Immersive Strategies: A First-Person Perspective Chess in VR (Undergraduate Thesis for Interactive Media Arts at NYU Shanghai)
A common and easily neglected fact about games is how many of them are actually virtual representations of warfare. These games can be further roughly put into two categories, third-person strategic games such as StarCraft or Command and Conquer, and first-person combat games such as Counter-Strike. The former is usually more intellectually engaging but the players won’t feel as physically involved as first-person combat games. Both these two categories have their own merits. However, they are usually considered separated and seldom have we seen attempts of combining their advantages together. Therefore, one interesting question would be how a game will be like if we had the strategic components and the first-person combating components combined together.
The project “First-person Perspective VR chess” attempts to answer the above question by incorporating the first-person combat components into chess, a traditionally purely strategic game, with virtual reality. The reason why this project chooses to combine chess and virtual reality is that they present two extremes of gaming experiences. On the one hand, chess is commonly viewed as a strategic-oriented game that requires calm and intellect. On the other hand, virtual reality was created to create immersive and first-person experiences. By combining them together, the advantages of strategic games and first-person combating games can be best utilized.
It is true that incorporating VR in chess is not news. However, most of them only create a virtual gaming experience for regular chess playing, instead of playing from the first-person perspective with human-sized pieces. In this game, however, players will stand on a human-sized chess set and play the chess game from the perspective of any of the chess pieces. The targeted user group of this project are both chess lovers and video game lovers in general. For the former, this project would create an immersive gaming experience for chess-playing, and for the latter, this project will showcase how a game can be both strategically intriguing and physically engaging.
As the development of this project goes on, it turns out that virtual reality does introduce an immersive gaming experience for chess, but more questions arise. It turns out that the newly introduced components change the strategic view of chess. Firstly, players no longer have the entire picture of the chessboard. Secondly, the human-sized chess pieces will not only block the view of a part of the chessboard, but they also prevent a player from controlling whatever pieces are in that area. Therefore, the project is not only about how first-perspective brings immersive engagement to a strategic game, but also about how it will reshape the strategies of chess. By changing the game dynamics such as piece sizes and control mechanics, the game requires the players to think about the chess strategies differently. For example, a player can now block the sight of the opponent on an important piece to protect it or sacrifice a piece in order to get a better view of the chessboard. Therefore, perhaps the answer to the question that we raised at the beginning can be formulated in this way: to combine an immersed gaming experience with a strategic-oriented game, the strategic component will either be degraded or altered and potentially lead to a completely different gaming experience. Is this gaming experience better or worse? Maybe we have to leave it for the players to decide.