I’m not talking about just creating something that hadn’t been seen before. That’s always going to be happening. I’m talking about creating a genre from scratch that didn’t exist at all before.

HL: Alyx does some great stuff but it doesn’t have buttons that do basic concepts that buttons hadn’t done before, in the same way that run/jump/shoot was invented as functions for the A and B buttons in Super Mario, or the inventory screen was invented for Zelda 1. I’m not intending to be critical of the idea of building on new stuff and inventing new paradigms to go on top of it. I’m just saying that the initial creation is a special type of time.

I would actually describe the structure of VR games as a feature that has prevented them from seeing widespread adoption in the same way that the early game consoles got near-universal adoption: They don’t invent a new language. They just try to retrofit the existing languages of first-person video games into their new environment. Maybe there is no new paradigm that’s suitable for VR in a way that would make it groundbreaking and make possible some things that are totally different from “sticking the player in first person into a first person game instead of showing stuff on screen.” Maybe there is and it just hasn’t been invented yet. I don’t know. But it seems like they’re not adding all that much beyond just immersing you in the game world. They’re still looking for that change that happened before from Adventure to Zelda or from Pitfall to Mario.