I went to the XR Space and tried several VR games and apps. The VR device I used was called PICO 4 and PICO belongs to a famous Chinese company called ByteDance. From my point of view, the most interesting game was Superhot, a first-person shooter game where time moves only when the player moves. Basically, I needed to move my controllers to use fists and other weapons to fight against robots rushing at me. When I didn’t move, the whole game just froze but as soon as I moved, the robots also moved and tried to shoot at me and I needed to escape the bullets.
I have experienced multisensory interactions in this game. The first sense was sight because I needed to be careful with the opponents who came from different directions. Hence, I often looked both ways while moving in the game, but my movements also allowed the opponents to rush at me, which was the most exciting and innovative design of the game. The second sense was hearing. The sound effects were quite real and I could hear bullets going right through me. The hit sound effect when I killed a robot was also very thrilling. The third sense was touch since I needed to touch different buttons on the controllers to take action in the game. I remember that one button was designed for picking up and holding weapons and another button was designed to pull the trigger. I believe that these three senses all contribute to the fantastic game experience and make me immersed in the gameplay. It was great fun but I would suggest 30 minutes was a proper duration for playing this game since I felt a bit tired after playing for 45 minutes.
I won’t agree that the game content in Superhot is an artwork. In my opinion, the main difference between an artwork and a game is that an artwork often expresses some ideas, thought and it relates to a certain type of aesthetics but a game can be designed just for entertainment. This is also the case in Superhot since I didn’t see any core ideas or messages from the game designer but it did bring me lots of fun. If I need to change it to an artwork, I will improve its design into an image. The image demonstrates the scene that a black character is fighting against numerous enemies with red skin color. What I would like to stress is the huge difference in numbers between the two sides as well as the uncertainty about the red men. It may reflects some personal life struggles or social issues related to race and identity.
