They raise all kinds of questions, like “Who am I?”, “How did I get here?”, “Did I choose to be here or not?” and so on, questions that we should be asking as we start any interactive experience but we don’t because usually the cut scenes tell us what we need to know and that’s enough. There is something jarring and also fascinating about these moments of realisation. The gender (or in the case of Scavenger’s Odyssey the species) of the body isn’t important but what’s interesting is that in these experiences I was faced with the fact that the body I saw when I looked down was not my own. The first thing I noticed in that experience is that I was in a woman’s body. One of the first VR experiences I ever tried was ABE VR, a short horror experience in which you are kidnapped and tortured by a psychotic robot surgeon. Video games nearly always put us in control of another body but in VR the implications of occupying another form are immediately apparent. You’re in someone else’s body and that feels like a huge revelation. You notice this immediately because when the game starts you are looking at your hands, except they’re not “your” hands because they’re blue and only have three fingers and a thumb. The first thing you notice in Scavenger’s Odyssey is that you have a body.
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