of it. And I think that's what makes Counter-Strike also very simple. When everybody's dead, there's a point being made. And I think a game like Overwatch, extremely complicated to grasp what's going on in the game. And it makes them very, very difficult spectator games. So I think it would come from VR to be like, hey, my grandmother is watching this and she understands, you know, like regular sports, soccer, the ball in the net, one point. It's simple. Name a complicated sports, maybe like more like rugby and already you kind of lose a lot of people. Like what is going on right now? Why are they all in a pack, like pushing each other? Like, I don't understand. So like rugby is already a little more complicated and it's harder for people to watch. without knowing anything. While most of the other sports, you don't need to be taught anything. It's straight up from the box, if I want to say. So I think that esports games are really popular from the get-go. They're ones that you can understand really well, that spectators can just enjoy without knowing all the depth. And I think that's one of the big challenges and developers to create these kind of games.

[00:07:32.993] Kent Bye: I think one of the top, in terms of money, earnings for esports is Dota 2, and that, to me, is a very complicated game. I've watched a number of different matches, I've listened to the commentary, but I'd still, if I was just left to my own devices, wouldn't be able to track who's winning in any given moment. I think one thing that may be an issue is that in watching kind of a 2D screen and I know that Valve has recently released kind of a VR spectator mode for Dota 2 to be able to have you immersed within the experience and be able to perhaps be able to watch or pay attention to the game a little bit differently and then to then perhaps have the running commentary from the people who are kind of knowing what's going on and being able to point out the different numbers and analyses and the strategies that's kind of unfolding. So how do you kind of make sense of Dota 2? It does seem like it's a very complicated game, but yet it's been able to really catch on.

[00:08:24.516] Stephanie Harvey: I think Dota 2 is very hardcore, meaning a lot of people are already extremely advanced when they start watching it and cheering on. And you can see in the numbers, they have less spectators than the other games. Even though there's more money, more people play the game than kind of spectate it. Yes, there's these hype events like the Majors and the International, but mainly Dota 2 is composed of a lot of Dota players. Well, if you check League of Legends and even Counter-Strike, I watch League of Legends and I don't even play League, so it's already much simpler. But I think all MOBA games are extremely complex, and what makes them approachable for anybody is the commentators. It's literally the quality of whoever is casting the games. And you can see it in League of Legends and Dota, the people casting are pros. They're extremely competent, they do this for a living, and the companies, whether it's Valve or Riot, put a lot of money into developing this talent to make sure that these tournament are extremely interesting to watch. I can close my eyes in League and basically understand what's going on and enjoy it. And then when I open my eyes, of course, it kind of completes it. But for me, I don't really understand the little subtleties of the game because I'm a complete newbie to these kind of games. So I just enjoy. I get hyped whenever the casters are hyped. I get hyped when the crowd is cheering. It's more of a complete experience. And with what Valve is doing for the VR, I think it's also an experiment right now, I really believe that people that use the VR to get in Dota 2 were either curious or already kind of hardcore players that just wanted to push their experience even further.

[00:09:56.282] Kent Bye: I think with the Dota 2, MOBA, and as well as Counter-Strike, a lot of these games end up being like a number of different people on a team, so it becomes like people are playing different roles and there's different strategies and it becomes more of a team strategy rather than some of the games that may be one-on-one. Maybe you could talk a bit about like the team collaborative element of esports and why that makes it a little bit more interesting than just one-on-one.

[00:10:19.030] Stephanie Harvey: Yeah, I actually think that's one of the weird things about me thinking about VR esports, because even though I'm playing on a computer, whenever I'm playing with my team, we're physically next to each other and we can cheer and we can high-five and we can look at each other in between the rounds and really work on our strategy. If we're dead, we talk about it together. Hey, what happened last round between the people that are dead currently? what can I do to help you next round or do we need to switch our strategy what is happening like how do we need to adapt and if we're in VR doing that it removes all the physical interaction that we have during matches which I really think it would be challenging to reproduce in VR I'm like do you have a button where you're like Zoom out of the VR and talk to each other real life to make sure you have that connection, you have that hype because momentum is so important and it's all about mental. To the level that we're playing at, it's a lot mental. It's not doing the mistakes. You never do it during practice and also in a match you do that mistake. It's a lot about how you're feeling with your teammates sitting next to you. And if I can't see them or if I can't touch them and can't high five and I can't build up on our momentum when we're winning rounds with the VR, how do we do it? And I think that's something that when we were talking about esports and VR, that's something I was really interested. I want to high five my teammates. Do I high five in the game or like what is happening, you know? So I think that's going to be interesting to see.

[00:11:40.877] Kent Bye: Yeah, I've had a chance to try a lot of different VR experiences, and there have been some experiences that have been able to achieve a very high level of social presence. The Toy Box demo from Oculus Rift with the Oculus Touch controllers, where they had it live networked, so it wasn't like you have the latency that you would usually have if it was going over the internet. So there's issues there to make it so that the latency is low enough to make it feel like you're actually co-present with people. But I do think that as eye tracking comes in, as you're able to do facial recognition and be able to get the emotional component, and then on top of that be able to track multiple different parts of your body so you can actually have an embodied experience within VR. So I think the social presence and the social component is going to be there eventually at some point. But it actually kind of brings up another point which is the difference between the level of movements happening within a lot of these eSports which is kind of these abstracted, you know, using a mouse and keyboard and buttons and being able to very quickly with your fingers and your hands move around where I think the trend with virtual reality is kind of removing a lot of those abstractions and you're kind of moving your full arms and body and ducking and moving around and potentially even getting to the point where you're running around a space. So it becomes a little bit more of a full embodied experience rather than just with the mouse and keyboard. So I want to just ask you as a pro gamer, what do you see as kind of the core competencies that you've been able to develop that differentiate you from an amateur or casual gamer?

[00:13:12.215] Stephanie Harvey: There's a lot of precision, but a lot of specific games, like the games I'm playing, which is first-person shooters, it's a lot of reaction and a lot of muscle memory. So I don't really think about what I'm doing. I just do it. And then I think, oh, I just, whoa, like that was sick. That's basically what happens. When you play MOBA games, it's more like, hey, we're going to do this. All right, let's do it. And then you execute. CSGO is a lot of reaction shots. Someone peeks. You've got to do something now. You can't wait and think. And I think that is something that you can push into sports a lot with my tool sets. But if I had to fully embody that into VR, I think that it would be a lot more reactional than thinking, which is very interesting. But also, I really feel that you'd need an even more balanced life than what I have or what other people have. I think to be a pro athlete, you need a balanced life or else your career will be really short. So we all work out at the house and stuff like that. But if you actually are competing into VR esports, then it's going to be from the start that you're going to have to be like kind of balanced. So I think it will be interesting to see how the athletes develop throughout the esports VR. And I can see something like esports paintball VR be like very, very similar to whatever is going on in real life and really easy for people to see what's going on and stuff like that. So these people are in shape.

[00:14:37.305] Kent Bye: And so you were talking here in the panel here at PAX West that, you know, there's these new laptops that are 120 Hz and that you are actually playing the game at 120 Hz on your rigs and so it's at a higher refresh rate and you have to be able to not use kind of a trackpad but also use kind of like the normal mouse and keyboard because you're trying to do the muscle memory training. I'm curious to hear about your training and practice regimen, like what you have to do in order to kind of get ready and keep up to speed with your skills.

[00:15:08.360] Stephanie Harvey: Well, like I said, I have to train my muscle memories a lot. So every day I go into servers and just practice just my muscle memory. So I'll have shooting targets and I just shoot for hours. Random enemies. I'm not even playing the game technically or not according to the normal rules of the game I'm just playing in special mode where I'm just practicing my aim And then I practice a lot of my strategy with my teams without any enemies So we practice I always say like our dance our tactical movements Exactly like a SWAT team would practice it when they're not in a real-life situation they have like SWAT houses and they practice how to get into a room and who is going to look what and where. We do the same thing for hours and hours on all the different maps and all the different strategies that we have. And then after that, we play for fun versus other teams that are also practicing. And we try the strategies that we applied during our practices into the games until we have official matches, usually almost every night in online leagues, to be able to see if our practices are efficient, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:16:11.501] Kent Bye: Oh, wow. That's way more involved than I expected. But it sounds like it. I mean, it sounds like you're almost like a trained military unit going out and practicing different strategies and then putting them into practice almost literally every day.

[00:16:24.380] Stephanie Harvey: I compare it to sports. Your favorite sports, let's say it's football. That's exactly what we do. I have a coach. I have managers. I have agents. I have sponsors. I have a team. I have teammates. We have drills where we practice X and Y and Z, we even work out, we watch what we eat, because it's important when you like, you need all your brain when you're practicing or playing. So if you eat at certain hours, you'll get more tired, which like will affect your performance in the game. So there's like everything the same as a sports. And the only difference is that I do it on computer.

[00:16:59.180] Kent Bye: Well, I think that when I look at and think about virtual reality, you're using a mouse and keyboard. A lot of early Oculus Rift games are using an Xbox controller. And then the HTC Vive and eventually the Oculus Touch is actually motion tracked six degree of freedom controllers. And so are there any eSports that are actually using an Xbox controller right now?

[00:17:19.112] Stephanie Harvey: Yeah, so fighting games are using Xbox controller. Call of Duty at the moment is really popular on Xbox. Well, they're playing on PlayStation at the moment, but Halo is still on Xbox. There's a couple of esports games that are using the controller and they're pretty successful and they're good games.

[00:17:36.680] Kent Bye: Yeah, if I were to make a prediction, it would be the same type of games that people are playing within the Xbox controller being the first intermediary step for virtual reality. But again, I think the locomotion issue, like all those games are moving around and there's a lot of VR motion sickness, so people will have to kind of build up an immunity to that. I think at this point it is still very early days, but are there any other kind of factors in the ecosystem of esports in terms of sponsors or other things that kind of have to come together in order to actually make a specific video game successful in terms of like having tournaments and prize money and all the stuff that kind of has to come together for that?

[00:18:15.627] Stephanie Harvey: Well, I think for the teams, like the organizations to get VR ready esports team, it will cost a lot of money. And to get that money, it's either the sponsors are going to need to invest in these risky esports titles, or it's going to be the developer that's going to support the organizations by giving them money to have these teams either compete or have a small salary or do whatever. But it's going to definitely come from not the community at the start. I doubt the community will be big enough to invest their own money into traveling to go to VR eSports events. I really believe it's going to come from a business point of view at first. Just because nobody has a VR, or that's not true, but it's very rare to say, oh yeah, I have a VR. I can start playing this game. It requires too many steps. to get in. Everybody has a computer. Starting League of Legends for free is like an easy entry. While VR, you need the good computer, you need the VR, you need potentially to buy the game. So that's already three more steps than what League of Legends potentially can bring people in. So I think that it requires a lot of investment from maybe the VR people, the companies, to support these orgs, to have these esports VR team.

[00:19:29.748] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you see as kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?

[00:19:36.897] Stephanie Harvey: For me, it would really be everything that has to do with performance, going to a show, or even sports. We've already seen, I don't know if you heard about it, the RealSense Intel camera at stadiums, where you can actually watch your favorite basketball player and do a 360 around him while he's shooting to see if he stepped on the line, or I don't know, stuff like that. Well, I feel that if I was in my VR and I had the best seat in the house for me and I could watch that and I could like move around and like oh I don't like the seat and move around and go somewhere else. I think for me that's really incredible and it's something I would do. I would potentially buy VR just to experience that or go to my favorite band. I can't at them because x and y's but I can just be on stage with them and watch them play and you know, and not disturb anybody else. I think that's something that's really, really exciting for me. The fantasy of it is really exciting. And I really hope in esports we can do something really similar. These esports shows and esports stadiums are really crazy. I went to Evo in Vegas. It was nuts. There was like light shows and people were cheering and it was really great. And I've been to a couple of Counter-Strike and League of Legends events where there's like 20,000 people in the stadium cheering for their teams. And it's just something that I wish everybody could experience. everybody could with VR, it would be pretty incredible.

[00:20:58.503] Kent Bye: In terms of Counter-Strike, I know in Dota they have a VR view. Is something like a VR view, like to be able to see the entire world in kind of a miniaturized way, is that something that would even work in Counter-Strike? Or is there a certain amount of suspense of not knowing everybody's perspective? Or when people are watching it, can they see what everybody else can see?

[00:21:17.978] Stephanie Harvey: Yeah, actually, a couple of years ago, Counter-Strike added shadows so you can always see now where everybody is. It really helps the spectator's experience to actually anticipate what's going to happen and be hyped for the player that's about to kill someone. So you know the other players are about to cross the corner and your thrill and excitement kind of raises already. So we're like, oh my god, he's about to see, he's about to see. And if two players are not seeing each other and they're walking next to each other, the crowd starts getting really antsy and people are like, oh my god, it's happening. So in Counter-Strike, it really increased the spectator experience. It went from like, we don't know what's going on. My parents didn't know what's going on. they would see people appear and disappear and get tired away and it would be too fast. And now with the shadows, they're like, oh, you know, they can't understand who are the enemies or the friends and everything. So it made everything clearer. And I think with VR, maybe we're going to find something else like that that makes the trill even better for whoever is watching. In Counter-Strike, we already have the possibility to be in the game and move around however you want with something that's called GoTV. So you just, you're in the game and you can do whatever you want. And most people still choose to have a observer, so someone that's really experienced, will move the camera for you and just sit back and watch it. So maybe in VR we could translate that, have like an observer VR guy that just, you sit back and you don't have to do anything with the VR, but you experience whatever he's making you experience, and maybe that could be really interesting.

[00:22:44.843] Kent Bye: I see. So it's sort of like they're live editing, knowing kind of strategically what's happening and know where a good vantage point would be to put like a 2D virtual camera at this point. And then you can kind of watch it unfold from that perspective. Because, yeah, I mean, for each individual perspective, you're only seeing an occluded view. But as a spectator, you kind of want to have this mixture between that suspense, but also like watching from that first person perspective what the other person is actually seeing.

[00:23:10.690] Stephanie Harvey: Yeah, exactly. And I think that some apps are really good at it. We've reached a level in Counter-Strike where you can see if an app server is good or not. And I think that's really incredible because it created new jobs and created new talents and something that we never thought of. Like, even if there's action somewhere else on the map, if you cut whatever is happening on the camera right away and go to the action, if something was relevant in that camera, a lot of spectators get frustrated, like, oh, why did they change a camera? I was watching this. So it's really a balance between get to the action as fast as possible without destroying what you were already watching and creating a story about whatever the casters are saying with whatever I'm displaying and making sure everything is mixed together so that the spectator just doesn't realize that a human is controlling the camera. It's exactly like when you play a game and you play like a third-person game and you don't think about the camera Well, it's because it's well made. But if you start thinking about, oh my god, I wish I could move like this. It's absolutely a game design problem, where if you notice it, then there's something that's wrong. Well, the observer's job is for you to not notice that somebody is observing and switching cameras and making something happen. If you start to say, oh, why did you switch there? It gets you out of the immersion. So yeah.

[00:24:25.995] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, it sounds like VR could start to help create a new ecosystem of new ways of allowing the observers to make it more of an interesting experience. There's different levels of interactivity for people, whether they're just completely passive, they're engaging and knowing enough about it, and then the professionals who are actually playing it. So yeah, I think it's still early days and a lot to be still figured out. So I just wanted to thank you for stopping by and sharing some of your thoughts. So thank you.

[00:24:53.720] Stephanie Harvey: Thanks for having me.

[00:24:55.118] Kent Bye: So that was Stephanie Harvey, also known as MissHarveyOnline, and she's a professional esports gamer for Counter Logic Gaming Red, and as well as a game designer from Ubisoft for the last seven years. So I have a number of different takeaways from this interview, is that first of all, I think that esports and VR is something that's still yet to be determined. I think that Stephanie's right in the sense that it's gonna take time for the virtual reality technology and equipment to really get to the scale to really support a esports title. Also, I think making eSports games that are super competitive and fair and fun and open enough so that they're interesting to watch with many different variations, I think is also something that's going to be a big key for success in VR eSports. I think that the V-Reel is actually doing a lot of really interesting live streaming within VR, and I expect that it could be that People who are watching these games are going to have to engage a little bit more in terms of being able to jump in between themselves from the god mode and then being able to jump in to see the action from the first-person perspective. However, I think Stephanie is right in that a game like Dota 2 is watched by people who really know what they're doing when they're watching. they really know how to play the game and so you have to have some level of expertise in order to know where to be when and so what Stephanie is saying that's happening in Counter-Strike I think is actually going to be happening in virtual reality esports as well where there's going to be people who are going to be a little bit more knowledgeable about the strategies and where the best place to spectate is going to be. Maybe there'll be ways that you'll be able to jump into a VR experience and then kind of see those points of where a lot of people are at and watching and maybe it'll be a little bit of the wisdom of the crowds type of thing where you can see the hot spots where a lot of people are at watching and so you could kind of use that as some indicator. Or maybe it'll be an individual who's really knowledgeable and they're kind of leading and you're just watching and cutting between these different scenes in first-person perspective within VR so you can go to right where the most action is. So I think this idea of a soccer game is super simple and I was watching actually here at PAX West the whole Rocket League tournament and it was pretty simple because it's basically just two cars and they're hitting these balls back and forth and you know for me it was a little tough to watch because they were doing it actually on split screen and so it took me a bit to learn like which screen to pay attention to and that maybe I should watch the defender if the other person's about to score just to see how they're gonna try to come and stop it. It's just a little bit of knowledge that you have to gather to be able to know what to pay attention to and then once you figure that out then it can be a lot of fun to see how good some of these players are and you start to really appreciate their skill level and how they're able to do things that the more casual or amateur players aren't able to do. And so I think there's still a lot of open questions in terms of the different input controllers that are going to work best for eSports. I think eventually VR is going to be moving more and more towards embodied controllers. But yet, a lot of these initial eSports are using the mouse and keyboard still. And so people are able to cultivate these extremely sophisticated muscle memories to be able to actually aim with the mouse. Like Stephanie said, she practices that every day, just shooting at targets. and plays Counter-Strike up to like 10 hours a day just to practice and then put all those skills and strategies into practice at the end of each day by playing against these different teams. So I think the first round of virtual reality games is actually even moving away from the mouse and keyboard and moving more towards Xbox controllers where it's a different kind of set of muscle memories and there are some eSports that use those controllers but VR with these six degree of freedom controllers you could start to see how you're gonna perhaps move more of your body and move around and a lot of the first-person shooters that are out there right now are using your head to aim and And I've heard some people playing the World War 2 tunes here at PAX West talking about how it's actually easier for them to aim with their head than it was to try to aim with just the Xbox controller. And so in terms of precision and aiming, I think the most precise is going to be the mouse and keyboard. The least precise is probably going to be the Xbox controller. And then somewhere in the middle, maybe there's going to be this middle ground between aiming with your head and being able to move around with your fingers. So in the future, maybe we'll start to move to other types of prop guns that you're using your physical hands to be able to aim and shoot rather than just your fingers. And it would be a little bit more of your entire lower body. And you'll have the ability to disconnect aiming from your head to aiming with your hands so that you can look around and then actually use your full body. And I imagine that people will have to start to stand up for that and be a little bit more of a room scale type of experience. dead and buried from Oculus starts to have that a little bit as well as a lot of the first person shooters slash wave shooters that are happening in VR so far are using just the motion track controllers. And the last point that I wanted to just bring out is that Stephanie did see that there is going to be a little bit of requirement from some of these companies to be able to support the larger ecosystem of being able to cultivate the announcing talent as well as prize pools. But I think a lot of companies right now are kind of taking a step back and just seeing how if people are even interested in playing the game, first of all, they think it's fun. And then if they want to take it to the next level of starting to compete with each other. And then from that point, then starting to organize more official tournaments for people to play with perhaps prize money and announcers. So perhaps by this time next year at PAX West, we're going to see a lot more e-sports types of games within VR. I think we're going to have to see what types of games come out once all the VR systems are out there, as well as if people are starting to play games competitively on their own and organizing different tournaments. So it's still very early days for esports and VR, but I guess we'll see how it all develops. So that's all that I have for today. I just wanted to thank you for joining me here on the Voices of VR podcast. And if you'd like to support the podcast, then tell your friends, spread the word. And if you'd like to tell more people, go to iTunes and leave a review. and become a donor to my Patreon at patreon.com slash Voices of VR.

More from this show