We recently demoed The Climb, a new virtual reality game from Crytek. At our demo session, we had the opportunity to chat with Jason Rubin, the Head of Worldwide Studios at Oculus, about his role in working with developers to make great virtual reality games for the launch of the Oculus Rift. The following is a transcript of our conversation, which you can also watch in our preview video for The Climb.

Tested: Jason, you work with game developers to make games for the Oculus Rift. What's been your experience working with those devs making their first virtual reality games?

Jason Rubin: My job is to bring great titles to the Oculus platform at launch and thereafter, and make sure that we push VR forward and kind of do new things and experiment--experimentation that might not happen if Oculus didn't get out there and get involved in the developer community. We bring best practices, finances, production expertise, and things like that. And we've had a lot of takers.

When I started, I thought it was going to be a job about convincing people to develop for VR. Turns out that's actually the easiest thing I do--I just drop off a development kit, and the minute it's in some studio, the studio immediately wants to work on it. I end up giving them more kits and people come up with ideas. So I spend a lot of my time working on best practices, making games comfortable, making them novel and unique, scoping things, and then making sure the games actually happen.

Do you find that the first wave of what the developers try to make end up all being similar? What are the things they gravitate toward that aren't necessarily the things that you want to push for Oculus?

We have a difficult challenge because we have 30 years of game development behind us as a community. Obviously, we've come up with ideas we really like, that are also extremely fun, some of which work really well in virtual reality, and some of which don't. But also importantly, we've opened up an entirely new realm of games that could be created--it's hard to say "you have a year, go create new stuff." It takes time to experiment, and it takes time to come up with those new ideas.

[Crytek's] The Climb is one of those things where I walked into a pitch for--"things we think would be cool in VR"--there were a slew of ideas on the table, and I just latched onto this idea of climbing. It was extremely well prototyped, it was comfortable, it was fun, and you could see the hook there immediately. On top of that, one of the demos that we had been giving at Oculus that was most well received was standing at the edge of a building. So I knew people really liked the immersion and the presence that VR brings, like that kind of butterflies-in-your-stomach moment when you're looking out over the edge. Here was a title that could bring that to the gamer, but also offer really compelling gameplay. So we decided to focus on this, and Crytek was extremely excited to get going and focus on that specific idea and flesh it out into something that's a wide ranging and compelling gameplay experience.

When you say one idea, you mean one mechanic--one that has an analogue all the way back to old arcade games (like Crazy Climber). But it's something that's experienced differently in VR. Internally, are you trying those different mechanics that are departures from desktop or console gaming?

Yeah, by one mechanic, I'm not trying to narrow it down. Madden is one mechanic. A first person shooter is one effective mechanic. What's hard to do in the amount of time that we had between when our development kits first went out and when launch happens is something that's much broader--a Grand Theft Auto, if you will, that has to running and shooting and diving out of planes and driving and flying and fistfights. It's very hard to put together that scope in a short amount of time. So we focused on one mechanic but then figured out all the fun things we could do with that mechanic.

Is that also about easing an audience into new kinds of gaming experiences they haven't had before? Give them one idea to start and then iterate with more mechanics. Is that how you see the progression of game development in VR?

"I think the audience is capable of handling anything you throw at them. The one thing that VR brings to the table that hasn't been there in the past is comfort and discomfort."

I think the audience is capable of handling anything you throw at them. I have a huge amount of respect for the gamer. You give them something and they will either like it or not like it, but they'll experiment with anything. The one thing that VR brings to the table that hasn't been there in the past is comfort and discomfort. You can actually feel uncomfortable in VR. It has to do with the same forces that make you uncomfortable on a boat or a backseat of a car. It's not something off or misunderstood--it's just something that exists. So, a lot of experimentation and a lot of time and energy goes into making things comfortable.

In general, that means less movement, less locomotion. But not always, and in fact, in The Climb, you're climbing a mountain, so there's locomotion. And you're doing things like grabbing handholds and going around pillars that in general you would think would never work in VR. But in fact, with enough time and experimentation, you can create something very compelling that does that and is comfortable. You played The Climb yourself--how did you feel?

It felt great, and I felt like I had a sense of agency, even though the transition animation from letting go of the trigger and grabbing the next handhold meant letting the camera take control of my head. So you're pushing those boundaries for VR rules--there are no fixed rules.

Right, the goal is to give you the agency of being there and the urgency of being on a cliff without giving you the discomfort from movement. And that is a very fine line. If we take away either the agency or the feeling that you're actually there, it's easy not to give you discomfort. But to give you that sense of presence while simultaneously not making you feel discomforted--that's the technology that Crytek has come up with. And it's fantastic.

And each team that's out there is doing their own bit to kind of get there. When I started, we thought sniper rifles weren't going to work [in VR]--we now have sniper rifle games. When I started, [we thought] a game that's steered by your head wasn't going to work, and now Anshar 2 is one of the highest rated Gear VR games. So, just going out and figuring out the fringes of what works and what doesn't work with an eye to keeping things at the end, very comfortable, has lead to a broader width of things we can do than we thought initially.

You mentioned movement being one of the potential factors of discomfort. What about duration? What are you finding in your playtests and conversations with developers--how long are people wearing the consumer version of the Oculus Rift?

I don't think we have a final answer for that. I will say there's a lot of misinformation that comes from earlier development kits and past experiences in VR that aren't born out by the final technology that we're bringing out and some of our competitors are bringing out. So I do think that longer than the bite-sized experiences that people fear are going to be possible. If I go to a theme park, there are rides that I can ride infinitely, and there are also rides like a roller coaster that I wouldn't want to do for two hours. VR gives you that agency and it gives you that presence, so if you have a very high-energy extremely charged experience, well that may be something you can't do for a huge amount of time. If, on the other hand, you create something that's a little more slow moving, that doesn't require a lot of arm motion with the touch controllers and physical exertion that would make you tired in the real world, I do believe that multi-hour gameplay will be not only possible, but will be something that gamers partake in. I think there will be a lot of range there in between.

I'd also say there are best practices there. If you have a very bright game, for example arctic white-out snow, that's tiring on the eyes just as it is to be at a beach without sunglasses. So a lot of the things that you hear batted around--"VR's going to be short time, VR can only do this"--is either based on old information or a lack of information and a lack of foresight. I think we'll know this over time, but I do believe there's going to be a range from short duration things to long duration things.

You're saying duration will be more informed by the game design than the hardware itself.

Absolutely. There are games that I can foresee that you will create in the next year that people will play for hours at a time without either eye exertion or other exertion. It may not be The Climb, if you're playing it with Oculus Touch controllers and you're moving your arms around a lot. There are limits to how long people can lift things over their shoulders in the real world that play in the game. However, Crytek's timed the game with that in mind, and they've created checkpoints and level ends that make sense for that.

Oculus is shipping Rift with an Xbox controller, and Touch is going to come out after the headset release. In working with developers, are you pushing them to make experiences that are going to be good for both--games that you play once with the gamepad and when Touch comes out, reexperience? Are there tradeoffs there?

"There are games that I can foresee that you will create in the next year that people will play for hours at a time without either eye exertion or other exertion."

[A game made for] Both controllers is the rare case. The Climb is a rare case of a game that plays incredibly well on gamepad and also is an obvious winner on Touch. In general, people are tending to make a decision between the two. Again, I don't think we really know the final outcome for controllers. What I will say is that the Xbox One controller is kind of the child of the child of the child of the child of the perfect breeding down to perfect controller for the human figure. I mean, you can just grab that controller, and if you're a gamer, you know exactly where the buttons are--it feels comfortable for long gameplay sessions, and it's incredibly multi-functional. It's a fantastic controller. It doesn't give you hands in space or some of the things Touch does, but it's an incredibly good controller.

I know there's a world of seeing your hands in VR that's incredibly powerful, and Touch proves that out. But I also believe that there's a world of playing longer games and not getting yourself tired. Games for sitting down, and playing with a controller like the Xbox One controller that's also incredibly viable. I also think there are control schemes we haven't seen yet. I think there are things that people are going to experimenting with with controllers that we don't know yet. So I think VR at its infancy--we can't really predict where things are going--but what I do know is that the Xbox One controller is an absolutely controller for a wide variety of games and it made sense to put one in the box. When people bring home their Touch controllers, I don't think they're giving up the Xbox One controller for a lot of titles. I truly believe that controller has its place in the future of VR.

Does that same balance also apply for whether you have a sitting experience or standing one or room-scale experience?

Absolutely. The seated experiences are going to last longer--they're not as tiring. It's the same as the real world. Standing experiences give you a little bit more feeling of presence if you're not in a cockpit where it makes sense to be sitting down. Standing gives you more range with your Touch controllers, they give you abilities you don't have sitting down. So we're pushing both experiences--we think they're both valuable. I would guess that the seated experiences will be longer than standing ones for obvious reasons, but we really don't know that either. There very well may be someone that comes up with a standing gamepad controlled experience--like The Climb--that ends up being incredibly comfortable for a long time.

What has surprised you most in working with developers? Is it when someone comes to you with a mechanic that you latch onto? What gets you excited about VR development?

I'm surprised every day. I've been making games for 30 years and I've never seen the pace of innovation happen faster. I've never seen a moment in which the opportunities open to the development community versus what exists currently has been so broad at the end and small now. We have a very small number of games that we've experimented with in the face of what I think VR can give us, opening up all dimensions as opposed to just a 2D television. And also, games have become larger, and take more time now, they take more people now. Projects can take two or three years. And in the VR space, a year is an incredible amount of innovation. So you have this inherent conflict between technology moving incredibly fast and large games taking an amazing amount of time. It's going to be interesting as that plays out, and we settle down a little bit, but I think it'll take a few years. Every day I see something new either on the internet or someone brings it to me, and I say "we should have thought of that, or that's obviously the way you do whatever it is that you do" and I'm surprised.

Well we love being surprised as well. Thank you, Jason, for chatting with us.